Current fire use (controlled burns and WFU)can still have catastrophic effects if human and resource objectives are not well established. I hope we do not think that just letting summer fires go will generate positive results. They may, and they may not.

Effective planning, through community involvement and an interagency approach to landscape scale fire and fuels management can be helpful. Increasing the fire on the ground during the milder times of year still has not been fully adopted by our western practitioners. This year when California was hot and heavy how many other places were missing burn windows? Our emergency is in the areas we can affect now, change and improve now. Once they are involved in a conflagration, how much effort and energy should we be deploying? Of course we need to protect life and property. But in these fires that our new generation of firefighters are experiencing, we need to evacuate the locals and back off, create a good plan and implement it. We need to stop trying to muscle these big fires and deplete the rest of the nations’ resources. Every year, there will be some hot and dry place that will suck up our resources and the places we could be getting a handle on will be pushed to back burner until it’s number is called and it is burning uncontrollably with catastrophic effects.

Looking forward to working with all of you out there. Questions to ask yourself: what is the historic role of fire in this landscape? What are our values at risk? What kind of fire do we need to restore this landscape? Can fire alone do the work? What are impacts on the local economy? What are the barriers that effect the federal managed lands? How can we collaborate to help improve and restore our natural lands and the fire that maintains them?