Catastrophic wildfires demand accountability, and not just in the short term
On Sunday afternoon (May 1), evacuated residents of the Mora Valley pulled off onto the shoulder of NM 518, near the top of the pass at the Taos County line, and watched in disbelief as the raging Hermits Peak Fire bore down on their small, centuriesold villages. Pickups and minivans — stuffed with kids, pets and whatever other belongings might fit — veered off the highway to watch as the massive, gray-tinged column of smoke erupted with fury over the tiny adobe homes and ranchitos below.
It’s impossible to describe what that moment must have felt like for people from that valley. To have to leave at a moment’s notice, only to look back and watch a place that they’ve known for generations menaced by a surge of flames and smoke. The scene was tragic, heartbreaking.
In moments like these, we naturally want to find someone to blame, and the fact that this destructive inferno started as a Forest Service prescribed fire makes it very easy to point the finger. When the immediate threat posed by this fire finally abates, and a thorough investigation of the fire’s cause is all said and done, people in that agency should be held accountable, especially if poor decisions were made, or risks were taken during that prescribed fire that shouldn’t have been taken.
However, our collective demands for accountability should not end there.
The catastrophe affecting our friends, neighbors and family members to the east is the result of not just an errant fire. It’s the result of more than a century of bad land management policy at the local level, coupled with the effects of unchecked fossil fuel emissions and climate change at the global scale. These are chronic, pervasive issues that didn’t start last month when this fire got out of control. This is a slow, creeping crisis that’s been decades in the making and for which we’re once again experiencing dire consequences.
We know with absolute certainty that many forest ecosystems in the Southwest need frequent, low-severity fire to be healthy. This includes almost all of the area that’s been burned on the east slope of the Sangres in the last few weeks. But as a society, we spent decades aggressively suppressing and choking off that kind of “good” fire, allowing woody vegetation to grow in thick, and create a buildup of hazardous fuels that are now supercharging “bad” wildfire behavior. This tinderbox of fuels is made even more treacherous as prolonged and unprecedented periods of hotter, drier weather become increasingly common. Undoing this disaster is painstaking and dangerous work, and it’s only getting harder.
While we’ve known about this scenario for decades, we simply haven’t acted fast enough to address it. As a society, we have the terrible habit of ignoring a glaringly-obvious threat as long as it doesn’t feel like an immediate one. Some evolutionary biologists think our inclination to respond to short-term dangers, but not longterm ones, is an innate characteristic of our species. The dismal irony in the case of Hermits Peak is that the spark that ignited the current
disaster was lit in the hopes of preventing exactly this kind of inferno.
For better or worse, prescribed fire is one of the few tools at our disposal that will help us protect our forests, watersheds and communities from the kind of fires we are seeing this season. Without prescribed fire, land managers can’t possibly address the root of the hazardous fuels problem and restore stability to these ecosystems at any meaningful scale. It’s worth pointing out that the overwhelming majority of prescribed fire activities go according to plan. Prescribed fire experts usually spend weeks or even months preparing for these operations, waiting for the right burn windows at the right time and in the right place. Because of that thoughtful planning and evidence that these treatments really work to reduce wildfire risks and improve forest health, public perception around prescribed fire has gradually moved toward acceptance and even tenuous support over the last couple decades. But every time one of these fires jumps the line, that support usually dissolves pretty quickly.
This certainly isn’t the first time that a prescribed fire has gone awry. The most obvious case in our
area was the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, which also started as a prescribed fire that got out of control and destroyed more than 230 homes and threatened facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In the aftermath of tragedies like Cerro Grande, we generally see a sharp decline in the political and social appetite for employing prescribed burning as a tool for reducing wildfire hazard. We see gutwrenching images of towns aflame and hundreds of people displaced from their homes, and we naturally (and correctly) demand accountability. In response, the news media and elected officials at all levels go to great lengths to show they’re demanding answers and holding people responsible.
That narrative is almost certain to play out in the coming months. Fingers will be pointed. Heads will probably roll. Some people might get thrown under the bus. That is just the political reality. And if there are people who need to be held accountable for this wildfire, then they damn well should be.
But after that short-term drama plays out, if we allow land managers to hole up in their offices rather than continue to do the hard work on the ground needed to prevent catastrophic fires across our entire region, then our effort to truly demand accountability has failed. If agencies get spooked and choose to do nothing for fear or risking their own necks, we’re only increasing the likelihood of more catastrophic wildfires, more evacuations, and more loss of property and life.
Yes, there are steps we can take to reduce the chances of another Hermits Peak Fire. We can learn from any mistakes and tighten up processes and procedures to make it less likely that a future prescribed fire will run out of control. But the risk will never be zero. There will always be a chance that our cure feels worse than the disease. But not employing prescribed fire will not keep catastrophic fires from happening. In fact, doing so will only make them more likely and more common. Consider the current moment: Of the five or six major wildfires the
state has already seen this fire season, we are only aware of one that was caused by a prescribed fire.
All this might be easy to say in the abstract, but it’s not something that’s easy to tell a family that’s been evacuated by the Hermits Peak Fire. This callous rationality is little solace to people who have lost homes, who’ve been ripped from the place they’ve lived for generations, and who, on Sunday, stood on the side of the highway and watched their valley burn.
However, if we listen closely to the frustration and anger of some people who’ve been affected by the Hermits Peak Fire, a common complaint is that the Forest Service and other agencies didn’t do enough to manage these places for quite some time. They took a hands-off approach for too long, and the fire behavior we’ve seen over more than 100,000 acres is the natural consequence of that inaction.
To that end, when this fire finally subsides, our demands for accountability must go beyond investigations into what may have gone wrong with this particular prescribed fire. The news media and elected officials clamoring for answers about who’s to blame for this fire should demand the same accountability in the years to come as it relates to action on the ground. Are agencies doing everything they can to restore forest health and reduce the chances of mega-fires? Are they finding ways around the red tape and agency complacency, which too often bogs down these efforts? And are we as community members doing all we can to support those efforts?
This crisis is unfortunately everyone’s problem, and it’s not going to get any better. The worst possible outcome of this tragedy is for it to have a chilling effect on proactive efforts and treatments — including well-executed prescribed fire — with the hopes of preventing more communities from feeling the pain that our neighbors to the east are experiencing right now.
There will always be a chance that our cure feels worse than the disease. But not employing prescribed fire will not keep catastrophic fires from happening. In fact, doing so will only make them more likely and more common.
J.R. Logan is the Taos County Wildland-Urban Interface Coordinator and manager of several forest restoration projects that promote ecosystem health, traditional uses and economic development in Northern New Mexico. To learn more about the forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction in Taos County, visit taoscountywildfire.org.