Manage Wildfires Before They Begin - Part 1

From suppression to science-based fire management in NPS (photo by the National Academy of Sciences

Some of you may not know but prior to my 43 years with the National Park Service (NPS), I was a seasonal wildland firefighter with the Kootenai National Forest in NW Montana. After joining the NPS, I continued to serve for additional years (on short-term collateral duty assignments) with wildland fire crews from the park areas I worked. 

Federal fire protection began in the national parks in 1886, when the U.S. Army administered Yellowstone Park. After the trauma of the 1910 conflagration fire season, and creation of the NPS in 1916, the new Service embraced the Forest Service’s policy of aggressive suppression. Federal land agencies generally saw forest and grassland fires as the “bad guy;” something to fight and extinguish. 

Suppression was reinforced with five major fire years between 1919 and 1934. Although some wildlife biologists such as George Wright may have disagreed, the NPS believed that with adequate resources, like CCC crews, suppression appeared to work. Following the Forest Service, which controlled fire protection purse strings, the NPS hired foresters instead of wildlife biologists to manage its fire programs. 

Suppression was further reinforced during WWII, when the NPS no longer had the ample resources of the decade before, but neither did it experience high levels of visitation. At the time, since many of the larger forest fires stemmed from human action, they diminished as did visitation. 

For the early 20^th Century, suppression was policy; a national park area reality that only began to incrementally change in the 1950s as additional scientists and wildlife managers entered the workforce. With their scrutiny in “connecting the dots,” scientists began to discover key relationships between periodic fires and habitat health. 

You see, fire is a force of nature that has shaped national park areas. Every grassland, shrubland, and forest has a natural fire cycle. Without these periodic natural fires, fuels build up and many ecosystems become stagnant and unhealthy; precursors for a conflagration. Periodic natural fires create a mosaic pattern on the landscape leading to firebreaks. 

Several plant species require natural fire mineral-rich soil to sprout; some trees require fire to release seeds to reproduce. The tallgrass prairie is just one example of an entire ecosystem that needs fire to exist. Periodic natural fires slow down the spread of some invasive plants. Science in the NPS was beginning to shine.

In 1958, Everglades National Park ignited its first prescribed burn. The 1963 Leopold Report, further articulated the NPS’s mission with its call for parks to be managed as “vignettes of primitive America.” Following passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the NPS was compelled to reassess its fire plans in the context of the new law. 

By 1967, the NPS found itself at the forefront of experimenting with fire ecology, allowing “prescribed natural fires” in selected areas, and devising administrative models to reintroduce periodic fires. National park areas became the testing ground for intentionally igniting fires. Ecologically sound, this strategy was revolutionary and the NPS persisted in the face of intense questioning of its practices.

These changes in management philosophy contributed to a revolution in the NPS’s approach to fire that became policy in 1968 including a myriad of ways fire could help maintain national park landscapes, including cultural landscapes.

It took twenty years for the philosophical commitment to fire use to evolve into a formal planning structure. First, a 1976 NPS Task Directive assessed past and current practices, and developed recommended courses of action for a Service-wide fire management program including natural and accidental fire response and rules by which fire could be introduced. The directive anticipated a reformulation of the fire management program to account for the differences among the 287 national park units. It also centralized resources and strategies addressing fires to the Boise Interagency Fire Center. 

It led to standardization efforts to tighten nomenclature so everyone could learn the meanings among natural fire, prescribed fire, and prescribed natural fire. Each fire became unique and dependent upon conditions like lightning strikes vs human activity, the historic fire regime of the habitat, topography, and vegetation. But one item wasn’t even on the radar screen for most - global warming.

Next week, in Part 2, this post continues with stories of the continued evolution of NPS wildland fire management through events such as the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 and the Grand Canyon Dragon Fire of 2025. How might a new variable – climate change – affect all of this? Stay Tuned. 

Yours truly a loooong time ago in the Kootenai National Forest (Photo By Mark)

Prescribed natural fires in the NPS (NPS photo file)

Reproduction after fire-released seeds (NPS photo file)