Stephen Pyne Archives - Page 2 of 2

May 5: Senate hearing about wildfire management

Bill GabbertMay 4, 2015June 3, 2020Uncategorizedhearing, Holy Grail, Stephen Pyne4 Comments

(UPDATED at 11:42 a.m. MDT, May 5, 2015)

A video recording of this morning’s hearing by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources about wildfires has been posted along with the formal written statements of the five witnesses. These all went up on the website much more quickly than we have seen in the past.

The video and the written statements can be seen here.

I was only able to see portions of the statements by the witnesses, and missed the following Q&A period. One part that I found interesting was what Bob Eisele, a retired Watershed and Fire Analyst with the County of San Diego said about technology. Basically Mr. Eisele, who spoke only occasionally referring to notes, said, “We need to know where the fire is”, and “We need to know where the firefighters are”, referring to real-time tracking of the fire and firefighting resources, what I call the Holy Grail of Wildland Firefighter Safety.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tomas Tidwell predictably said, “We have the resources”, and then mentioned engines, large air tankers, and MAFFS military air tankers.

Dr. Sharon Hood, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Montana, made an interesting presentation about how low-severity fires can help provide ponderosa pine with defenses against bark beetle attacks, and that excluding frequent fire from
the system greatly decreases resistance from bark beetle outbreaks.

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(Originally published at 8 p.m. MDT, May 4, 2015)

On Tuesday, May 5 the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources will hold a hearing “to receive testimony on the Federal government’s role in wildfire management, the impact of fires on communities, and potential improvements to be made in fire operations.”

It is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. EDT, and will be viewable on a live webcast. These hearings are recorded and can usually be replayed a day or two later.

The panel of witnesses will include:

Mr. Thomas Tidwell

Chief, U.S. Forest Service

U.S. Department of Agriculture
Dr. Stephen Pyne

Regents’ Professor & Distinguished Sustainability Scholar

School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
Dr. Sharon Hood

Post-Doctoral Researcher, College of Forestry & Conservation

University of Montana
Mr. Bruce Hallin

Director of Water Rights and Contracts

Salt River Project
Mr. Bob Eisele

Watershed and Fire Analyst

County of San Diego, CA – Retired

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Kelly.

Steven Pyne: Our approach to wildfires is all wrong

Bill GabbertSeptember 18, 2013August 25, 2019UncategorizedStephen Pyne1 Comment

USFS engine crew on the White Draw Fire, July 29, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

Steven Pyne, the author of many books about wildland fire, has written an amazing op/ed piece for the Washington Post titled “From Yosemite to Colorado, our approach to wildfires is all wrong”.

It is the most interesting article I have read in a long time, due in part, of course, to the wisdom of his ideas about how to coexist with the wildfire problems facing us. But what makes it a joy to read is his extraordinary gift as a wordsmith. About every third sentence I encountered a word, phrase, or a way of looking at an issue that was surprising, in a good way — arrangements of words that have rarely if ever been used in the context of wildland fire management.

You must read it, but here are some examples:

“misdiagnosed the problem”
“retrofitting houses”
“irrationally exuberant sprawl”
“fire repression”
“translating ideas into programs”
“pluralism of fire programs”
“ill-sited McMansions”
“climate change may flip the script”
“fire equivalent of a flood plain”
“emergency interventions rather than systemic reforms”

You are welcome.

Thanks go out to Bruce

Steve Pyne on the future of wildland fire

Bill GabbertDecember 23, 2012August 25, 2019UncategorizedStephen Pyne6 Comments

Steve Pyne, the author of several books on the history of wildland fire, has posted on his Arizona State University web site an essay in which he looks at the past and into the future. Here is an excerpt:

“…The reason is that the primary driver of the American fire scene is not amenable to technical fixes and funding. It’s about how Americans live on their land. It’s about values. This is where the National Cohesive Strategy, which could act for the American fire community as a new treaty might for the EU, should help. Unfortunately the Cohesive Strategy puts science at its core when the reality is politics. The fire scene is not about positive knowledge; it’s about choices, and values chosen get sorted out by politics. We’re talking about the public estate and public safety. If those aren’t matters for democratic politics, what is? The decisive issue is not whether our science is good enough, but whether our politics is.”

