(Except there are no fixes, exactly, and we totally want to tell you all about it.)

By Lael Gilbert | Illustrations by Liz Lord ’04

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In a culture of three-second sound bites and easy-fix-clickbait, the complex reality of wildfire is tricky to talk about. It’s an intricate issue with shifting variables, sensitive tradeoffs, and no single “correct” solution to make it all go away.

Forests of the West, after all, are complicated places made up of thousands of interconnected parts — animals and insects, plants and trees, fungi, bacteria, soil, water, and people — operating in cycles that can last from seconds to centuries, on scales from bacterial action to atmospheric shifts. These massive networks operate invisibly, exquisitely, and quietly as the backdrop to our lives and livelihoods — until they don’t.

For the past half century, the West has been on fire. Since the 1980s, the average area that burns in a year jumped from one million to seven million acres. Over 87% of the U.S. population now experiences some smoke-filled days each summer, with serious impacts on health and safety in communities even hundreds of miles from the source. Uncontrolled wildfires cost billions of dollars, put lives at risk, pump smoke into the atmosphere, and leave scars on the places we love.

But putting them out doesn’t necessarily help — sorry Smokey. Throughout natural history, and on through Indigenous people’s oversight and management, most forests in the West regularly burned — some every few years, others every few hundred. Then, around 1935, the U.S. implemented a policy to aggressively suppress wildfires. Forests were seen as economic assets, and public and political pressure pushed toward protecting them as valuable timber resources. Even many early conservationists saw fire as mainly destructive. Federal agencies constructed entire organizational structures and budgets around the task of putting them out.

Without the assistance from the patchy, periodic burning with which forests evolved, trees grew dense, and branches and trunks lay where they fell, creating cluttered, overgrown stockpiles of burnable fuel for uninterrupted miles, feeding increasing numbers of large, hot, and destructive wildfires.

What managers didn’t know back then was that aggressive suppression of wildfire only put off (and exacerbated) the inevitable — the West would eventually burn.

“Now our forests are in a fire deficit,” says Larissa Yocom, fire ecologist and Director of the Utah Forest Restoration Institute at USU. “By keeping fires out of the forests for so many decades, we’ve set the stage for them to be more destructive and widespread.”

And buckle up, there are even more variables to add to the mix these days. Long-term drought, shifting species composition and altered fire seasons all come into play. People, too, live and recreate in the backcountry in greater numbers, and entire communities have settled in the places that have been waiting for fire to return for a century.

Getting good fires back into the places that need them is tricky. Understanding the intricacies of why, how, and when requires on-the-ground experience, wide cooperation, steady focus, and a pretty good guess at what’s going to happen next.

Universities play a critical role here.

USU has pulled together a smorgasbord of science expertise — forest ecology, fire behavior, soils, drought, climate change, hydrology, policy, recreation, and economics. True-blue nerds, people willing to take a deep dive down research rabbit holes to build better understanding out of the minutiae they measure — figuring out how those small pieces of the puzzle shift the others. And then evaluate how it all might change next year and next century. And then tell everyone about it.

Boring? Sometimes. Essential? Absolutely, if we are going to make headway toward healthier forests. Here are a few things these folks want you to know.

1. Forest Insider Reveals — There’s No Such Thing as Natural

When you think about how you might heal a forest, it’s easy to assume that managers would try to restore it to some original, “natural” state. But forests have been changing for as long as scientists can trace. So which moment counts as natural? The mid-1800s? Circa 1492?

“It’s an impractical approach,” says Jim Lutz, forest ecologist at USU. “The concept of forests as pristine, untouched places before Europeans arrived ignores the long history of land management by native people. And conditions have changed significantly since then. If every other aspect of the larger environment has shifted, why would we try to keep forests as a museum to the past?”

Managing a healthy forest starts with knowing what you want from the land, Lutz explains. Beauty? Habitat for wildlife? Productivity for grazing? Wood products? Once you decide on the goal, you can tweak the ecosystem within certain parameters.

