In spite of all their years of unpopularity, prescribed burns
are making a comeback. It’s not that people don’t have good reason to be
skeptical of them—sometimes they go wrong, and those instances stay in people’s
minds far longer than the many that worked as they were supposed to. The
disastrous Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico, which in May 2000 burned hundreds of
homes in Los Alamos and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, began as
a prescribed fire that got out of control when the wind shifted.
With dozens of wildfires occurring each season, though, many people are
realizing that decades of fire-prevention efforts have thwarted the natural
cycle in which lightning fires periodically thin the vegetation. When a wildfire
breaks out now near a populated area, firefighters are often dealing with many
seasons’ of accumulated dry undergrowth.
Some areas are finding other advantages to prescribed burns as well.
Lenexa, Kansas, for example—long known for its forward-thinking watershed
management—is using them
to reduce invasive plants and give the native species a fighting chance. Some
native species do better with, or even require, periodic burns. And because the
area’s soil has a high clay content, the deep-rooted native plants encourage
greater stormwater infiltration than many of the shallower-rooted non-natives.
Part of the strategy in conducting the burns, of course, is to let people
know about them and explain why they’re needed. How often—if at all—are they
being done in your area? Do you think they should be used more often?