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Concept
History of wildfire suppression in the United States
Résumé
Wildfire suppression in the United States has had a long and varied history. For most of the 20th century, any form of wildland fire, whether it was naturally caused or otherwise, was quickly suppressed for fear of uncontrollable and destructive conflagrations such as the Peshtigo Fire in 1871 and the Great Fire of 1910. In the 1960s, policies governing wildfire suppression changed due to ecological studies that recognized fire as a natural process necessary for new growth. Today, policies advocating complete fire suppression have been exchanged for those who encourage wildland fire use, or the allowing of fire to act as a tool, such as the case with controlled burns.
Native American use of fire in ecosystems are part of the environmental cycles and maintenance of wildlife habitats that sustain the cultures and economies of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Indigenous peoples have used burning practices to manage, protect, and relate to their surrounds since time immemorial. According to sociologist Kari Norgaard: "Indigenous peoples have long set low-intensity fires to manage eco-cultural resources and reduce the buildup of fuels – flammable trees, grasses and brush – that cause larger, hotter and more dangerous fires, like the ones that have burned across the West in recent years. Before fire suppression, forests in the West experienced a mix of low- to high-severity fires for millennia. Large, high-severity fires played an important ecological role, yet their spread was limited by low-severity fires set by indigenous peoples"
However, "Fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850," and with the institution of the Weeks Act in 1911, "cultural uses of fire" were essentially made "illegal and for the many decades following, less and less burning occurred while more and more vegetation grew. Over a century of policies of fire suppression have created the conditions for the catastrophic, high-intensity wildfires we are seeing today" according to the Karuk Tribe of Northern California's Climate Adaptation Plan.
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