Lutz studies the biggest trees in the oldest forests of the West — those able to survive past wildfires. He and a team of students personally monitor 125,000 trees each summer, discovering and defining the subtle ecological processes that helped those trees survive, and exploring how we can use that knowledge to have the best possible forests that can bounce back after fire.

“Studying which trees live and which trees die through episodes of fire over long periods of time lets us understand the interplay of fire, drought, insects, and disease,” Lutz says. “The kinds of trees that can survive all the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ are the ones we want to form the forests of tomorrow.”

Which begs the question — what conditions did forests face in the past?

2. This Man Cut Open an Old Tree and You Won’t Believe What He Found

Tree rings, if you know how to look at them, provide a wealth of information about seasonal growth, disturbances like fire and pests, and long-term trends like drought. With them, forestry expert Justin DeRose can see into the past — summer seasons, beetle invasions and wet years from centuries ago.

Each cross section of the trunk or “cookie” he collects adds essential details. Wide rings mean years of good growing conditions, while narrow rings signal drought, cold summers, or other stressors. Scars and dark bands let DeRose reconstruct exactly when and how often fires burned across a landscape.

DeRose shares this information through a network of databases that record the life-history of tens-of-thousands of trees, creating a rich record of forest growth, death, and change across space and time.

“These networks are essential to understand forests, and provide excellent cues about where they are headed,” Derose says.

And once you decide where a forest came from, and where you want it to go, how exactly do you get there?

3. The Mind-Blowing Way Foresters Lose (Wood) Weight

In her head, Yocom has two informal scales for wildland fires: good-to-bad for ecosystems, and good-to-bad for people. On the people-scale, the “good” fires are basically invisible — they don’t put smoke into communities and don’t impact homes or recreation. They quietly and efficiently do their work in remote canyons and wilderness mountainsides, recycling woody debris and old plant material, resetting forest systems. On the ecosystem-scale, the good fires are those that match historical patterns.

It can be a long wait for naturally ignited fires to fit positives on both checklists, though, so land managers manufacture them. Prescribed fires, intentionally set and carefully managed, are one of the most effective and least expensive tools managers have for restoring and maintaining healthy western landscapes, Yocom explains.

There are alternatives.

Thinning out trees and brush with chainsaws or heavy equipment and burning piled-up wood can reduce the surplus in small areas or more populated spots where prescribed fire isn’t practical. Yocom’s research shows, however, that neither can completely replicate the ecological benefits of wildfire — even if they have their place. Thinning leaves behind small fuels that pose an ongoing risk for unplanned fire, while burning treats only small areas and may damage soils or nearby trees. Both require a lot of on-the-ground labor and equipment and are relatively expensive.

Prescribed fire promotes the regeneration of native plants. It lets nutrients recycle into the soil and is a friend to fire-adapted ecosystems like aspen. When conditions like humidity levels and wind direction are right, fire professionals have the chance to conduct burns under safe conditions. One way or another, these forests are going to burn, and outcomes are usually better when conditions are mild, Yocom says.

But even with overwhelming evidence that suppressing natural fires doesn’t do forests long-term good, it can be hard for land managers to adopt a change…

4. Your Jaw will Drop When You Hear What Managers REALLY Think of Fire

Catrin Edgeley, a natural resource sociologist, studies how communities interact with wildfire risk. She gauges public support or opposition for fuels treatments like prescribed fire, evacuation planning, community recovery after fire, and health impacts from smoke.

In recent research she queried wildfire professionals about what might motivate them to use wildfire management strategies “other than full suppression,” — letting some naturally ignited wildfires continue to burn when conditions are safe. Although rules allow managers to use this strategy, many remain hesitant because of perceived risks and strong organizational pressures.

“Supporting fire managers who make the decision is critical to healthy ecosystems and protecting at-risk communities,” Edgeley exhorts. “It’s all the factors surrounding that decision, like social and political conditions, that complicate the path forward.”

