fire management

The Forest Service's new chief recently published a letter that called for wildfires to be suppressed "as swiftly as possible." That may sound prudent to many, but it raised eyebrows among some who study fire policy. They worried that it may signal a return to aggressive suppression that has been linked to growing wildfire severity.

President Trump has signed an executive order on wildfire policy, which seeks to speed responses to wildfires and address what it calls “reckless mismanagement.”

Tom Schultz, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, is calling for wildfires to be extinguished “as swiftly as possible this season.” But aggressive suppression policies are widely believed to be one of the key culprits in the current wildfire crisis.

Wildland fire has a diversity problem: in 2022, the Government Accountability Office reported that the federal firefighting force was 84 percent men and 72 percent white. This inequitable situation has been identified as one of the key barriers to recruiting and retaining a workforce capable of confronting the wildfire crisis.

Firefighters are battling longer fire seasons with less people. Volunteerism has dropped nationwide – and Wyoming is seeing that trend, too. Fire departments are asking themselves how to regain numbers for a vital community service.

The study's lead author says that land managers could do fuels treatments in the wake of such burns to extend that mitigating impact.

The program is a partnership between the Western Colorado Conservation Corps, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service. It prepares young women for wildland firefighting jobs with federal agencies.

Forecasters are predicting a normal fire season. But that’s still a lot of fires – Wyoming averages 800 wildfires a year. State officials say Wyoming’s strongest asset in fighting those hundreds of fires is a bunch of local, state, and federal agencies working together.

Home insurance is becoming a more uncertain market, in large part due to climate-fueled disasters like wildfires. Some states in the West are taking steps to address the situation, like Oregon where a 2023 law requires insurers to account for home-hardening measures in their underwriting models. In California, they’re trying to take it a step further.

Many Indigenous peoples in North America have long standing traditions of cultural burning, the deliberate ignition of fires for a wide array of purposes. With the robust participation of tribal members, a new paper tries to quantify the scale of past burning by the Karuk people of Northern California.