Image: American Forest Resources Council

By Frank Carroll | August 1, 2026

Nine days ago, lightning struck a stand of Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine on the Barlow Ranger District of the Mt. Hood National Forest, a few miles west of Rock Creek Reservoir. By the time you read this, the Grasshopper Fire had burned more than 23,000 acres, forced Level 3 “Go Now” evacuations across Wasco County — Sportsman Park, Pine Hollow, Wamic — and drawn a federal emergency declaration. It is still burning, largely uncontained, through the hottest weeks of an Oregon summer.

It is burning through ground the U.S. Forest Service identified, years ago, as exactly the kind of overgrown, fire-prone stand that needed to be thinned. It is burning through the Grasshopper Restoration Project — the same 5,000-plus acres that Oregon Wild sued to stop in 2023, and that the Forest Service, after a settlement extracted under threat of prolonged litigation, agreed to log more narrowly, more slowly, and on a smaller footprint than originally planned. The fire does not know the difference between an old-growth stand set aside to satisfy a lawsuit and one still awaiting a saw. It has taken all of it.

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What the Project Was Supposed to Do

The Grasshopper Project sat in a transition zone along the Cascade Crest, directly south of the Badger Creek Wilderness — exactly the kind of dry, fire-adapted forest where forty years absent meaningful forest management has left more trees per acre than the land can support. The Forest Service’s stated purpose was unremarkable and, frankly, statutory: reduce the risk of high-intensity, uncharacteristic wildfire; restore stand diversity; improve habitat conditions for wildlife and fish; and produce timber and forest products as one outcome of doing the work. It combined mechanical thinning with prescribed fire — the same combination that federal and university fire science has favored for decades as the best available tool for moving overstocked forests toward something that survives a fire instead of feeding one.

In June 2023, Oregon Wild sued the Forest Service in U.S. District Court for Oregon (No. 3:23-cv-00935), represented by its staff attorney John Persell and by Meriel Darzen of the Crag Law Center. The complaint argued the agency should have prepared a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than a lighter-weight environmental assessment, that it had not adequately analyzed cumulative carbon impacts, and that it relied on a stale 2020 biological opinion for the northern spotted owl. None of these claims asserted the thinning itself was unsafe or unlawful on the merits — they were procedural. The case never reached a verdict. It was settled in January 2025: the Forest Service agreed to diameter limits, protection of cedar and yew, and the outright removal of two old-growth units, with logging scaled back in four more. Oregon Wild collected its attorneys’ fees — reported at more than $50,000 — under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

Eighteen months later, lightning did what the settlement negotiators never had to plan for.

Conservation by Catastrophe

Every value this lawsuit claimed to protect — the old growth, the owl habitat, the carbon, the riparian buffers, the recreation corridors — has now been consumed more completely, more permanently, and more violently than any thinning project would ever have touched it.

This is the part that the environmental litigation industry never has to answer for, because it is never forced to. Sue to stop a project, win a delay or a settlement, declare victory for “old growth” and “habitat,” and walk away before anyone checks back in five, ten, or eighteen months later to see what actually happened to the trees, the owls, and the carbon that were supposedly being saved. What happened here is what happens with grim regularity across the West: the forest that was too precious to thin was not too precious to burn to the ground.

A thinning project removes a portion of the smaller, more flammable trees and ladder fuels, leaving the biggest, oldest, most fire-resistant trees standing, with a canopy that survives and shade that keeps the understory cooler and moister. A crown fire in an unthinned stand does the opposite: it kills everything, including the biggest and oldest trees the litigation was filed to protect, and it does so at a scale and severity that no logging unit ever approached. Spotted owl nesting-roosting habitat does not survive a stand-replacing fire; it is not protected by leaving the stand untouched, it is erased. Carbon that was “sequestered” in standing timber is not stored by refusing to manage the forest — it goes into the atmosphere anyway, in a single violent pulse, along with the soil carbon and the understory that would have persisted through a controlled treatment. There is no version of this outcome that leaves the plaintiffs’ stated goals better off than they would have been under the project they sued to stop.

And here is the part that should trouble every honest person on either side of this argument: we will never know, in this case, whether the treatment would have held the line, because it was never allowed to be finished and tested against reality. That is the recurring, structural flaw in this style of litigation. It does not lose gracefully and let the results speak. It delays, narrows, and settles just enough to claim a win, and then it is nowhere to be found when the hypothesis it forced onto the landscape — that an unmanaged forest left alone is safer than a managed one — gets tested by lightning and August heat instead of by data.

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The Machine That Pays for It

None of this happens for free, and none of it is paid for by the people who file the lawsuits. The Equal Access to Justice Act was written in 1980 to help ordinary citizens challenge government overreach without being bankrupted by legal fees. It has become, in practice, a subsidy for a small number of well-funded advocacy organizations that file and refile against the same agency, over the same category of project, year after year, collecting attorneys’ fees from the U.S. Treasury whether or not the underlying management decision was ever shown to be wrong. Oregon Wild’s fee award in the Grasshopper settlement is a rounding error in the scheme of things — tens of thousands of dollars — but it is fees the Forest Service and the taxpayers who fund it pay regardless of the outcome on the ground, while the individuals, small operators, and rural counties who might want to challenge the other direction face net-worth caps and standing hurdles the nonprofits do not.

The plaintiffs in these cases have no skin in the game. They do not post a bond against the risk that their injunction turns out to be wrong — courts routinely find, as one did just this year in a related Oregon Wild case over the 42 Divide Project, that requiring a bond would be a “significant hardship” for the nonprofit. They do not lose their jobs when a mill can’t get logs, they do not lose their homes to evacuation orders, and they do not send crews to the fire line. When the forest burns instead, there is no clawback, no penalty, and, so far, no accountability at all.

An Open Letter to the People Who Filed This Suit

This is addressed, plainly, to the four people whose names are on the public record for the Grasshopper litigation: John Persell, staff attorney for Oregon Wild; Meriel Darzen, senior attorney at the Crag Law Center; Quinn Read, Executive Director of Oregon Wild; and Courtney Johnson, Executive Director of the Crag Law Center.

Mr. Persell, Ms. Darzen, Ms. Read, and Ms. Johnson:

When your organizations announced the settlement of this case in January 2025, Mr. Persell said it would ensure “forest health, wildlife habitat, and climate resilience are not shortchanged,” and that scaling back the logging meant “long-term ecological benefits are now prioritized over short-term extraction.” Ms. Darzen called it “an important achievement for Mt. Hood National Forest that will benefit the community and the forest.” We would ask you, honestly and without rhetorical flourish, to go stand on Rocky Butte today and repeat those sentences. Tell the people of Wamic and Pine Hollow, who packed their cars under a Level 3 evacuation order, which “long-term ecological benefits” survived. Tell us where the old growth you fought to save is standing today, and where the northern spotted owl habitat you cited the Endangered Species Act to protect can now be found. It burned. All of it. More completely than any timber sale on the docket would have touched it.

We do not claim your lawsuit is the only cause of the Grasshopper Fire — lightning struck, and it struck during a stretch of extreme heat and wind that would have tested any stand. But you do not get to claim no part in it, either. You chose to challenge a project built for exactly this scenario. You chose delay and a narrower scope over letting the treatment proceed and be measured against results. You were paid for that choice by the taxpayers whose forest is now ash. That is not a technicality; it is the entire substance of what happened here.

So we are asking you directly: will you walk the burn scar with the district rangers who have to plan the recovery? Will your organizations put money and volunteer hours into the reforestation, erosion control, and brush suppression this landscape will need for the next generation, the same way you put money and staff time into stopping the work that might have prevented some of this? Will you commit, publicly, to letting a comparable project run its full course next time, rather than settling for a scaled-back version you can call a win before anyone checks the outcome? If your science is genuinely as uncertain as courts have found it to be, then the honest response is not reflexive litigation — it is humility, and a willingness to let a well-designed project actually be tried and evaluated. We would welcome you proving us wrong. So far, the pattern is that we don’t get the chance to find out, because your lawsuits stop the experiment before it runs.

What Real Accountability Would Look Like

Congress has three live vehicles that would begin to fix the incentives that produced this outcome, and all three deserve support from anyone who wants working forests instead of ash fields:

The Fix Our Forests Act (H.R. 471 / S. 1462, 119th Congress) would speed environmental review for hazardous-fuels and forest-health projects in high-risk “fireshed” areas and create a joint Forest Service–USGS Fireshed Center to prioritize the ground most at risk — ground like the Grasshopper project area. It passed the House in January 2025 and, as of mid-2026, is still awaiting a Senate floor vote.

The FEES Act (introduced by Reps. Tom Tiffany and Harriet Hageman) would cap Equal Access to Justice Act awards at $200,000 per case, limit any one group to three fee-generating cases per year, and require judges to reduce or deny fee awards where a litigant’s conduct was dilatory or oppressive.

The Stop Serial Litigation Act of 2026 (H.R. 9295, Rep. Mike Rulli) targets the small set of repeat filers who generate the bulk of EAJA payouts in natural-resources cases, while preserving the Act’s original purpose of helping individual citizens challenge government overreach.

None of these bills bans citizen suits or environmental review. They simply ask that the groups filing case after case bear some proportionate relationship between how much they can collect and how often they refile, and that courts weigh the real-world cost of delay — which this fire has now made impossible to ignore — as seriously as they weigh the procedural claims in the complaint.

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Make Your Voice Heard

If you want to write, call, or visit the organizations that litigated this project, their public offices are listed below. If you want to press for legislative reform, contact your U.S. Senators and Representative and ask them to support the Fix Our Forests Act, the FEES Act, and the Stop Serial Litigation Act.

Oregon Wild

5825 N. Greeley Ave., Portland, OR 97217 • (503) 283-6343 • info@oregonwild.org

Executive Director: Quinn Read • Staff Attorney: John Persell (jp@oregonwild.org)

Crag Law Center

3141 E. Burnside St., Portland, OR 97214 • (503) 525-2724

Executive Director: Courtney Johnson • Senior Attorney: Meriel Darzen (meriel@crag.org)

If you write, be direct but be accurate — hold the argument to the facts of what happened here, not to assumptions about motive. That is the only kind of pressure that actually changes how an organization operates.