Managers report they would be more likely to allow fires to “do their thing” if there were consistent and public support from agency leaders — their bosses. They want recognition and incentives for successes, and policy changes allowing land burned this way to count toward administrative goals for cleaning up the landscape.

And meanwhile, when catastrophic wildfires rip through existing forests, we must be ready to deal with the consequences …

5. The Unbelievable Thing We Found in Your Reservoir Water

One worrisome impact of wildfire happens after it’s out. High-severity fires remove vegetation and roots that hold soils in place. Streams and rivers in severely burned watersheds can quickly transform into muddy deluges during the first rainstorm after a fire, pulling sediment, ash, woody debris, rocks, and even boulders into the water system.

Although this can benefit stream habitat in some cases, the dark surge ultimately dumps into the nearest reservoir, impacting water quality and literally filling it from the ground up.

Hydrologist Patrick Belmont teamed with Yocom to build a model to identify which watersheds were most at risk, how much sediment a particular erosion event might produce, and how far downstream the sediment could reach. Projections show that wildfires may cause sediment yields to double in one-third of all Western watersheds, potentially causing serious losses in water storage

Outright solutions to this aspect of the wildfire problem are hard to pin down, but Belmont’s work has shown increasing the number and size of well-managed prescribed burns is a solid strategy in the ecosystems adapted to that pattern, allowing existing vegetation to recover and keep soils in place. Other faculty also study how to use plants and trees after fire to stabilize those soils.

And who, over the next three decades, is going to manage that mess?

6. He Was a Wildland Firefighter for 36 Years Before He Tried This One Trick

USU forest-focused faculty do double-duty, most also teaching students to understand the management of forest ecosystems by building foundational skills.

Wildland firefighter and USU faculty member Brad Washa is stubbornly passionate about getting students into forests to witness first-hand how these ecosystems function, how prescribed fire can be used, the effects of wildfires, and the experience seasoned managers have for handling issues varying from smoke management to endangered species.

With a 36-year career in wildland firefighting under his belt, Washa understands better than anyone the best way to build skills is to get thrown into the fire — metaphorically of course. He brings students to visit fire sites and prescribed burns, offers training to qualify as wildland firefighters, and places them in seasonal wildland fire jobs. When everyone from the firefighter on the ground to the district ranger is well-versed in forest ecology and pragmatic experience, he believes, it makes for much stronger, smarter teams.

“The most effective wildland fire and natural resource managers combine firsthand operational experience with an academic foundation in fire ecology and management,” he says.

The One Wild Topic that’s Kind of Complicated

Tackling wildfire means slogging through a vastly complex, nuanced, and slow system, and USU researchers are covering an incredible amount of ground.

They work to understand a forest’s past, predict risk, and model where fire is likely to burn in the future. They are working with and learning from land managers to figure out where wildfires are likely to get severe, where they might interrupt waterways and transportation systems, how to modify landscapes to moderate the destruction, and how to get people to support these modification efforts.

They also work to understand what to plant to interrupt a wildfire that’s out of control, how wildlife will respond, how communities can prepare themselves, what plants grow back after a fire, how long that will take, and how and where we might want to plant trees and plants now so they’ll have a better chance at survival when they burn.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg and doesn’t even get to the subject of fire on rangelands.

But as a land grant university, USU is built to handle exactly these kinds of questions. Researchers are supported by federal, state, and private funds that allow them to tackle this task over time, train students for management stability in the future, and find ways to keep pace with changing conditions. Without these efforts Utah would become more vulnerable to the increasing severity of change, unable to determine which string to pull to get the knot to unravel. The slow and steady pace of tackling these kinds of complex questions can be frustrating — to everyone. There’s no wand to wave to make them disappear. Or, rather, the slow, steady work is the magic, and exactly how problems like this one eventually get resolved.