It’s that time again, the season of smoky skies that seems to start earlier — and last longer — each passing year.
By some luck of topography and weather patterns, we’ve often been fortunate enough here in northwest Washington to avoid the worst of the air quality impacts from fires in British Columbia and the Western states. But as we’ve increasingly experienced over the last decade, there’s really nowhere left untouched by the hazy veil of wildfire season anymore.
In addition to the tragic loss of life, property, and livelihood from fires themselves, wildfire smoke travels far beyond the burn area. It’s more than just a nuisance. Particulate pollution from smoke is right-sized to wreak havoc on our airways, especially for those at higher risk of respiratory impacts, including children and older people, as well as unhoused neighbors and outdoor laborers like farmworkers, who are exposed to harmful levels of air pollution for extended periods of time.
You’ll find no shortage of press coverage on the impacts of climate change on wildfire across the globe. Scientists agree that climate change fosters the kind of weather conditions that are likely to increase the frequency, intensity, and severity of fire events beyond what our landscapes have adapted to. But climate change alone isn’t to blame for this new fire paradigm. It acts more like a magnifying glass, compounding the effects of the last century of management decisions across our landscapes. In particular, heavy industrial logging and blanket wildfire suppression policies have left our forests denser, drier, and more uniform in age and species. Unfortunately, these elements combine to undermine a forest’s resilience to wildfire and other climate impacts like drought, flooding, pests, and disease.
Thankfully, if we look back far enough, we already know what we can do to help our forests rebuild resilience while we continue our efforts to combat climate change. Fire is, and has been, a natural shaping force across our landscapes from the beginning, and Indigenous people have been in relationship with fire since time immemorial — including here in Western Washington. In addition to cultural burning, Indigenous land stewards used a number of other techniques to encourage forest diversity of all types across a thoughtfully managed mosaic of forest habitats.
This fundamentally Indigenous approach to viewing forests as complex, interconnected systems has been brought back into the spotlight as land managers grapple with the legacy impacts of the 20th century. University of Washington-based forest ecologist Dr. Jerry Franklin, affectionately called the “father of new forestry,” champions a set of contemporary practices known as Ecological Forest Management (EFM). This “toolkit” harnesses conventional logging practices, traditional knowledge, and human creativity to mimic the natural disturbances in forests that promote species, age, and structural diversity. Over time, this can help to expedite a forest’s trajectory back toward a more resilient state — one that is layered, diverse, and well-established enough to weather a climate-changed fire regime.
RE Sources sees opportunities for public, Tribal, and private land managers to lead the way on making these changes, but we need support and investment from decision makers to make them feasible. For the last five years, RE Sources has collaborated with our local coalition of forest advocates to engage the community in dozens of hikes, educational events, and advocacy actions aimed at demonstrating the broad support for EFM in the Mount Baker foothills and beyond — and local leaders are listening!
County and City decision makers have affirmed the value of ecological forest management with a few significant actions that RE Sources has vocally supported, including:
- Investing in Stewart Mountain Community Forest, a public forest that will be managed with EFM for multiple benefits
- Jointly developing the EFM-driven Lake Whatcom Forest Management Plan, which will steward more than 12,000 acres in Bellingham’s drinking watershed to enhance forest health and improve wildfire resilience
- Developing a Whatcom County Forest Resilience Plan, which emphasizes the need for landscape-level coordination to restore forest health
Practicing EFM at scale opens the door to more than fire-resilient forests alone. It offers the opportunity to address the ways in which the status quo of forest management is particularly failing rural and Tribal communities, who are at the frontlines of both the economic and climate change crises.