For the Record

Fairness requires a few caveats this piece should not skip past. The Grasshopper Fire was ignited by lightning during a period of extreme heat and wind, not by the absence of a timber sale alone — fire behavior is driven by weather and terrain as much as by fuel load, and a federal judge reviewing a similar Oregon Wild challenge to the 42 Divide Project this year found it “far from clear” that delaying logging materially increases fire risk, noting that risk can often be mitigated through post-harvest fuels treatment rather than logging itself. It is also true that this same network of groups — Oregon Wild, Bark, and others — won on the merits before the Ninth Circuit in an earlier Mt. Hood case, Bark v. U.S. Forest Service, where the court found the agency’s own environmental review legally inadequate. Their litigation record is not uniformly meritless, and reasonable people, including federal judges, continue to disagree about how much a given thinning project would have changed a given fire’s outcome. What is not in dispute is that the Grasshopper Project, as originally designed, will never be tested against this fire, because it was never completed — and that is the argument this piece is making: when litigation forecloses the test, we are left arguing over a hypothesis instead of a result, while the forest itself pays the price of the delay.

“…the current legal architecture leaves those officials making high-consequence, low-accountability decisions, and leaves the landowners in a fire’s path with little more than the hope that their fire becomes prominent enough, and politically visible enough, that Congress decides to act.”

FRANK ON FIRE: With Joe Reddan and the NWA Officers and Board

July 29, 2026

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This paper examines a narrow but consequential legal question. When Congress created the Forest Service, through the Organic Administration Act of 1897, the agency was to manage federal reserved lands for enumerated purposes: outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes. Every founding statute that mentions fire at all treats fire as a hazard to be prevented and suppressed. None of them authorizes an agency official to intentionally allow a wildfire to burn, to expand a wildfire’s perimeter through deliberate ignition, or to use a naturally ignited fire as a management tool to accomplish ecological objectives.

Since the mid-1990s, and with a significant policy shift formalized in 2009, encouraged by the Federal Land Assistance Management Enhancement (FLAME) Act (P. L. 111-88,) which in Sec. 503 required a national cohesive wildfire management strategy, the Forest Service, the Park Service, and other federal fire agencies have nonetheless developed and implemented a body of interagency policy, agency manuals, and field directives that do exactly this. That body of doctrine, generally referred to as wildland fire use, fire managed for resource benefit, or (in current terminology) a range of strategic responses selected through the Wildland Fire Decision Support System, rests entirely on administrative interpretation of broad, general statutory language, primarily the multiple use language of the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the conservation mandate of the National Park Service Organic Act, and the untrammeled and natural conditions language of the Wilderness Act. None of these provisions was written with wildfire management in mind, none has been the subject of a court decision holding that it affirmatively authorizes intentional fire use, and none of the interagency policy documents that operationalize the practice, the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, the 2001 Review and Update, and the 2009 Guidance for Implementation, was never subjected to notice and comment rulemaking or published as a binding regulation. They are internal executive branch policy statements.

At the same time, when a federal fire management decision, whether an escaped prescribed burn or a wildfire deliberately managed to expand for resource benefit, damages private or other public property, the ordinary avenues of legal recourse are effectively closed. The Federal Tort Claims Act’s discretionary function exception, codified at 28 U.S.C. section 2680(a), has been applied consistently and without meaningful exception to shield federal wildfire response decisions from suit, including decisions to monitor or manage a fire for its potential resource benefits rather than fully suppress it. The Tucker Act’s takings remedy is theoretically available after the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Arkansas Game and Fish Commission v. United States, but the causation standard applied by the Court of Federal Claims and the Federal Circuit makes recovery exceedingly difficult, as the government’s 2025 victory in McDonough v. United States demonstrates. In the two instances in the last twenty-five years where federal prescribed fire operations caused catastrophic, widely publicized damage, the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 and the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of 2022, Congress did not rely on the Federal Tort Claims Act or the Tucker Act at all. It enacted standalone, no-fault compensation statutes administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That pattern is itself strong evidence that the ordinary remedies do not work.

This paper traces that legal architecture from the Organic Act of 1897 forward: the organic purposes of the agencies, the appropriations that fund fire management, the administrative invention of wildfire use policy since 2010, the doctrinal barriers to accountability, the two instances of special congressional compensation, and a case study of the Black Fire in the Gila National Forest in 2022. It also addresses the fiscal law questions surrounding the use of suppression appropriations for firing and burnout operations and the funding of post-fire rehabilitation. Where the public record does not support a factual premise, this paper says so directly rather than assuming it.

II. THE ORGANIC PURPOSES OF THE FEDERAL LAND MANAGEMENT AGENCIES

A. The Forest Service

The Organic Administration Act of 1897, codified in relevant part at 16 U.S.C. sections 473 through 478 and 551, established the legal purposes of the national forests. Section 475 states that forest reserves may be established “to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber.” Section 551 authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to make rules and regulations to “make provisions for the protection against destruction by fire and depredations” on the national forests. The only fire-related language in the founding statute of the Forest Service casts fire as destruction to be prevented, not as a tool to be deployed.

The Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, codified at 16 U.S.C. sections 528 through 531, directs that the national forests be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes, on a multiple use and sustained yield basis, “supplemental to, but not in derogation of” the purposes of the 1897 Act. The statute contains no reference to fire management of any kind.

The National Forest Management Act of 1976 amended the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974, codified at 16 U.S.C. § 1600 et seq., to require comprehensive, interdisciplinary land and resource management plans. Its only reference to fire, at 16 U.S.C. section 1604(g)(3)(E)(iii), authorizes salvage and sanitation harvesting of timber “substantially damaged by fire, windthrow or other catastrophe,” treating fire once again as a damaging event that triggers a subsequent management response, not as an affirmative management tool in itself. The National Forest Management Act is fundamentally a planning and procedural statute. It does not mention prescribed fire, wildland fire use, or resource benefit fire anywhere in its text.

B. The National Park Service

The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, now codified at 54 U.S.C. section 100101(a), directs the Park Service to “conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife” within the parks “and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The Act does not mention fire in any form. The dual conservation and enjoyment mandate has been read by internal Park Service policy, not by the statute itself, as supporting the continuation of natural fire processes where consistent with resource objectives. That is an agency interpretation layered atop statutory silence. It is not an express delegation of authority to intentionally allow or expand fire.

C. The Bureau of Land Management

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, codified in relevant part at 43 U.S.C. section 315, states its purpose as preserving public rangelands “from destruction or unnecessary injury” and providing for their orderly use and improvement. It contains no fire authorization language. In 1947, the United States Grazing Service and the General Land Office were administratively combined to form the Bureau of Land Management.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, codified at 43 U.S.C. section 1701 and following, is the Bureau of Land Management’s organic act. Section 1701(a) declares a policy of managing public lands on a multiple-use and sustained-yield basis while protecting scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, and other values. Section 1702(c) defines multiple use as a combination of resource uses without permanent impairment of land productivity. The original 1976 text contains no fire provision. A later amendment, codified at 43 U.S.C. section 1748b, directs a joint Forest Service and Department of the Interior cohesive wildfire management strategy report. That is a planning and coordination requirement. It does not authorize any agency official to intentionally allow or expand a wildfire.

D. The Wilderness Act

The Wilderness Act of 1964, codified at 16 U.S.C. section 1131, defines wilderness as an area “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man” and land that has been “protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.” This language, particularly the words “untrammeled” and “natural conditions,” is the textual hook most frequently cited by agency fire managers to justify allowing natural ignitions to burn in wilderness areas, on the theory that total fire suppression is itself an unnatural human intervention in a fire-dependent ecosystem. The Act does not mention fire specifically anywhere in its text, and no court has held that section 1131 affirmatively authorizes federal officials to intentionally ignite, allow to expand, or otherwise use fire as a management tool. Litigation under the Wilderness Act involving fire has instead concerned whether particular suppression tactics, such as mechanized equipment, chainsaws, or temporary roads, violate the Act’s prohibitions on mechanical transport and structures in section 1133(c). The untrammeled and natural conditions language is definitional. It describes a management goal. It is not an operative grant of authority to burn.

E. Summary

Reviewing the full body of organic legislation governing the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, every statutory reference to fire is protective or suppressive in character. The word fire appears in these statutes only in the context of preventing destruction by fire, addressing damage after a fire, or defining a natural condition in the abstract. No organic statute contains language that can fairly be read as an affirmative congressional authorization for a federal official to intentionally allow a wildfire to burn, to expand a wildfire’s perimeter, or to use fire as a tool to accomplish resource objectives.

III. CONGRESSIONAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR FIRE MANAGEMENT

Congress funds wildland fire management through the annual Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which divides the Wildland Fire Management appropriation into several distinct program activities: Preparedness, Suppression Operations, Hazardous Fuels Management, Burned Area Rehabilitation, and, since 2018, a dedicated Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund. Each activity is described in agency budget justification documents as serving a specific purpose. Suppression Operations funds active response to wildfires. Hazardous Fuels Management funds prescribed burning and mechanical fuel reduction conducted before a fire occurs, under an approved burn plan. Burned Area Rehabilitation funds post-fire watershed and land stabilization work.

For decades, when suppression costs exceeded appropriated amounts within a fiscal year, agencies transferred funds from unrelated accounts, such as recreation, research, and land acquisition programs, to cover the shortfall, a practice widely known as fire borrowing. The Government Accountability Office documented the resulting project cancellations and delays in a 2004 report, GAO-04-612.

Congress first attempted a structural fix in the FLAME Act of 2009, enacted as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act, Public Law 111-88. The FLAME Act created a reserve fund, the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Fund, dedicated to emergency wildfire suppression costs on Department of the Interior and Forest Service lands. Its purpose, as stated in the statute, is exclusively to fund suppression of large or emergency fires. It does not authorize the use or expansion of a wildfire for ecological objectives. It funds putting fires out.

