Living with Fire

Promoting healthy forests to reduce wildfire severity.

We work with partners throughout Oregon and Washington to restore forest health through active stewardship. Decades of fire suppression and inadequate forest management have led to unhealthy forest conditions that are more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, insect infestation, and disease.

For millennia, Indigenous People in the Pacific Northwest have stewarded healthy forests with traditional management practices. These include harvesting and removing select trees and underbrush, as well as cultural burning—low-intensity fires that remove undergrowth, promote culturally important plants, maintain hunting grounds, and improve soil health.

After colonization, and particularly over the last century, Pacific Northwest forest managers began widespread suppression of forest fires. This practice created denser forest conditions capable of fueling and carrying high-intensity fires across large landscapes. Higher summer temperatures also create a longer fire season and drier fuels, contributing to hotter fires. Hotter fires kill small and large old trees – making catastrophic wildfires the biggest current threat to old-growth forests.

Helping frontline communities be prepared when catastrophic wildfires occur.

In all western states, the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – the zone between urban areas and wildlands where homes are at greater riask of burning during wildfire – is expanding.

In Oregon, more than 600,000 homes are in this zone and at risk of experiencing catastrophic wildfire, comprising 36% of all houses and nearly 1.3M residents. In Washington, more than 1 million homes are in this zone, totaling 36% of all houses and nearly 2.4M residents. The cost of insuring homes in this zone is very high and sometimes not available at all.

We are working in several areas of the Pacific Northwest to protect homes and critical infrastructure like utilities from catastrophic wildfire. We work with communities and partners to create fire breaks around communities, create access and defensible space for first responders, and support home hardening through fire-resistant home retrofits. Numerous studies and real-life experiences have shown that these practices save lives, money, and homes when catastrophic wildfires happen.

Restoring healthy forests after catastrophic wildfire.

Wildfires now burn hotter and longer because of the compounding effects of warmer summers and unhealthy forest conditions. These fires have serious consequences for ecosystems and communities, triggering a decades-long process of rehabilitation and recovery.

In Oregon, the 2020 wildfire season was unprecedented in its severity, burning nearly 1 million acres of land during the Labor Day fires. Over a third of that land was privately owned, disproportionately impacting small, non-industrial landowners and residents.

With support from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, we are partnering with local soil and water conservation districts, watershed groups, and long-term recovery organizations to help these private landowners recover. We facilitate access to funding, technical assistance, contractors, and native plants needed to re-establish healthy, climate-resilient ecosystems.

We view this effort as a pilot from which we can learn lessons with our partners, build broader statewide capacity for wildfire recovery work, and better meet the needs of communities impacted by future fires. 

Preparing the land to accept beneficial fire.

The Pacific Northwest is no stranger to fire, as many of the ecosystems here are fire-adapted. 

Beneficial fire is the application or control of low- to moderate-severity fire. It may include cultural burning managed by Tribes, prescribed fire managed to restore ecological function, or spontaneous fire that is controlled but allowed to burn when deemed appropriate by experts.

Reintroducing beneficial fire as a land management tool will not only restore forest health, but also lessen the risk of high-severity, catastrophic wildfire to local communities. We do this through:

• Informing policy decisions and collaboratively finding solutions that remove barriers to responsible burning on Tribal, public, and private land through the Oregon Prescribed Fire Council and Washington Prescribed Fire Council.

• Supporting the implementation and expansion of local Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) in WA and OR, which are community-led efforts that make prescribed fire accessible to private landowners for a wide range of benefits.