To Protect Forests, I Learned to Burn Them

It took a decade of fighting fires to learn the opposite lesson: the best way to protect a forest is to set it on fire. In Washington, where dense stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine have grown thick after a century of suppression, the instinct to douse every flame has left the landscape primed for catastrophe. The forests we saved from small fires are now the ones most likely to burn in the big ones.

From suppression to stewardship

The shift is more than a change in tactics; it is a change in worldview. State agencies, conservation groups, and tribal nations are converging on a practice that Indigenous peoples have used for generations: low-intensity, intentional burning that clears underbrush, returns nutrients to the soil, and opens the canopy to sunlight. What was once dismissed as dangerous is now recognized as essential maintenance for a living ecosystem.

The hard part is not the science but the politics. Smoke from prescribed burns drifts into towns, and neighbors who have spent years fearing fire are asked to accept it as a seasonal fact of life. Land managers must thread a narrow needle of weather, wind, and moisture, and every burn carries the weight of liability. Building public trust takes longer than any single burn season.

Yet the alternative is not peace; it is deferral. Every year we decline to burn deliberately, we accept a larger, angrier fire later. Learning to burn is not a surrender to the flames but a negotiation with them — a recognition that protection, done right, sometimes means lighting the match ourselves.