A more comprehensive fix arrived with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Division O, titled the Wildfire Suppression Funding and Forest Management Activities Act, Public Law 115-141. This statute amended the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to create a disaster-style budget cap adjustment for wildfire suppression, effective beginning in fiscal year 2020, and to provide additional budget authority starting at 2.25 billion dollars and rising to 2.95 billion dollars by fiscal year 2027. The purpose of this legislation, as reflected in its text and legislative history, was to end fire borrowing by giving agencies access to suppression funding comparable to how Congress funds other natural disasters. It also included forest management provisions expediting certain hazardous fuels and insect and disease treatment projects. It contains no provision authorizing the intentional expansion of a wildfire for resource benefit.

None of the appropriations statutes reviewed for this paper, including the FLAME Act and the 2018 funding fix, contains language authorizing wildfire use for resource benefit. Every one of them is framed, and funded, around the objective of suppression. Within current agency practice, however, funds appropriated for Suppression Operations and the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund are not segregated by management strategy. Whether a fire is fought under a full suppression strategy, a confine and contain strategy, a point protection strategy, or a monitoring strategy that allows the fire to spread while achieving resource objectives, the costs of that response, including any firing or burnout operations conducted as part of it, are drawn from the same Suppression Operations and Reserve Fund accounts. There is no separate appropriation line item and no statutory definition distinguishing costs incurred to put out a fire from costs incurred to manage a fire for ecological benefit while it continues to burn.

IV. THE ADMINISTRATIVE INVENTION OF WILDLAND FIRE USE, POLICY WITHOUT STATUTE

A. The 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy

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Following the severe fire fatalities and losses of 1994, the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior chartered an interagency Fire Management Policy Review, which produced the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review, Final Report, dated December 18, 1995. The draft policy was published in the Federal Register as a notice, 60 Fed. Reg. 32,469, June 22, 1995, seeking public comment, not as a proposed rule under the notice-and-comment procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act. The final 1995 policy, for the first time, formally authorized what it called prescribed natural fire, later termed wildland fire use, permitting naturally ignited fires to burn under an approved fire management plan to achieve resource objectives. The document itself states that it is an umbrella interagency policy that does not replace agency-specific policies, and it cites no specific statute as the source of its authority. It was never codified in the Code of Federal Regulations.

B. The 2001 Review and Update

After the May 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, discussed in detail in Section VII below, the Secretaries commissioned a review that produced the Review and Update of the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, dated January 2001. This document is described by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture as the primary interagency wildland fire policy still in force today. It carried forward the 1995 principles, tightened procedures for prescribed fire escapes, and reaffirmed wildland fire use as a management category distinct from suppression. It too is an interagency policy statement, not a regulation, implemented operationally through the Interagency Strategy for the Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, dated June 20, 2003, and issued under the authority of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, an interagency coordinating body with no independent statutory basis.

C. The 2009 Guidance for Implementation

This is the document most directly responsible for the current legal landscape. In 2008 the Wildland Fire Leadership Council directed field testing of new operational rules, and on February 13, 2009, the Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy was approved and signed, not by the Secretaries of Agriculture or the Interior, but by the interagency Fire Executive Council, composed of fire and aviation directors from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The 2009 Guidance eliminated the prior rule that a wildland fire could be managed for only one objective at a time. The 2004 operational rule it replaced had stated plainly that “a wildland fire cannot be managed for both objectives concurrently.” The 2009 Guidance replaced that rule with the opposite instruction: “A wildland fire may be concurrently managed for one or more objectives and objectives can change as the fire spreads across the landscape.” The separate designation “Wildland Fire Use” was retired, and all wildfire response decisions were folded into a single framework evaluated through the Wildland Fire Decision Support System, a computer-based analytical tool used by agency administrators to select and document a strategic response. It is this 2009 change, an internal interagency executive directive signed by fire program managers rather than the Secretaries, let alone Congress, that created the administrative and operational basis for a single wildfire to be simultaneously fought in one location and allowed, or actively helped, to expand in another, in pursuit of stated ecological objectives.

D. Agency Manuals

The Forest Service Manual, chapter 5130, on wildfire response, states policy that a wildland fire may be concurrently managed for one or more objectives, language mirroring the 2009 Guidance, and permits managing natural ignitions toward land and resource management plan objectives when risk is judged to be within acceptable limits. The specific statutory citations found within the Forest Service Manual’s fire chapters are narrow and procedural, referencing 36 C.F.R. section 211.5, which governs emergency fire assistance, and 42 U.S.C. section 1856b, which governs reciprocal fire protection agreements between agencies. Neither provision authorizes intentional wildfire expansion. Every page of the Forest Service Manual carries the standard disclaimer that guidance documents lack the force and effect of law unless expressly authorized by statute.

The National Park Service implements comparable direction through Reference Manual 18 and Director’s Order 18, issued under the Service’s Management Policies 2006, citing no independent statutory authority beyond the general conservation mandate of the 1916 Organic Act.

E. Rulemaking Status

None of the 1995, 2001, or 2009 policy documents underwent notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. section 553. Only the 1995 draft received any Federal Register publication, and that publication was a notice soliciting comment on a policy report, not a proposed rule. None of the three documents was ever codified in the Code of Federal Regulations. They are, in the technical and legal sense, internal executive branch policy statements, not law.

F. The One Place Congress Did Legislate, and What It Did Not Cover

Congress has enacted one statutory provision touching directly on fire ignited by federal officials: 16 U.S.C. section 551c-1, which restricts the Forest Service from conducting prescribed burns, meaning planned, deliberately ignited fires under an approved burn plan, on days of extreme fire danger, and requires annual reporting to Congress on prescribed fire activity. This provision implicitly acknowledges that the Forest Service conducts planned prescribed burns, and it regulates the conditions under which that planned activity may occur. It says nothing about unplanned, naturally ignited wildfires that agency officials choose to allow to continue burning, or to expand through firing operations, in pursuit of resource objectives. Congress has narrowly legislated on the planned ignition side of fire management. It has not legislated on the unplanned wildfire use side at all.

G. Conclusion

No act of Congress authorizes a federal official to intentionally allow a naturally ignited wildfire to continue burning, or to expand a wildfire’s perimeter through deliberate firing operations, in order to accomplish ecological or resource management objectives. That practice rests entirely on a chain of interagency executive policy documents beginning in 1995, restructured in 2009 by a body below Cabinet level, interpreting broad and general statutory language, principally the multiple use provisions of the 1960 and 1976 organic acts and the untrammeled and natural conditions language of the Wilderness Act, none of which mentions fire management as such. As reflected in Government Accountability Office reports and Congressional Research Service products that describe federal fire policy as a patchwork of legislation and agency guidance, the practice of wildfire use rests on executive discretion rather than express congressional delegation.

V. ACCOUNTABILITY: THE DISCRETIONARY FUNCTION EXCEPTION

The Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. sections 1346(b) and 2671 through 2680, waives the sovereign immunity of the United States for torts committed by federal employees acting within the scope of their employment, under circumstances where a private person would be liable under the law of the place where the act occurred. Section 2680(a), the discretionary function exception, withdraws that waiver for any claim “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved be abused.” That final clause is the operative barrier for landowners harmed by federal fire decisions. It applies even where the agency’s exercise of discretion was, in the plaintiff’s view, wrong, careless, or unreasonable.

The Supreme Court set out the governing two-part test in Berkovitz v. United States, 486 U.S. 531 (1988), and United States v. Gaubert, 499 U.S. 315 (1991). First, the conduct at issue must involve an element of judgment or choice. If a federal statute, regulation, or internal policy specifically prescribes a mandatory course of action, leaving the official no discretion to deviate, the exception does not apply. Second, if choice exists, the exception protects only judgment grounded in social, economic, or political policy considerations, even if the official did not consciously weigh those considerations in the moment, so long as the decision is of a type that policy analysis would inform.

Applied to wildfire management, federal courts have consistently held that decisions about how to respond to a wildfire, including decisions to monitor a fire, to allow it to continue burning, or to manage it for potential ecological benefit rather than fully suppress it, are discretionary policy judgments protected by section 2680(a). The most directly relevant recent decision is Strawberry Water Users Association v. United States, decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on July 30, 2024. In that case, the Forest Service initially chose to monitor and contain, rather than fully suppress, the 2018 Bald Mountain and Pole Creek Fires in Utah, reasoning that limited fire could benefit forest health. Unexpected high winds caused the fires to escape that strategy, and the resulting fires burned approximately 100,000 acres, including private land. The District of Utah dismissed the resulting suit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed, holding that the incident commander’s decision, balancing firefighter safety, risk to private property, and potential resource benefits, was precisely the kind of policy judgment the discretionary function exception was designed to shield, even though the agency was aware of the risk of expansion and even though the fire ultimately damaged private property.

A comparable result was reached in Miller v. United States, 163 F.3d 591 (9th Cir. 1998), involving a fire on the Ochoco National Forest in Oregon that spread onto private land, where the Ninth Circuit held that the Forest Service’s choices about attack method, balancing cost, safety, and resource considerations, reflect exactly the type of economic, social, and political judgment the discretionary function exception protects. District courts applying the same framework, including McDougal v. United States Forest Service, 195 F. Supp. 2d 1229 (D. Or. 2002) have reached similar conclusions in the firefighting-response context.

No case identified in researching this paper has held that a federal official’s decision to deliberately manage or expand a wildfire for resource benefit fell outside the discretionary function exception. The pattern in the reported case law is structural and consistent, not an occasional outcome. Property owners whose land is damaged by a wildfire that federal officials chose to monitor, manage for resource benefit, or expand through firing operations have, as a practical matter, no viable claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act, because the very decision to take that approach is treated as the kind of policy judgment Congress intended to insulate from judicial second guessing when it enacted section 2680(a) in 1946.

