Fire

The answer is complicated. Before a century of fire suppression, large fires, even west of the Cascades, were not uncommon. While wildfires are a normal part of forest ecology in the Pacific Northwest, climate change and current forest conditions are resulting in record-breaking seasons and wildfires that are relatively large, intense, and occur with greater frequency. For instance, in the Mount Adams area, we are seeing forest stands burning several times within a decade—a much higher rate than what scientists believe occurred here in the past and one that interrupts natural cycles of regrowth and recovery.

Climate change is one factor in record-breaking fire seasons. High temperatures and changes to precipitation patterns create more dry vegetation that can fuel expansive wildfires. However, the condition of many parts of our forests following decades of mismanagement may be more to blame for increasing fire danger than any other single factor. For a century, the U.S. adopted a policy of total fire suppression that ignored indigenous knowledge and the importance of wildfire to the landscape. As a result, many forest stands are now prone to more intense or large fires. Worse, many thousands of acres of healthy and biodiverse forests have been clearcut and replaced by profit-maximizing monocultures of closely packed stands of trees of the same age and species. These tree plantations are dangerous tinderboxes; they are vulnerable to disease and lack the natural wildfire resilience of the biodiverse and complex forests they replaced.