Middle Ground – A Collection of Essays by Stephen Pyne
Covering the Cross Timbers area in Oklahoma, the Missouri Ozarks, and prairie remnants in Illinois, Pyne brings his historical and ecological awareness, cultural insights, and literary style to an exploration of fire practices in areas long ignored by the wildland fire community.
- Patch Burning - describes the Cross Timbers, a belt of “tallgrass prairie and implacable oaks” stretching from Texas to Kansas, that was created through centuries of open burning, but that is now constrained by the demands of urban development and an industrial society.
- People of the Prairie, People of the Fire - tells the story of land managers in Illinois committed to traditional burn practices and trying to restore fire to bits of land in a sea of industrial agriculture, far outside the attention of the “big-hitters of fire management.”
- Missouri Compromise - provides a fascinating historical look at the connections between land, people and fire in the Ozarks, while exploring what is meant by the terms "natural fire" and "anthropogenic fire."
- Middle Ground: Image slideshow - Fire in the middle US. The slideshow contains images taken in support of all three essays.
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center and the International Association of Wildland Fire hosted a webinar on Prepare, Stay and Defend, or Go Early, bringing together international experts on fire management in the wildland-urban interface to discuss Australia's program and how it might or might not be applied to other fire-prone communities. Dan Bailey of the International Code Council moderated and panelists included:
- Gary Morgan of Australia's Bushfire Cooperative Research Center
- Jack Cohen of the Rocky Mountain Research Station
- Tara McGee of the University of Alberta
- Bob Roper, Fire Chief for Ventura County, CA
- Domingo Molina of the University of Lleida, Spain.
Video - Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
A Step in the Right Direction for Incident IT
The Development of Safety Training after Mann Gulch
By Mark Matthews In the decade following the Mann Gulch fire that killed twelve smoke jumpers and one recreational guard in Montana in 1949, the U. S. Forest Service created technical and research centers in Montana and California dedicated to developing equipment to help protect firefighters from a multitude of dangers on the fire line. Probably the most dramatic invention was the metal-coated, pup tent-like fire shelter that reflects radiant heat and gives a firefighter a better chance at surviving an entrapment. Today, the centers also study a myriad of health and safety issues--from the long-term effects of smoke inhalation on firefighters, to driver safety in and around large fire camps. More...
Complicated Fires Require a Simple Message
By Josh McDaniel
 Two years ago, I caught a CNN report on the Zaca Fire outside of Santa Barbara. There were the normal dramatic shots of crown fires, retardant drops, and evacuations, but I was struck by the content of the report. The CNN reporter explained that the fire managers on the Zaca were taking different strategies on different flanks of the fire, essentially allowing one of the flanks to burn into wilderness and aggressively suppressing a flank that was threatening smaller communities. CNN got it right! More...
Questioning Mann Gulch
By Mark Matthews
On August 5, 1949, a surging wildfire trapped fifteen smoke jumpers and one fireguard in a chimney-shaped canyon called Mann Gulch, whose mouth opened onto the banks of the Missouri River outside Great Falls, Mont. The fire instantaneously killed eleven men; another two died in the hospital the next day. A total of 450 men fought Mann Gulch fire before it was controlled on August 10. By that time it had covered 5,000 acres. Around noon on August 6, 1949, a Bell 47-D helicopter flew the last of the bodies out of Mann Gulch.
April, 2009. Wildland Fire Budgeting and the Economic Recovery Plan
Stay Cool - There are Ways to Escape an Entrapment By Mark Matthews
The nature of fire remains unpredictable. Staying out of harm’s way may be the best advice—but what if fate and the elements don’t cooperate? Dr. Marty Alexander, a Senior Fire Behavior Research Officer with the Canadian Forestry Service, based in Edmonton, Alberta, wants to make sure firefighters and others are prepared for the worst—especially those who don’t carry fire shelters. “The danger of being entrapped or burned over and possibly killed or seriously injured by a wildfire is very real threat for people living, working or visiting rural areas subject to wildfires,” he says. More...
Forests absorb billions of tons of CO2 globally per year, amounting to about 30% of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning. And so far, forests provide this service mostly for free. However, now that the creation of a mandatory carbon emissions cap-and-trade system has become more likely under the Obama administration, this freebie economic subsidy may be coming to an end. Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist with Northern Arizona University, thinks that may be good for forests. Hurteau believes that the increased interest in managing forests for carbon sequestration may actually help drive a new approach to managing forests by giving forest owners economic incentives to reduce fire risk and create healthier, more resilient forests. More...
The latest in an ongoing scientific debate as to whether the massive Southern California fires are natural and infrequent events in the chaparral ecosystem or are the result of a fire suppression policy that has allowed an unnatural accumulation of fuels. For decades, land-management policy in the region has been based on the idea that landscape-level fuel management can ultimately limit the size of these massive fires. A growing body of research has called that paradigm into question, and the results have big implications for land and fire management. More...
Jack Cohen, Forest History Today, Fall 2008
The trend of increasing wildfire intensity and size likely due to increasing fuel hazards is only one consequence of fire suppression. Another legacy of the fire exclusion has far reaching implications: an organizational mindset that continually frames the wildland-urban interface fire problem in terms of fire suppression and control to the exclusion of potentially more effective alternatives.
It has long been conventional wisdom that CO2 emissions were essentially neutral in global carbon fluxes since fires also promote vegetation regrowth and uptake of CO2. However, the more frequent and severe fires that the US and the world is experiencing as a result of climate change and fire suppression have made many begin to question whether that balance continues to exist. More ...
 Only 14% of Potential WUI Currently DevelopedAs bad as the WUI problem has become for wildland fire managers, a new study published by the Montana-based, independent non-profit research organization, Headwater Economics, shows that it could become much worse. Headwater Economics researcher, Patty Gude and her colleagues, found that only 14 percent of the available WUI in western states is currently developed, leaving 86 percent available for new construction. More ...
By Josh McDaniel
Lodgepole pines throughout the Rockies are dying. The culprit is a tiny beetle, no bigger than some of the letters on this page that girdles the trees and also releases a fungus that interrupts water flow within a tree. The mountain pine beetle has killed 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine in Colorado alone since 1996, and in 2007 the beetles killed an estimated 3.9 million acres of lodgepole pine across the Rocky Mountain region. The extent of beetle kill has raised concerns that the risk of catastrophic fires is spreading along with the outbreak. More ...
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