VI. THE ILLUSORY TAKINGS REMEDY

The Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. section 1491, gives the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction over claims against the United States founded upon the Constitution, including claims that government action has affected a taking of private property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment. In theory, a landowner whose property is deliberately burned as a result of a federal firing or burnout operation, or as a result of a decision to allow a fire to expand for resource benefit, could bring an inverse condemnation claim rather than a tort claim, since the discretionary function exception applies only to tort claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act and does not bar takings claims under the Tucker Act.

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Arkansas Game and Fish Commission v. United States, 568 U.S. 23 (2012), established that temporary, government-induced flooding is not categorically excluded from takings liability merely because it is not permanent, rejecting a Federal Circuit rule that had required permanence or inevitable recurrence. That decision provides the doctrinal foundation for arguing that a temporary but government-caused invasion of property, including one caused by fire, can in principle support a takings claim.

In practice, however, the causation standard applied by the Federal Circuit makes such claims extremely difficult to win. Under Ridge Line, Inc. v. United States, 346 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2003), and Moden v. United States, 404 F.3d 1335 (Fed. Cir. 2005), a plaintiff must show that the government’s action was intended or was the direct, natural, or probable result of authorized government conduct, not merely an incidental or consequential effect of it, and that it appropriated a benefit to the government or preempted the owner’s use of the property, rather than merely diminishing its value. This test requires the plaintiff to prove that the government’s conduct actually caused the damage, in the sense that the damage would not have occurred absent the government’s intervention.

That causation requirement was tested directly in McDonough v. United States, decided by the Court of Federal Claims following a December 2024 bench trial, with judgment entered September 11, 2025. The plaintiffs, ranch owners near Wolf Creek, Montana, claimed a taking arising from the Forest Service’s intentional backburn and firing operations during the 2017 Alice Creek Fire, in which the agency deliberately burned the plaintiffs’ forage and timber as fuel to protect other structures. Even though the government’s ignition of fire on the plaintiffs’ land was intentional and undisputed, the court held that the plaintiffs still bore the burden of proving that the government’s action, rather than the natural, lightning-caused, drought- and wind-driven fire itself, was the actual cause of the loss. On the facts, the court found that the fire would likely have caused equal or greater damage to the property even without the government’s firing operation, and it ruled for the United States.

McDonough illustrates the structural problem facing landowners in these cases. Federal fire officials operate in an environment of drought, wind, and terrain that would often have caused significant fire damage regardless of any specific agency decision. That reality allows the government to argue, and allows courts to find, that even a deliberate, intentional firing operation did not legally cause the resulting damage, because the same or worse damage was likely to occur naturally in any event. The same emergency conditions- drought, wind, extreme fire behavior- that agencies invoke to justify their operational choices in the first place, including the choice to manage a fire for resource benefit rather than to fully suppress it, become the government’s causation defense when a landowner later seeks compensation. The public is left in the position of confronting a government decision that expanded a fire’s damage without a practical way to prove, under the governing legal standard, that the expansion, rather than the underlying natural conditions, caused its loss.

No case identified in this research has held in a plaintiff’s favor on a taking’s theory arising from intentional wildfire expansion or wildfire use for resource benefit. Arkansas Game and Fish Commission establishes that such a claim is not categorically barred. It does not establish that such a claim can realistically be won.

VII. WHEN STATUTES FAIL: AD HOC CONGRESSIONAL COMPENSATION

In the two instances in the last twenty-five years where a federal fire ignited or managed by federal officials caused catastrophic, widely publicized property damage, Congress did not rely on the Federal Tort Claims Act or the Tucker Act to provide a remedy. It enacted standalone compensation statutes.

A. The Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act of 2000

The Cerro Grande Fire began on May 4, 2000, as a National Park Service prescribed burn at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. It escaped its planned boundaries, burned approximately 47,750 acres, destroyed more than two hundred structures, burned through the Nation’s preeminent nuclear research development and assembly laboratory run by the University of California, Berkeley, and forced the evacuation of the city of Los Alamos. Congress responded with the Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act, Public Law 106-246, Title I, 114 Stat. 584, enacted July 13, 2000, implemented through regulations at 44 C.F.R. Part 295.

The Act created a no-fault, causation-based compensation program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through a dedicated Office of Cerro Grande Fire Claims. A claimant needed to show only that a loss resulted from the fire, not that any federal employee acted negligently, and needed to elect the statutory claims process as an exclusive remedy, after which final compensation released the government and its employees from further liability. Compensable categories included real and personal property loss, business loss, financial loss, personal injury, and reforestation and mitigation costs, categories broader and more forgiving than ordinary tort damages. Congress ultimately appropriated approximately $ 661 million, including approximately $ 455 million for victim and insurer subrogation claims, approximately $ 45 million for administrative costs, and the remainder for related purposes, including watershed remediation and tribal lands. Claimants were required to file a Notice of Loss within two years of the regulations first taking effect, a deadline that expired August 28, 2002, with no statutory mechanism for extension.

B. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act of 2022

The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history began as two separate Forest Service prescribed fire operations: the Las Dispensas prescribed burn, ignited April 6, 2022, and holdover embers from a January 2022 pile burn in Calf Canyon thought to have been extinguished. The two escaped fires merged and ultimately burned more than 341,000 acres. Congress responded with the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act, Division G of Public Law 117-180, 136 Stat. 2114, 2168, enacted September 30, 2022, implemented through regulations at 44 C.F.R. Part 296.

The statute follows the same architecture as the Cerro Grande Act: a no-fault administrative compensation program run through a dedicated FEMA claims office, paying actual compensatory damages upon a showing that the loss resulted from the fire, without any requirement to prove negligence, and expressly excluding punitive damages, interest, and attorney or agent fees. Compensable categories include real property loss and diminution in value, personal property, business loss, financial and investment loss, reforestation and revegetation costs, and risk reduction and mitigation costs, with caps on several of these categories removed by rulemaking in 2023 and 2024. Congress appropriated 2.5 billion dollars in the original 2022 Act, an additional 1.45 billion dollars in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, and a further 1.5 billion dollars in December 2024, for a cumulative total of approximately 5.45 billion dollars, the largest sum Congress has ever appropriated to compensate victims of a single wildfire. The original claims deadline, set for two years after the interim final rule, was extended twice by subsequent legislation, ultimately to March 14, 2025.

C. The Common Pattern

Both statutes share the same core design, and that design is instructive in itself. Rather than amend the Federal Tort Claims Act to remove or narrow the discretionary function exception for prescribed fire operations, and rather than rely on the Tucker Act’s takings remedy, Congress in both instances created an entirely separate, no-fault administrative compensation fund, paid for with new appropriations, and administered outside the courts altogether. Neither statute’s public legislative record contains an explicit floor statement declaring that the Federal Tort Claims Act or the Tucker Act were legally foreclosed. But the structural choice speaks for itself. Prescribed burn planning decisions, weather window judgments, staffing determinations, and burn plan approvals are precisely the kind of policy-laden discretionary decisions that section 2680(a) shields from tort liability, and wildfire-caused property damage is precisely the kind of loss that the Ridge Line and Moden causation standard makes difficult to recover under the Tucker Act. Congress did not test those propositions in either case. It bypassed them entirely, twice, and created a fund instead. A landowner harmed by a comparable fire today, absent a third act of Congress, has no equivalent recourse.

VIII. CASE STUDY: THE BLACK FIRE AND THE GILA AND ALDO LEOPOLD WILDERNESS, 2022

Photo: The 2022 Black Fire IMT and agency administrators lit two huge fires in order to “reintroduce fire to the fire-depleted” Aldo Leopold Wilderness. They started by lighting the interior of the Aldo Leopold with drones and helitorches, then built a counter-fire to the west in the Gila Wilderness so the interior fire would draw the counter-fire in to complete the burn and away from communities like Silver City, NM. What started as a few thousand-acre escaped campfire (cause and origin have not been disclosed) turned into the biggest prescribed wildfire in Forest Service history. Maps by ARC GIS #Firemappers. Slides by Frank Carroll.

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The Black Fire began on May 13, 2022, near Middle Mesa in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Publicly available reporting attributes the fire’s origin to human causes under investigation by law enforcement, not to a lightning strike. It grew rapidly under extreme drought and wind conditions, at times exceeding 27,000 acres of growth in a single day and becoming the second largest wildfire in modern New Mexico history, behind only the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of the same year. Final reported acreage figures vary somewhat across sources, generally ranging from 325,000 to 330,000 acres. The fire burned through more than 90% of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness and portions of the surrounding Gila National Forest, reached 70% containment by late June 2022, and was reported substantially extinguished by late July 2022.

Daily incident updates and Forest Service materials confirm that fire managers conducted firing and burnout operations during the response, including the use of unmanned aircraft systems, commonly described as drones, equipped with plastic sphere dispenser devices that release incendiary spheres, sometimes referred to informally as dragon eggs, filled with potassium permanganate and ignited on contact with an injected chemical. The stated tactical purpose of these operations, as described in incident updates, was to strengthen containment lines, to keep the fire south of a state highway and west of another, and to provide point protection for structures and infrastructure. This paper’s research did not locate specific public reporting confirming that aerial ignition operations were deliberately planned or targeted to burn through the interior of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness or the Gila Wilderness, as distinct from being used along containment lines at the fire’s edges. Given the fire’s extraordinarily rapid natural spread under red-flag conditions, the available public record does not clearly establish how much of the wilderness acreage burned as a result of the fire’s uncontrolled growth versus how much resulted from deliberate firing operations. This paper states that limitation plainly rather than asserting a causal breakdown the public record does not support.

A cost figure of approximately 27.2 million dollars for Black Fire suppression appears in aggregated reporting, but this paper was unable to independently verify that figure against a clearly identified primary source, and no breakdown of that figure by tactic, including aerial ignition or air tanker operations specifically, was located. No lawsuit, congressional inquiry, Government Accountability Office report, or Inspector General review specific to the Black Fire’s firing operations or its effect on the Aldo Leopold Wilderness was identified in this research, in marked contrast to the extensive congressional and public scrutiny, and the 5.45-billion-dollar compensation fund, that followed the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burning in the same state in the same year. That contrast is itself part of this paper’s thesis. A prescribed burn that escapes generates a name, a statute, and a compensation fund. A wildfire that officials choose to manage for resource benefit, using the same suppression appropriations, the same aerial ignition tools, and causing comparable landscape scale damage to a wilderness area, generates no comparable public accounting, in part because it is legally classified as fire suppression response to a naturally occurring event rather than as an agency-initiated action, even where officials actively used ignition devices to expand the burned area.

