On a wooded property near the small community of Viola in north Idaho, the air is hot and thick with smoke. Dozens of volunteers follow a pre-made parameter with drip torches that they tip like watering cans toward the ground.
Only, it’s not water dripping out. It’s fire — a burning mix of diesel and gasoline that ignites dry grass and pine needles below. Volunteers are here for a controlled burn, where fire is intentionally started to reduce wildfire risk and improve ecological health. The team is made up of university students, professors and staff from local lumber companies and forest management groups.
Volunteers move along the fireline, using the drip torches to “black out” a thick, dark buffer zone at the fire parameter before starting work inside that line. The air crackles with the smell of burning plants and gasoline.
One team member, Gabriel Cortez, is teaching a student about fire, and the best way to use his drip torch.
“Look where you're dropping the fuel,” he said, pointing. “See where it's a little spike?”
Before Cortez started working prescribed burns as a student in 2008, he was a smoke jumping wildland firefighter. But these days, he said, he’s more interested in teaching people how to understand and use fire.
“You have the benefit of time to really watch what the fire's doing, compared to a wildfire where you're really just in suppression mode,” Cortez said.
That relationship with fire is one that might have felt foreign to firefighters decades before.
Heather Heward is an instructor at the University of Idaho, the daughter of a career wildland firefighter, and founder of the Idaho Prescribed Fire Council.
“Fire is not the enemy.”Heather Heward
She’s also the “burn boss” at the Viola location, an official title designated for lead managers at prescribed fires.
“‘Firefighter’ is always something I've struggled with, because I don't want to fight fire,” she said. “Fire is not the enemy.”
The public’s relationship with fire is often framed through the lens of risk, Heward said.
But when people only view fire in terms of threat, she said, they risk missing out on its benefits. Heward thinks of fire like medicine for wildlands. The same way a doctor might prescribe a drug when a patient is sick, wildland managers administer burns to help an environment heal and increase its resilience.
In some places, Heward said, fire is even an important part of the plant life cycle. At the Viola burn, ponderosa pines dominate the south and west slopes that the team works.
“If you ask the ponderosa pine what it likes for fire, it will tell you. It will tell you with its thick bark, with its high branches, with its flammable pine needles,” Heward said. “It'll say, ‘I like frequent fire.’”
But regular burning takes adaptation, Heward said, both for plants and people.
“The ponderosa pine evolved with fire, therefore it's a fire adapted plant,” she said. “As people, we are also tasked with becoming fire adapted.”
For the general public, she said, that sometimes means adjusting to some inconvenience. Fire of any kind can decrease air quality, so knowing how to clean air at home with a box fan and air filter is a form of fire adaptation.
For land managers, she said, fire adaptation includes knowing how to use fire as a tool instead of just putting it out.
Mark Swanson, a professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, said prescribed burns can have wide-ranging benefits to an ecosystem.
“A lot of wildlife really benefits,” he said. “Things like flammulated owls or pygmy nuthatches. Deer and elk really benefit, because of the flush of grasses, forbs and shrubs that respond strongly to fire.”
It’s not just that fire can create positive change, Heward said. Suppression alone is no longer a realistic response to wildfire.
“The reality is, we are in a different environment. We had cooler and wetter conditions in the middle of the century. We could win that battle at that time,” Heward said. “We have way more resources now. We have way more roads, we have all these things that should make firefighting easier. And we are losing regularly.”
Still, even when landowners are willing, Heward said, many insurance companies are nervous about the additional risk of a controlled burn.
“I understand that,” Heward said. “If we do nothing, we are just kicking that risk down the road and it grows as it moves.”
Some states, including Washington and Oregon, are working to mitigate risk by creating claims funds that would provide liability coverage for prescribed burns. Heward said here in Idaho, she’s watching closely to see what might work in her state.
Wildland managers say opinions of prescribed burns are more favorable today than they were decades prior. But some people still fear that burns will get out of hand.
Tari Becker is the Viola landowner who invited the burn group onto her property.
“I would say we were always against controlled burns because we didn't know much about controlled burns,” she said.
Becker’s parents bought the land in 1956, she said. For most of her life, her family was wary of prescribed fire. So, she gets why people hesitate.
“Fire is seen as a negative thing by a lot of landowners because when wildfire comes through,” she said, “it takes so much.”
“I am surrounded by people who don't have adequate escape.”Tari Becker
But Becker’s perspective changed about 10 years ago when she started taking classes in forestry. She said her biggest motivation for the burns was risk management for herself, and for her neighbors. In Viola, the closest fire department is about 20 minutes away.
“I am surrounded by people who don't have adequate escape,” she said.
Heward said sometimes people have the idea that it’s someone else’s job to protect their homes and towns from fire. But she thinks community fire protection needs to involve the whole community.
"It doesn't need to be a good old boys elite club,” she said. “In fact, if we continue to convince people that you can only be on the fire line if you wear a yellow shirt, wear green pants, have a hard hat, (have) an A-frame body shape and are in your mid-twenties, we're doing a disservice."
As the owner of a larger property of several hundred acres, Becker said she sees an opportunity to help protect the larger community. But she can’t do that alone.
Over the past several months, she’s met with neighbors to answer questions about her burn plans. She hosted open houses with wildland managers to train those neighbors on prescribed burns, and invited them onto her property.
Getting buy-in is a challenge when her vision conflicts with neighbors drawn to a rural lifestyle for the allure of dense forest and seclusion.
“The people that are looking out their window from a smaller parcel are looking at my hillside of trees,” she said. “And if I move a tree there, that feels like I'm taking something from them.”
Still, Becker said, she thinks it’s important to try. She’s hoping her neighbors will see positive outcomes on her land, and that message will spread.
“Next spring, that whole area is gonna look so different,” she said. “I can hardly wait to see so many of the wildflowers and native plants come back.”
That kind of collaboration is needed if communities want to be resilient when the fires do come along, Heward said.