Video interview with Dr. Stephen Pyne

Bill GabbertNovember 12, 2010August 25, 2019UncategorizedStephen Pyne

During the International Association of Wildland Fire’s recent Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference in Spokane, Washington, Josh McDaniel from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center conducted an interview with author and professor Dr. Steven J. Pyne. HERE is a link to the video at the LLC. Unfortunately the audio is terrible, because apparently there was no microphone used except for the one on the camera. And, I am no movie critic, but I kept hoping that the camera operator would zoom in on Dr. Pyne. It never happened–they kept the same shot on the screen for the entire 25-minute video.

We would embed the video here, but the in-house video hosting system that the LLC uses does not allow embedding. It’s too bad they don’t post the videos on YouTube. We commend the LLC for producing interviews with fire experts, but hope they improve their video producing skills.

Biography of Dr. Pyne: He is a Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University in Tempe and the author of more than a score of books, most of them on the history of humanity and fire. Among them, Year of the Fires: The story of the Great Fires of 1910. In a previous life, he was a member of the North Rim Longshots for 15 seasons at Grand Canyon National Park.

Steven Pyne: evacuations not always necessary

Bill GabbertAugust 6, 2009September 6, 2018Uncategorizedevacuation, Stephen Pyne

The prolific author of books about wildland fire, Steven Pyne, has been quoted in a Canadian publication as being an advocate for homeowners, in some cases, not evacuating in front of a fire, but staying, and putting out the small embers after the fire front passes. Sometimes this is called “prepare, stay and defend, or leave early”.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

VICTORIA, B.C. — A U.S. fire-fighting expert says evacuating communities to escape forest fires is not always the right thing to do.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne says it’s rare that communities are engulfed in a “tsunami of fire.”

More often, homes are destroyed by fires started from small burning embers thrown out from the fire front, Pyne said in an interview. They could be extinguished with little effort.

“After the front has passed, or the main surge, you could go out with a squirt gun and a whisk broom,” said Pyne.

He pointed to a wildfire that destroyed a number of homes an evacuated neighbourhood in Los Alamos, NM, nine years ago.

Afterward, officials realized most were the result of burning embers, said Pyne, who teaches at Arizona State University.

“Are these mass evacuations the right approach?” he asked. “Or is that what people are doing because they’re afraid of TV or lawsuits, who knows what?”

John Maclean's forward for Stephen Pyne's book

BillMay 7, 2008July 30, 2019Uncategorizedbooks, John N. Maclean, Stephen Pyne

John Maclean has written three books about wildland fire: “Fire on the Mountain”, “Fire and Ashes”, and “The Thirtymile Fire”. Recently he wrote a foreword to Stephen J. Pyne’s “Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910”, first published in 2001, which is being reissued in 2008 by Mountain Press in Missoula.

We have permission from John and Mountain Press to reprint the foreword here. In the excerpt below, John writes about the fires of 1910 and the cabin at Seely Lake, Montana that has been in his family for generations. The entire foreword is worth a read.

“This summer a palpable cloak of heat and expectation hung over the landscape as though the predictable and cherished past had been replaced by an unfamiliar monster. Make no mistake, northwestern Montana is fire country and has been for centuries. The marks of fire, discovered in tree rings when one of the giant larch trees finally thunders to the ground, show that for centuries fire occurred along the shores of Seeley Lake every quarter century or so – until our forebears stopped the cycle in the wake of the Great Fires of 1910, the subject of Stephen Pyne’s Year of the Fires. When I was growing up, the Forest Service, the agency responsible for the federal land around the cabin, did not allow us to cut a tree and even discouraged clearing brush. The offset was the promise that the Forest Service would contain any fire that threatened the area under the full suppression policy that was adopted in response to the 1910 calamity.

That full suppression policy now has been formally abandoned – along with the rule forbidding the cutting of trees around Seeley Lake. In recent years, the Forest Service itself undertook a forest thinning and light burning project in the area. The treated zones provoked complaints in the first year or two because they looked rough, but they have become a glorious sight since then. Densely packed stands of “dog hair” lodgepole pine have been opened up, disclosing centuries-old trees. The big trees, whose growth was stunted in recent decades because they were deprived of moisture and light, now can take their place as giants and future giants. Fuzzy new trees and low brush carpet the forest floor. Wildlife can move freely. Humans can hike or snowmobile through the stands without battling brush. The forest is not fire proof, but a low-intensity fire would likely burn through here without catastrophic damage. Regular clearing by fire is what allowed the giants to grow big in the first place.

During the summer, I mowed down the tall grass near the cabin, felled a couple of dead lodgepole pines, and cleared a year’s accumulation of duff from near the cabin. Then I left the place to its rendezvous with fire – which was not long in coming.”

Maclean’s and Pyne’s books can be found at the International Association of Wildland Fire Books page.