As to funding, whatever the specific mix of monitoring, containment, and firing operations conducted during the Black Fire, all of it was funded from the same Wildland Fire Management Suppression Operations and Reserve Fund accounts described in Section III above. There is no separate statutory appropriation, and no separate legal category, for the cost of expanding a fire for resource benefit as opposed to the cost of containing it. Both draw on the identical suppression appropriation.

IX. THE APPROPRIATIONS QUESTION: IS FUNDING BURNOUT OPERATIONS AND COMPENSATION FROM SUPPRESSION MONEY A FISCAL IRREGULARITY

The Purpose Statute, 31 U.S.C. section 1301(a), provides that appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which they were made, except as otherwise provided by law. The Anti-Deficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. sections 1341 and 1342, prohibits federal officials from obligating or expending funds in excess of an appropriation or before an appropriation is made, subject to a narrow exception for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. Together, these statutes and the body of Government Accountability Office decisions interpreting them, collected in the Government Accountability Office’s Principles of Federal Appropriations Law, establish the necessary expense doctrine: an expenditure is a proper use of an appropriation if it is reasonably necessary to accomplish the object for which the appropriation was made, even if not literally described by the appropriation’s text.

This paper’s research did not locate any Government Accountability Office decision, Department of the Interior or Department of Agriculture Inspector General report, or published legal opinion that squarely addresses whether firing or burnout operations that expand a wildfire’s perimeter, whether conducted as a suppression tactic to strengthen a containment line or as part of a strategy to manage a fire for resource benefit, fall within or outside the appropriated purpose of wildfire suppression. That is a genuine gap in the public record, not a settled legal conclusion in either direction. What can be said with confidence is that current agency practice does not distinguish, for funding purposes, between the cost of a full suppression response and the cost of a monitoring or resource benefit response to the same fire. Both are paid from the same Suppression Operations and Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund accounts, under the same appropriation. Whether that commingling itself represents sound appropriations practice, given that the two strategies serve materially different purposes, one aimed at extinguishing a fire and the other at allowing or helping it continue, is a question Congress has not addressed through separate line-item appropriations, and that the Government Accountability Office does not appear to have separately audited.

On the question of compensation to affected landowners, the answer is considerably clearer. Direct compensatory payments to owners of property damaged by a federal fire are not payable from ordinary suppression or emergency appropriations. Both the Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act and the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act were freestanding statutes, each creating a new appropriation and a new FEMA claims office, precisely because the existing wildfire suppression appropriations provide no legal authority to pay tort-like compensation to third parties for property damage. Absent a comparable act of Congress following a specific fire, suppression appropriations cannot lawfully be redirected to compensate landowners, regardless of how that fire was managed.

The Burned Area Emergency Response program, commonly known as BAER, which funds post-fire watershed and land stabilization work, is not authorized by its own dedicated organic statute. It operates under Forest Service Manual 2523, whose stated statutory authority traces to section 323(a) of Public Law 105-277, as amended by section 434 of Public Law 109-54, provisions authorizing watershed restoration agreements and expenditures where there is a clear benefit to National Forest System lands, together with Public Law 106-558, which addresses funding for BAER team personnel. BAER is funded through the Burned Area Rehabilitation activity within the Wildland Fire Management appropriation, alongside Suppression Operations, rather than through a separate dedicated statute comparable to the Cerro Grande or Hermits Peak Acts. It is a program built on agency manual authority interpreting general watershed restoration provisions, not a standalone congressional program targeted at post-wildfire recovery generally, and it funds work on federal land, not compensation to private or other non-federal landowners.

X. CONCLUSION

Tracing the law from the Organic Act of 1897 forward produces a consistent result. Every statute that created or expanded the authority of the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management to manage federal reserved lands addresses fire, where it addresses fire at all, as a hazard to be prevented, suppressed, or cleaned up after. No organic statute, and no fire-specific appropriations statute, including the FLAME Act of 2009 and the 2018 wildfire funding fix, authorizes a federal official to intentionally allow a wildfire to burn or to expand its perimeter in pursuit of ecological objectives. That practice, formalized nationally in 2009 through an interagency guidance document signed by fire program officials rather than by the Secretaries or Congress, rests on an administrative interpretation of general multiple-use and conservation language never written with wildfire management in mind, and it has never been subjected to notice-and-comment rulemaking.

When that practice results in damage to private or other public property, the persons harmed face a legal landscape built almost entirely around insulating the responsible officials from consequence. The Federal Tort Claims Act’s discretionary function exception has been applied uniformly to shield wildfire response decisions, including decisions to manage a fire for resource benefit, from tort liability. The Tucker Act’s takings remedy is theoretically available but, as the government’s victory in the 2025 McDonough decision demonstrates, requires a landowner to disprove a counterfactual, that the same natural conditions the agency cites to justify its own decisions would have caused equivalent damage anyway, a standard that is exceptionally difficult to meet even where the government’s ignition of fire on the plaintiff’s property is undisputed. In the two cases where federal fire operations caused catastrophic, well-documented harm, Congress bypassed both of those remedies entirely and legislated bespoke, no-fault compensation funds, a pattern that confirms rather than contradicts the conclusion that the ordinary legal system does not provide a realistic path to compensation.

The Black Fire of 2022 illustrates what happens in the more common case, where a fire causes comparable landscape-scale damage, including to one of the most significant wilderness areas in the United States, but does not generate the singular public narrative of an escaped prescribed burn. No comparable statute, inquiry, or compensation fund followed it. The same suppression appropriation that funds extinguishing a fire also funds expanding one, with no separate legal accounting between the two, and no public authority appears to have examined whether that commingling is itself sound. Absent a specific act of Congress, either narrowing the discretionary function exception for wildfire management decisions, clarifying the causation standard for wildfire related takings claims, or creating a general, standing compensation mechanism for property owners harmed by fires that federal officials chose to manage rather than suppress, the current legal architecture leaves those officials making high consequence, low accountability decisions, and leaves the landowners in a fire’s path with little more than the hope that their fire becomes prominent enough, and politically visible enough, that Congress decides to act.

Introduction

Intellectual curiosity has never been the wildland fire service’s long suit, and I say that as someone who has spent a career inside it. Maybe it’s the emergency nature of the work that pushes us toward the simple explanation, the tried-and-true line, the answer that fits on a briefing slide. Whatever the cause, fire and forestry have followed the same path as every other discipline in the natural resources’ world: we latch onto a single narrative, repeat it until it hardens into doctrine, and then defend it as though the matter were closed.

It isn’t closed. No line of scientific inquiry is ever truly settled, least of all one that struggles to account for every variable, where the interactions are poorly understood, and where the people running the studies rarely have any idea how their conclusions get used downstream. Academics publish a paper about fuel dynamics on a two-hundred-acre plot and, three steps removed, a line officer or a program lead turns it into a mandate covering half a million acres, with a straight-line piece of logic that goes: if fire is good, more fire must be better. That leap, from a narrow finding to a sweeping policy, is where the trouble starts.

Photo: The spectacular Blodgett Experimental Forest of the University of California Regents is among the most well-managed ‘family forests’ left in California. Logged of its climax forest of ponderosa pine around the turn of the 19th century, the forest has grown and prospered in the almost perfect tree-growing conditions of this last best place, tended by Berkeley foresters to be a living, working forest on a sustainable basis over decades, and, now, centuries. Even now, the ponderosas are achieving seral dominance as the climax forest that existed before. No fire has burned this area for over 120 years. The Mosquito Fire in 2022 burned some of it, and stands as a silent judge and witness to the successful—and failed—forest management policies of the past 30 years. Frank Carroll PFMc

Two ideas born from that leap are now reshaping, and in places destroying, forests that took a century and a half to build into living, working, sustaining systems. The first is the claim that a hundred years of fire suppression is the singular cause of today’s fire crisis, that keeping fire off the land during fire season quietly built unmanageable fuel loads across every forest type in the West. The second is the claim that logging is inherently a taking, that it strips the good trees and leaves behind a degraded remnant. Both ideas contain a kernel of truth and a great deal of overreach, and both have been marched well past what the evidence can actually bear.

Most working firefighters today never knew, and were never taught to value, the working forests that supported rural communities and kept the woods alive and regenerating for a century and a half. They have absorbed a set of narrow, site-specific studies showing that heavy equipment and mechanical treatment can have negative effects on small forested parcels, and they have generalized those findings into gospel, while looking past the reality in front of them: massive, high-severity fires that change the chemistry of the soil, bake the organic layer to nothing, leave behind hydrophobic soils that flood and erode for years afterward, and kill millions of live trees across every age class in a single season.

The New Vocabulary of Fire, and What It Actually Does

The fires doing this damage are not always accidents of nature. Many are intentionally lit, under names built to sound careful and scientific: strategic firing operations to reduce energy within Potential Operational Delineations, efforts to reintroduce fire to what planners call fire-depleted ecosystems. In a single fire season, these operations put more flame on the ground, over more acres, at higher intensity, than logging could touch in a decade at any comparable scale, and they do it deliberately, in the name of restoration.

The language built up around this practice deserves scrutiny, because language is doing real work here. Monitoring. Confine and contain. Big-boxing and burning. Firesheds. Fireshed managers. Wildfire use. Behind each term sits a helicopter with a drip torch slung underneath, a plastic sphere dispenser, a fusee, or a drone rigged to lay ignition across terrain no ground crew could–or maybe should–reach on foot. Combined, this arsenal puts down more fire, faster, and over more ground than any lightning-driven natural fire regime ever produced. The result, in places like the Sheep Creek drainage on the Boise National Forest, is ground that has burned so often and so hot across three decades that nothing grows there anymore, not even the brush fields that are supposed to signal the first stage of recovery after a fire. When even the pioneer brush species won’t come back, that is not restoration. That is a wound that will not close.

