Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, wrote an article that appeared in the Redding Searchlight. Here is an excerpt:
For wilderness wildfires, is there some kind of middle path between the extremes of either aggressive-attack or let-burn strategies? The answer is yes, and recent changes in federal fire policy by the Obama administration allow us to take that middle path forward, managing fires for both ecological restoration and community protection goals simultaneously.
First of all, we need a new language for fire management that gets us away from the “war metaphor” and the mentality of “fighting” fire or “battling” blazes. Essentially, this mentality has us annually making war on America’s wildlands — a war we ultimately cannot win and can no longer afford in terms of taxpayer dollars or firefighter lives. We should neither aggressively fight nor passively ignore any fire — instead, we should actively manage every fire. Thus, for example, when a fire is first detected, it needs an initial action, not initial “attack.”
Second, we need to stop blindly reacting to wildfire ignitions as if they were unforeseen, unpredictable emergencies, and begin to proactively plan and prepare for them as anticipated, predicted seasonal events.
This means developing fire management plans that provide guidance for firefighters on how to maximize the social and ecological benefits of fire while minimizing the risks to firefighters, costs to taxpayers, and impacts to the land from fire management actions. It is utterly preposterous that the Six Rivers National Forest has no fire management plan, and thus must blindly attack all future blazes no matter how unsafe, expensive, or ecologically destructive a given firefight may be.
