This blog entry is another installment of Ask Janus. Today, we’re talking about wildfires and trying to figure out if environmentalists are actually making the wildfires we experience every year worse by opposing controlled burns.

Every year wildfires spread across the country destroying homes, closing roads, filling the air with haze and smoke, laying waste to public land, and costing tax payers millions of dollars to quell the flames. The LA times reported that last year alone, California had over 2,000 wildfires, which burnt 1.4 million acres of land. Putting out those fires used up approximately half of the $1.4 billion in federal money and cost another $1 billion in state funds.

Naturally, with stakes this high, the people want something done about it – and that something, obviously, is to put out the fires. Now.

As snap decisions go, wanting to put out fires is a pretty good one. As is so often the case though, solutions offered in haste tend to be imperfect ones. I’m not saying we should be letting homes burn, but I am asking that we look at the unintended consequences.

The simple fact of the matter is that fire is a part of the natural process. By putting out fires for whatever reason, we interrupt that process. In nature, lightning will spark a wildfire every 5 to 10 years. It’s completely natural and happens just like clockwork. When allowed to occur, they burn away the accumulated leaves, twigs, and other waste on the forest floor. Five or ten years later, the next forest fire that sweeps through is very small because there is little in the way of accumulated fuel. Frequently, these fires are so mild that they don’t even reach into the canopy of the forest, leaving the trees virtually unharmed. The process is such a predictable and frequent occurrence, that certain plants, like the Sequoia Tree, depend on it. Without these regular, mild fires, the seeds of the Sequoia Trees do not sprout, thereby threatening the trees by preventing them from reproducing.

When we interrupt this process we allow tree litter and ground plants to become much deeper, thicker, and denser than they normally would ever become if left to their own devices. The effect of such accumulation is as obvious as it is ironic: It makes fires far more intense. Think about it for a second: leaves burn. Burned leaves disappear. The more leaves there are, the more intense the fire. What we’re left with is a choice: a little fire every 5 or 10 years or an absolute holocaust every 20-30 years.

The ideal solution to this problem comes in a process called “prescribed burns” or “controlled burns”. It’s a process that quite literally fights fire with fire. In a controlled burn, workers thin out densely packed undergrowth and create a fire break (basically a cleared area with nothing flammable in it to prevent the fire from spreading) then wait for an ideal time. When the wind, weather, and conditions on the ground are just right, a fire is intentionally started which is then closely watched. These controlled burns use up all of the fuel which accumulates to create the really intense, unstoppable fires we’ve come to dread.

Regardless of it’s benefits, there are problems with controlled burns. Politically, it’s a hard sell. Few people understand the benefits of controlled burns, and, frankly, it’s a boring subject. Not many people really even want to know the ins and outs of federal land management. To up the difficulty another notch, the arguments against controlled burns are hard to counter. You can’t really argue against the fact that fires destroy habitat. You can’t really argue against the fact that smoke lowers air quality (I would probably argue that carbon is carbon, you can’t stop forest fires forever, and eventually it’s all going to go up into the atmosphere or biodegrade into methane anyway, but that’s not really the point). You can’t really argue against the fact that accidents can happen and no one really wants to take responsibility for an uncontrolled controlled burn. You don’t even have to be a liberal to dislike the idea. As a conservative, the cost is probably the biggest factor for me. Clearing undergrowth, bringing in heavy equipment (frequently in areas with no roads), cutting fire breaks, and paying fire crews for their time and equipment is not cheap.

Despite all of that, there’s still a pretty solid consensus among foresters and conservationists: controlled burns are a vital part of our land management best practices.

Contrary to popular belief, animal populations are not decimated by controlled burns. Animal instinct guides animals away from fire, the forest grows back in a matter of months, and the size of a controlled burn is tiny compared to either human expansion into the area or an uncontrolled fire fueled by decades of tree litter. Controlled burns do not kill trees (they do in fact live and continue to provide habitat, unlike with say logging or strip mining) and without competition, undergrowth grows back at a surprisingly fast rate.

Intense regulations and government oversight require an almost obscene number of hoops to be jumped through ensure that precautions are taken in the extreme. Permits are given not for a specific day, but when all of the requirements are met. Even after a permit is obtained, the burn isn’t carried out until wind and weather permit – and with fire fighting crews present.

But most importantly of all, they lessen the ferocity and scope of wildfires that threaten populated areas. Without dangerous levels of fuel, fires can be more easily stopped. Without dangerous levels of fuel, fires actually burn themselves out without human intervention. Without dangerous levels of fuel, a simple lightning strike or a camp fire or a cigarette butt doesn’t destroy thousands of acres of homes and trees.

My own personal opinion on controlled burns is pragmatic. I believe that state and federal land that borders developed areas be thinned or cleared where required and undergo controlled burns whenever fuel builds up to unsafe levels. Those levels can be (and currently are) figured out by land management services such as the U.S. Forestry Service. I believe that natural wildfires should be allowed to burn their natural course when they can be kept away from these areas. This would placate both of my conservative tendencies by spending as few tax dollars as possible while still limiting property damage while still encouraging the natural order of the forest by letting it play out where we can and controlling and duplicating where we can’t.