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An Academic Bubble With No Skin in the Game

None of this happens in a vacuum. The universities training the next generation of fire ecologists, ecosystem scientists, and land managers have, as an institution, no operational stake in the outcome. They are not the ones who answer when a fire crosses a line, and they are not the ones who watch a watershed run black with ash for three years after a burn. What they are doing, deliberately or not, is teaching an entire generation of young scientists that any human use of the public commons is inherently destructive to biodiversity, even as intentionally set fires burn through everything that biodiversity is supposed to depend on, from two-by-four timber to critical habitat to riparian zones that these same programs claim to be protecting.

A recent case makes the pattern plain. A coalition led by Friends of the Bitterroot, joined by Friends of the Clearwater, Native Ecosystems Council, and WildEarth Guardians, sued the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service over a plan to allow additional road building on the Bitterroot National Forest. A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, finding that the agencies had failed to adequately weigh the effect of the road amendment on grizzly bears and bull trout, both protected under the Endangered Species Act, and restored the old road density limits. The plaintiffs called it a win for the bears and the fish. Their public messaging framed the ruling as a gift, a fighting chance for species that road building and logging access would otherwise imperil.

I would ask what a fighting chance is worth against a landscape-scale wildfire. The Caldor Fire in 2021 killed and injured at least 54 bears across more than two hundred thousand acres in the Sierra, burning so completely that wildlife officers were left euthanizing animals found with third-degree burns on their paws because there was no way to save them, and it heated stream temperatures in the burn scar high enough to kill fish outright. Whatever protection a reduced road network offers against a logging truck, it offers nothing against a crown fire moving through beetle-killed, unthinned timber with no way for an engine crew to attack it when it’s small, or get around it to anchor, flank, and contain it. The same fate met the spotted owl habitat buffers established with such fanfare a generation ago. Those buffers, built around the densest, oldest stands of timber, over decades became reservoirs of exactly the kind of continuous, heavy, standing fuel that turns a fire from a manageable burn into a catastrophic one. Whatever anyone hoped those buffers would accomplish, the fires of the last twenty years have gone through many of them just the same as everywhere else, and no one in the advocacy community has yet had to answer for that outcome in the same forum where they claimed credit for the original protections.

Without roads, there is no meaningful human access to accomplish the Forest Service’s own founding mission of multiple use and sustained yield: timber, forage, water, wildlife, and recreation, managed together for the people who own the land. More to the point of the fires themselves, without roads there is no way for firefighters to get equipment and personnel to a start quickly. Lightning strikes and human-caused starts alike are left to burn until conditions, not tactics, decide how big they get. A management choice framed as protection for wildlife becomes, in practice, a guarantee that when fire does come, and on these landscapes it always comes, it will burn the country down to bare ground and leave it unusable to people or to wildlife for a generation or more.

The Salvage That Never Happens

Compounding the damage, the Forest Service has repeatedly allowed a small, vocal set of groups opposed to any human use of the commons to dictate what can and cannot be salvaged after a fire. The result is entirely predictable: standing dead timber, merchantable for only a few years before it degrades past use, sits uncut. The land is never reforested. The brush that follows is never treated. What accumulates instead is hundreds of tons of heavy fuel per acre, piled twelve feet deep in places, impassable to elk, to deer, to bears, to firefighters, and eventually to fire crews trying to reach the next start in the same drainage.

Photo: In stark contrast to the well-managed, living, sustainable, Blodgett Experimental Forest, now in full post-fire recovery, this Forest Service ground was burned and abandoned. There has been no salvaging of the highly valuable old-growth and second-growth trees, no reforestation, no brush treatment with proven chemicals, no fuel reduction, and no management. This forest will fall over and jackstraw, a nightmare of 12-foot deep dead trees, unavailable to wildlife, unwelcome to humans, and effectively removed from the public commons for a century or more. Why? Because environmental activist NGOs and academics think forest management is ‘destructive’ and harms ‘biodiversity.’ The next fire in these untenable conditions will strip the organic matter, change the soil chemisty, convert the forest type to weeds and brush (if we’re lucky), and rob the public of these acres of the public lands we all own and share. Frank Carroll PFMc

I saw the contrast up close on a recent visit to the Mosquito Fire footprint near Auburn, California. On the private timberland, where landowners had salvaged and replanted, the haul roads had been pounded by logging trucks into a fine, choking powder that locals call moon dust, dust so fine it clogs air filters and blots out the sky in a following vehicle. It is not a pretty sight. But in the middle of those same roads, you find the same moon dust, in the median that no truck ever touched, pounded there instead by charismatic megafauna and other wildlife using the only open travel corridors left in a landscape that human intervention, or the lack of it, had turned into a hellscape for anything trying to move through it. The dust was not the mark of destructive industry. It was the mark of use, by trucks in one place and by the animals the advocacy groups claim to be protecting in the other.

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Two Foresters, Two Forests

I think about two foresters I know when I consider what’s been lost. One is young, just starting out. The other is an old hand, the third generation, now with a fourth and fifth coming up behind him, on a family tree farm that has been growing and cutting and replanting the same ground for most of a century. His forest, Aker Woods, is logged, thinned, reforested, and actively tended, and it stands today as a green island in a landscape increasingly defined by insect-killed stands, unsalvaged burn scars, severe wind-throw, and the visible signs of a management vacuum. Nobody set out to design an experiment comparing active stewardship against abandonment. But that is what the West has become, a side-by-side comparison, and the working tree farms are winning it without needing to say a word.

Without an institutional memory of why the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were created in the first place, there is no compass pointing back toward the founding purpose: conserving the land while keeping it open to the use and enjoyment of the people, present and future, who own it. The groups driving today’s litigation and policy don’t want anything built. They want acreage removed from use, and in the recent Bitterroot case alone that meant another half million acres of public forest pulled further out of the public’s hands, not because the public asked for it or wanted it, but because a handful of organizations with the most obscure standing to sue decided the public’s access was the threat that needed managing.

What the Foresters Are Telling Me

I don’t hold these views in isolation, and I want to give real space here to the people living this every day, because they are saying it better than I can. A young California Registered Professional Forester (RPF), early in a career he has chosen to build around logging and fire management, which today means fire management whether you’re planting trees or cutting them, wrote to me not long ago. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“I am always refreshed to read your commentary, so I figured I’d just reach out. I think that we’ve blown it here in the post mega-fire world. Somehow the academic fire radicals got hold of the mic and they’re framing the narrative now and I don’t think it’s right. I think that the tribal component and the cultural burning conversation is currently locked in this delusion, this circular logic system where people have been saying: just do light burns again and everything will go back to pre-European historical reference conditions. They’ve said it enough that they all believe it now. I’d bet not all of those indigenous burns were cute little underburns.

I love indigenous fire management, and I think what the tribes pulled off is legendary, literally. And that’s also the problem. All we have left from that era is oral tradition, the legends, but who in the world of fire could think that a story alone can teach you how to burn? Only burning can teach you that, and the traditions were meant to be notebooks passed down, not scripture. How could we not have lost most of that knowledge along the way? I don’t see anyone in this field showing the humility to admit that, and it worries me.

So my question to you is: what would you tell a young, inquisitive RPF who doesn’t buy the mainstream fire narrative? It’s not climate change alone that pushed us past the tipping point, even though it’s part of it. Look at the tree rings. We have always had brutal droughts in California. Even if we solved climate change tomorrow, we would still have droughts, and we would still be hot.

My other question is more targeted: is there an organization or a professional out there actually doing this right? Somewhere I can learn good fire management from, or do I just have to make my own mistakes and learn the hard way? Anything you’re willing to share would mean a lot.

Here’s my direct puzzle for you. If the tribes managed this land exclusively through low-intensity burning, why does every old-growth tree I’ve ever examined carry a fire scar running sixty feet up the trunk? Was that a mistake? Or was it deliberate? Because the way the academics frame it, low-intensity fire was the whole secret, the magic ingredient. I don’t buy it. I think they burned in cycles, and some of those cycles ran hot and hard. I cannot account for that kind of old-growth structure from low-intensity fire alone. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think so.

My other real concern is the total lack of diversity of thought in fire management right now. Everyone says the same thing, and that alone should be intellectually alarming. We all suddenly know the answer? That can’t be right. So where is the dissent? Where is the debate? That worries me more than almost anything else.”

I told him he understood things perfectly, and I still believe that. I wrote back that I am passing his thoughts along because they deserve a wider hearing:

“We assume the historic range of variability is whatever Lewis and Clark encountered when they crossed the continent. That’s probably wrong. Were the huge herds of buffalo and elk those expeditions described an artifact of a decimated human population, after two centuries of smallpox and other epidemics had already emptied out the land of the people who would otherwise have been managing and hunting it?

There’s an old account from George Ruxton of the Rockies, who rode out of Taos with a string of horses the day before the Taos uprising in which the Indians there killed the American governor. Ruxton was headed into the Sangre de Cristos, trying to cross the Rockies toward what’s now Walsenburg, when a band of Indians attacked him and tried to run off his stock. He fought them off, and they lit a forest fire behind him to trap him against the mountains. He rode forty miles ahead of that flaming front to survive. That was fire used as a weapon of war. It was not some magical, gentle, low intensity burn.

Even that one anecdote should be enough to break the academic narrative open. Whatever fire was to the native peoples of this continent, it was never a single, monolithic practice, a church with one liturgy. I think we’ve layered a kind of Western, almost Christian framework onto fire, a good-versus-evil, saint-or-sinner simplicity, and in doing so we’ve lost the truth of it. Fire wasn’t one thing to the people who used it best, and it isn’t one thing now. We’ve built a one-dimensional fairy tale out of something that was always complicated, and that’s a disservice to how complex fire actually is. Sometimes it gives, and sometimes it takes away. Fire isn’t a saint. It’s a force, and it deserves a kind of respect I don’t see anywhere in the pro-fire advocacy world. That absence drives me up the wall.

