Fall 2000

by Debra Shore

his summer, Americans woke up to fire. We watched on TV as uncontrolled burns raged across huge expanses of the western United States. Yet some experts claim that well-planned prescription burns could have averted or lessened many of this summer’s disasters.

Compare this Midwest analog with the TV images of raging conifer fires. Here our ground fires invigorate the oaks, drive out invasive species, and restore health to plant and animal communities. Photo by Joe Nowak.

The notion that woods, forests, even marshes need to burn in order to be healthy is contrary to what most of us grew up believing. After all, didn’t Bambi and Smokey teach us some of our bedrock values? Thus, it’s still counter-intuitive, for most of us, that in order to save our woods we must burn them occasionally. Indeed, even before the large fires burned nearly half of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, the U.S. Forest Service had already concluded that the era of fire prevention and suppression needed to give way. As Timothy Egan wrote recently in the New York Times, "Fire is as much a part of nature as creeks and wildflowers. Most forests have a natural cycle, in which a purging burn comes through every 10, 20, 50 or 100 years. The cycle may be suppressed, foresters say, but only at the cost of more powerful fires when it re-emerges."

Today, there is no dispute among experts that fire is an essential part of many ecosystems, including most of the natural communities of Chicago Wilderness. But that fact is hardly common knowledge, neither to the average person nor to the average news writer.

In the case of one fire, that at Los Alamos, the trouble was actually caused by a botched prescribed burn. One immediate concern that needs to be dispelled is the fear that what happened out West might happen here. It can’t and won’t — for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, we have different ecosystems. Out West are conifer forests and desert chaparral. These systems burn catastrophically and unavoidably, on relatively regular and long cycles — often as long as 50 to 100 years between burns. Thus, most of the areas burning in this hot, dry summer won’t burn again for 50 or 100 years or more.

Here, our ecosystems are deciduous oak woods, prairie, and various wetlands. Fires in these ecosystems are naturally more frequent — and of much lower intensity. When set by trained burn crews according to strict guidelines that put a primary emphasis on safety to people and adjacent property, our prescribed burns are demonstrably less dangerous than driving a car.

Even when set by errant teenagers, most creeping woodland ground fires are harmless to people (and good for the ecosystem). They go out by themselves or are quickly extinguished by local fire departments. Of course the kids may not pay attention to who’s downwind, and not one wants to breathe smoke. But the point is, this is not the West. We have neither the vast acreages, the explosive fuels nor the levels of drought that are present in the region of fire disasters.

"Unquestionably we should learn from the experiences out West," says Jim Anderson, natural resource manager for the Lake County Forest Preserves and co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness burn task force. "One lesson is that if you suppress fire, you have more of a problem than if you manage it wisely. We have a 30-year record in the region of land management agencies conducting controlled burns without a significant problem."

Anderson points out that training of personnel and precautions taken on the day of and during a prescribed burn are critical. "Last fall we were actually burning in conditions that were extremely dry for us, so we burned in smaller units and had more people out on burn crews."

According to Anderson, the burn crews worry most about smoke management. "If the wind shifts and smoke blows across a highway stopping traffic and people are late to work," he says, "that’s a disaster for us."

All burning by agencies in Illinois is done under a permit from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency as well as required local permits and is conducted according to a burn plan for the site that includes an acceptable range of parameters for wind speed and direction, humidity and temperature. If the wind is blowing the wrong direction, no burn occurs. (See "The Burn That Wasn't," Working the Wilderness, Fall 1999.)

Why burn at all in an urban environment? Because our native ecosystems were shaped by fire and require periodic burns to remain healthy. "One of our concerns with our oak woods is that they’re undergoing succession to woods dominated by sugar maple," says Roger Anderson, Distinguished Professor of Plant Ecology at Illinois State University. "The absence of fire has allowed this to happen. Now the oaks can’t reproduce and we’re losing a whole suite of insects and birds and butterflies that depend on oaks. Without periodic fires, we are losing biodiversity."

People sometimes worry about the effect of burns on air quality. But prescribed burns in this region are rarely conducted in the summer, when ozone action days occur, but rather in the fall and spring. "It’s not like a factory that sits there 365 days a year that puts pollutants into the air," says Roger Anderson. "And if you burn the prairies and woods often, you’re stimulating growth that takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than you’re putting in. We know this from studies."

Prescribed burn guidelines also promote burning on days that smoke will quickly rise and dissipate rather than hang or blow at ground level.

Chicago Wilderness has recently embarked on a major effort to develop a set of burn guidelines and a protocol for burn training that is specific to this region. "The basic burn training provided by the U.S. Forest Service is built on fire suppression, not on prescription burning," says Jim Anderson. "And it’s geared toward Western ecosystems. So we’re developing training that will incorporate some of the excellent Forest Service procedures while focussing on the particulars we deal with here: our fuel types, smoke management, fire department response, and burning in an urban environment. We’re calling it the Midwest Ecological Prescription Burn Training Program and it will be available to all land management agencies and volunteers."

We of Chicago Wilderness have two major tasks. One is continuing to do fire well — that is, safely and successfully. The other is to do a much better job of educating the public.