I’ve been badly burned by fire myself, physically hurt by it, and it took my childhood home along with everything in it. But I think I understand fire because of that loss, not in spite of it. It’s the whole cycle, the give and the take together. I cannot be the only one who sees it this way.”

He isn’t. And in increasingly vocal numbers, the people who actually use, love, and depend on the public commons are rejecting the agencies that let things get to this point. They are rejecting a narrow, self-interested style of interest-group politics that has spent thirty years pushing the public further off its own land, and they are rejecting a university culture that treats walking away from the forest and letting natural processes run their course as the only defensible position a serious person can hold. There is nothing on that path but darkness, and increasingly, ash.

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Fire Is Not a Monolith, and Neither Is the Answer

What these foresters are describing, in their own words, is the collapse of a false consensus. For twenty years, the fire and ecology fields have converged on a single storyline: suppression built the fuel, fire is medicine, more fire restores the land, and any use of mechanical equipment or commercial harvest is a compromise at best and a crime at worst. That storyline is not wrong in every particular. Fuel does accumulate in the absence of any disturbance. Fire does play a role in many western forest types that logging alone cannot replace. But a storyline that cannot accommodate an old-growth ponderosa with a sixty-foot fire scar, or a war party using fire as a weapon, or a landscape whose wildlife abundance may owe more to depopulation than to any deliberate indigenous fire regime, is not a scientific consensus. It is an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies do not tolerate the kind of dissent that real science requires.

The tribal cultural burning practiced across this continent for thousands of years was almost certainly as varied as the tribes themselves, some of it gentle and frequent, some of it savage and infrequent, some of it defensive, some of it offensive, some of it purely practical, clearing travel corridors or improving forage, and some of it undoubtedly a mistake that got away from the people who lit it, the same as it does today. We lost the vast majority of that specific, place-based knowledge when the populations who held it were decimated by disease and displacement, and what remains is oral tradition, invaluable as memory but never intended to function as a technical manual. Treating it as a single, replicable prescription–apply light fire, wait for pre-European conditions to reappear–is not honoring that tradition. It is flattening it into something simpler and safer than it ever actually was, because simple and safe is easier to defend in a public meeting or a court filing.

What the Founders Actually Built These Agencies to Do

Gifford Pinchot and the conservationists who built the Forest Service did not set out to create a preserve. They set out to create a working system, land managed for the greatest good of the greatest number over the longest time, timber cut and regrown, forage grazed and rested, water protected, and recreation welcomed, all at once, under professional management answerable to the public that owned the ground. Multiple use and sustained yield were not compromises grafted onto a purer preservationist mission later. They were the mission from the start. An agency that manages by walking away, that treats every road as a wound and every harvest as a taking, has drifted so far from that founding purpose that it barely resembles the institution Pinchot and others built, and it has done so without ever being asked by the public whether that drift was wanted.

The reckoning now underway in Washington, whatever one thinks of the administration driving it, did not come from nowhere. It has been thirty years in the making, three decades of watching agencies get out-lawyered and out-organized by a small number of well-funded advocacy groups, many of them operating on litigation costs recovered from the taxpayer through the Equal Access to Justice Act, suing the same agencies whose budgets and mission they then help shape through settlement and consent decree. The public did not vote for this arrangement, and increasingly the public knows it. When an administration moves against these departments and this pattern, it is not attacking conservation. It is responding to thirty years of the public commons being managed for the benefit of the groups that sue over it rather than the people who own it.

Photo: UC Berkeley foresters have salvaged the burned, dead forest from the Mosquito Fire. The replanted trees, ponderosa pine and incense cedars, and suppressed the ravening ceanothus brush fields with plant-specific chemistry. They are working now for a living sustainable forest in 100 years, a joy to behold, a refuge for all manner of wildlife, and a delight for humans shaded and protected in its high, green canopy. The Forest Service ground—our public lands, our public commons—will find a very different path, helping neither wildlife nor humans for decades to come. Its fate is almost assuredly more killing wildfire with no future forest in sight. Frank Carroll PFMc

Reopening the Commons

I am not arguing that fire has no place in these forests, or that every acre needs a road, or that logging alone can substitute for the disturbance regimes these landscapes evolved with. I am arguing that the public that owns these forests, all of it, hunters, loggers, ranchers, hikers, off-road riders, tribal members, mill towns, and family tree farms alike, has a right to use, access, and shape decisions about that land, and that no single advocacy coalition, however well-funded or well-lawyered, gets to decide unilaterally who is welcome on the commons and who is not. That decision belongs to the public and to the agencies built, imperfectly but deliberately, to answer to that public.

Getting back to that arrangement means reopening roads closed in the name of species that then burn anyway. It means restoring salvage logging on a timeline that matches the biology of dead timber rather than the timeline of litigation. It means reforestation as a default response to catastrophic fire, not an afterthought fought over for a decade while brush takes the ground instead. It means treating the diversity of thought my forester friends are asking for, the dissent, the debate, the willingness to say the tree rings and the war-party fire and the sixty-foot scars don’t fit the tidy version of the story, as a sign of a healthy field rather than a threat to be managed. And it means an honest accounting of outcomes: when a habitat protection or a road closure is followed a few years later by exactly the catastrophic fire it was meant to guard against, that has to be treated as information, not an inconvenience to be waited out until the next lawsuit.

The forests that sustained rural communities for a century and a half did not get that way by accident, and they will not survive by being left alone any more than a garden survives neglect. They survive through work: cutting, thinning, grazing, burning deliberately and carefully, building and maintaining the roads that let people and equipment reach a fire before it becomes an event that reshapes a watershed for a generation. That is the future Pinchot and the other founders of the conservation movement actually built for: land cared for so it could keep serving people, not land locked away and then, with a terrible irony, burned to the ground anyway by the very absence of the care that would have protected it. Getting back to that future is not a nostalgic exercise. It is the only path that ends with living forests instead of ash, and it starts with giving the public back its own inheritance.

‘Frank on Fire’ is a feature of the NWA and soon to be a podcast covering issues relevant to National wildfire policy. This is the first installment of an idea first suggested by Dana Tibbitts, a San Diego and Incline Village icon, author, editorialist, essayist, and deeply concerned citizen who also serves on the NWA Board.

I have tried to keep the numbers honest. Where I cite a casualty count, a fatality trend, an acreage figure, or a scientific finding, it is drawn from the historical record — NIFC and NWCG fatality data, published fire-behavior research, contemporaneous incident reporting, and peer-reviewed wildlife studies — and I have tried to represent that record accurately, including the parts of it that complicate my own argument. But this is not a neutral document, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I spent thirty years in the Forest Service. My father was a ranger before me. I have watched this agency’s mission collapse in real time, and I have an opinion about why, and about what it has cost. What follows is that opinion, built on the numbers, not in place of them.

1. The Trade We Made

Somewhere in the last three decades, American wildland fire agencies made a trade. We stopped asking crews to run at fires and hold them small, and we started asking them to fall back, build containment lines miles from the flame front, and either wait for the fire to arrive or burn toward it ourselves in massive firing operations. We called this indirect attack, or point protection, or managing fire for resource benefit, or a dozen other names meant to make it sound like restraint rather than retreat. And on the one metric the agency itself has always cared most about — firefighter body count — it worked. Entrapment and burnover deaths, the mass-casualty fireline disasters that define this profession’s worst days, have fallen for ninety years, and they kept falling straight through the indirect-attack era. I am not going to dispute that data point. I compiled enough of it myself.

What I dispute is the story we tell about why, and the ledger we refuse to keep on the other side of that trade. We did not eliminate the risks inherent in fighting wildland fire. We moved it — off the fireline and onto civilians who never signed up for it, onto watersheds and wildlife that had no vote, onto the lungs of people a thousand miles away breathing smoke from fires we let burn for months, and onto an agency mission that is now so hollowed out that the federal government itself is dismantling the Forest Service as we knew it. That is the trade. I think it was the wrong one, and I think the numbers, read honestly, say so.

2. What the Firefighter Numbers Actually Show

Let me give the historical trend its due, because I built this table from the same sources any honest researcher would use, and it does not flatter my argument on its face.

Period

Avg. Entrapment Deaths/Year

Defining Event / Reform

1926–1956

6.2

Big Blowup legacy era; CCC crews, early Smokejumpers (1940), and Hotshots (1948)

1957–1966

4.4

1956 Inaja Fire → 10 Standard Fire Orders & 18 Watch Out Situations (1957)

1967–1979

4.5

1966 Loop Fire → Downhill Line Construction Checklist

1980–1994

4.7

Late-1970s multi-fatality fires → fire shelters mandated; 1994 South Canyon

1995–2003

2.0

South Canyon → LCES adopted; risk-management doctrine formalized

2004–2012

1.6

Thirtymile (2001) & Cramer (2003) → Facilitated Learning Analyses, SAFENET

Entrapment and burnover deaths per year fell from 6.2 in the 1926–1956 baseline to 1.6 by 2004–2012, and no wildfire since Yarnell Hill in 2013 — nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots, killed when a thunderstorm outflow reversed the wind on a fire they had been working — has killed twelve or more firefighters in a single entrapment. That is a real, ninety-year decline, and I will not pretend it isn’t.

But total firefighter deaths from all causes have not fallen anywhere near as fast, because vehicle accidents and cardiac events — not entrapment — are now the leading killers of wildland firefighters, consistent with longer assignments, more total person-days per fire, and crews spending weeks driving long indirect-attack circuits instead of days on a direct initial attack. And in June of this year, three firefighters died in a burnover near Knowles, Colorado, not far from Storm King Mountain, where fourteen died in 1994 — a reminder that the entrapment risk we say we’ve engineered away has not actually gone to zero, even now.

So here is my first claim, and it is a modest one: the decline in mass firefighter casualties is real, but it is not the whole safety story, and it was never the whole point of the tactical shift. The point, as agency doctrine itself now states outright, was to “restore fire to fire-depleted ecosystems” and manage fire for “resource benefit” — which is a way of saying we decided, as a matter of policy, that letting fires burn bigger and longer was more valuable than keeping them small. Whether that trade actually served the public is the real question, and firefighter safety statistics alone cannot answer it.

3. Berry Creek: The Clearest Case I Have

I built the wildfire impact analysis for Camp Okizu — the children’s cancer camp destroyed in the North Complex Fire — and I stand behind it. Here is the sequence, corroborated by contemporaneous incident reporting as well as by our own investigation: the Bear and Claremont Fires burned in remote country for three weeks under a deliberate policy of minimal engagement. In early September 2020, crews used a firing operation to merge the two fires along the Middle Fork Feather River. A Red Flag Warning for a dry cold front and dangerous northeast winds was forecast and publicly announced days in advance. On September 8, with those forecast winds arriving on schedule, the fire jumped the river, grew by roughly 100,000 acres in hours, and reached Berry Creek with little or no evacuation warning. Sixteen people died. Camp Okizu’s 503 acres burned at 87 percent high severity. More than 41,000 square feet of buildings, including a camp built to give children with cancer a place to just be children, were destroyed.

I want to be precise about what I can prove and what I believe. What the record proves is the sequence: a firing operation to merge two fires, executed in the days immediately before a forecast blowup, followed by exactly the blowup that was forecast, followed by sixteen deaths. What I believe — and what I have asserted in a formal claim against the government — is that this was not an act of God. It was a choice, made with the forecast in hand, to grow the fire rather than to keep fighting it small while there was still time. I know the agency’s defenders will say the discretionary function exception protects that judgment call, and that courts have historically given incident commanders wide latitude. I am arguing that latitude should not extend to a decision made with a red-flag forecast already in the incident briefing. That argument is still alive because I don’t believe the families of the victims or the Butte County Sheriff understood what happened that day, and the Forest Service never investigated its own catastrophe (the Federal Tort Claims Act deadline commences for two years after the date a harmed individual becomes aware they are the victim of a tortious action). But I did not need a court to tell me what I saw in that watershed a year later: standing dead timber, stripped soil, a creek that no longer holds fish the way it used to, a camp that had to relocate rather than rebuild, and a burned community where the survivors are still living in camp trailers six years later.

Photo: The scope and scale of the firestorm that swept Berry Creek and killed 16 civilians is unimaginable. More than 190,000 acres of the 2020 North Complex Fire burned from September 9 to its conclusion. The Forest Service chose not to salvage millions of merchantable trees because they were discouraged by lawsuits and low market prices. Decades of failing to salvage and offer viable timber sales, or do the requisite thinning to keep the forest viable and healthy, left them, and us, with little to show for over a hundred years of forestry. Frank Carroll PFMc

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4. The Ledger Nobody Wants to Keep

Firefighter casualty statistics are the easiest numbers to find because the agency tracks them obsessively — as it should. But they are not the only casualties of this policy shift, and I want to put the rest of the ledger in front of the reader, because I do not think the public has ever been asked to weigh it as a whole.

Civilian lives

Camp Fire, 2018: 85 dead. North Complex/Berry Creek, 2020: 16 dead. The January 2025 Los Angeles fires: 31 dead. Tecolote Creek, New Mexico, 2022: three more, drowned in a flood on a watershed the Forest Service itself had scorched with an escaped prescribed burn — the government has since accepted responsibility and appropriated roughly $5.4 billion in compensation. These are not acts of nature that we simply failed to predict. Several of them followed forecasted weather, in terrain the agency knew, on fires the agency had chosen not to fully engage while they were still small.

Public health

Longer-duration fires do not just burn longer; they smoke longer, and that smoke does not respect a fire perimeter or a state line. In June and July of 2023, and again in the summers since, smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the Midwest and East Coast, pushing air quality to hazardous levels for over 100 million Americans in cities as far from any fireline as New York, Washington, and Chicago — orange skies, canceled outdoor school days, and, by the standard public-health accounting of fine particulate exposure, real cardiovascular and respiratory harm to people who never lived within a thousand miles of a fire. I recognize these are Canadian fires and a different jurisdiction; I raise them because they illustrate, at a continental scale, exactly the exposure pathway I am describing here at home — fires we let burn longer produce more smoke-days, and more smoke-days mean more people breathing dangerous air, whether the fire is in Plumas County or Manitoba.

Wildlife and habitat

The California spotted owl — a species nominally responsible for our cumulative loss of more timber to irretrievable destruction than any cause except wildfires— lost more high-severity habitat in the 2020 and 2021 megafires alone than in the previous thirty-five years combined, more than half a million acres, a principal reason the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing it under the Endangered Species Act in 2023. Since 2020, more than 1.7 million acres have burned in the Sierra Nevada. We adopted a fire policy substantially justified by ecological restoration, and one of its clearest measurable results has been to push toward federal listing the very owl that the entire multiple-use planning apparatus of the last thirty years was built to protect. I do not think that is restoration. I think it is the opposite, dressed up in restoration’s language.

Post-fire flooding and property

Severe, high-residence-time fire does not just burn the canopy; it bakes the soil, destroys the organic layer and the root structure that hold a hillside together, and creates hydrophobic soils that shed rain rather than absorb it. That is the mechanism behind Tecolote Creek, and it is a mechanism we are creating more often, on purpose, when we choose to let fires burn hot and long rather than catch them small. Post-fire debris flows and flooding are not a footnote to a wildfire’s damage; on some watersheds, they cause more property destruction, over a longer period, than the fire itself, and they are barely counted in any official wildfire casualty or cost tally I have ever seen. The City of Flagstaff, Arizona, is still struggling with the post-fire flooding of the 2010 Schultz Fire, as are many other locations where burned soils and water combine with reliably disastrous results.

Timber, treatment dollars, and the fuels we chose not to remove

Every acre of merchantable timber that burns in a megafire is an acre we did not thin, log, or otherwise treat for fuel reduction — and, just as important, it is timber revenue that never came back into the communities and the agency budgets that used to fund exactly the kind of proactive fuels work that might have kept these fires smaller in the first place. We have spent three decades being told that logging 5,000 acres under a sustained-yield harvest plan is a disaster, while a million-acre wildfire burning at high severity is simply nature taking its course. I have never understood how both of those things can be true, and I do not think most of the public understands it either — which is precisely the problem.

Photo: NorCal megafires left millions of merchantable trees dead and standing. The Forest Service made no attempt to salvage the dead timber for a host of reasons. The genesis of the anti-salvage movement was environmental activist court wins claiming salvage would cause more harm than good. The claim rings hollow in light of the long-resident time fires that will cook this area and any new vegetation when the trees fall and burn again. Frank Carroll, PFMc

5. The Post-Fire Logging Fight, and Chad Hanson

No discussion of this ledger is complete without addressing salvage logging, because that fight is where the deeper argument actually lives. After a stand-replacing fire, thousands of acres of dead timber are left standing. That timber has commercial value for a short window, after which it degrades. Left standing and then falling, those highly valuable trees become exactly the kind of heavy, continuous fuel bed that produces the next hot, long-residence fire — the kind that bakes soil and strips away the organic material and seed source, even vaporizing some mineral soil.

Chad Hanson and colleagues have published research arguing the opposite: that spotted owls persist and even benefit in post-fire landscapes, that salvage logging removes the structure that the owls and other post-fire specialists actually use, and that severe fire is not the ecological catastrophe foresters like me describe. I have read that research, and I do not find it persuasive as a basis for national policy, for one simple reason: it treats the interior of a single burned stand as if it existed in isolation from the fuel load, the fire history, and the communities around it. Other wildlife researchers — including the very biologists who documented the 2020–2021 megafire losses to spotted owl habitat — have reached a different, and in my view more sober, conclusion: that severe fire has persistent negative effects on owl populations, and that thinning and fuels management reduce the odds of the next catastrophic run.

This is a real, ongoing scientific dispute, and I want to be honest that it is one, rather than pretend the science is as settled as either Chad or I may claim. I have spent fifty years walking these stands, and I trust what stripped soil, dead root systems, and a creek gone silent tell me over a journal argument that a burned forest is fine because an owl was still found nesting in it two years later. Macabre proof may lie in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife decision to shoot 450,000 barred owls—almost indistinguishable from spotted owls—in an incomprehensible effort to favor a weak species by biological ethnic cleansing of a stronger species from the burned forests where barred owls thrive and, apparently, so do spotted owls.

Photo: Private landowners salvaged the dead timber and reforested the burned area in the foreground with vigorous young trees. In this image, we see the stark contrast between Hanson's argument and mine. I choose the rising young forest over the inevitable reburn and resulting brush fields. Frank Carroll PFMc

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6. Multiple Use, Sustained Yield, and Who Changed the Story

The Forest Service I knew operated under a mission Congress actually wrote down: multiple use, sustained yield — timber, water, wildlife, range, and recreation, managed together, for the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the long run. That mission assumed people belonged on and used the land, because they do, and because a resource nobody uses is a resource nobody defends. Over the last three decades, a relatively small number of well-funded activist organizations, backed by a still smaller number of wealthy donors, won a long string of court victories and administrative rule changes that pushed the agency away from that mission and toward a presumption that human use — logging above all, but increasingly grazing, recreation infrastructure, and active management of any kind — is itself the harm to be minimized. I understand why that story appealed to people who had never seen what a well-managed timber sale actually leaves behind. I do not think it appealed to the land, and I do not think it has appealed to the public, once the public actually saw the results: their forests closed off, their trails buried in dead standing timber, their air unbreathable for weeks at a time, and their taxes funding a mission that people no longer recognize.

You have to touch the land to know the land. That is not a slogan; it is the plainest fact of my professional life. A forest nobody is allowed to touch — not to log, not to graze, not to actively manage, and not even to salvage after it has already burned to the ground — is a forest most people will never see, never work in, never draw a living from, and, eventually, never think about at all. Environmental advocates who spent thirty years fighting to keep people off the land and out of the timber business won nearly every battle. What they lost, I believe, is the war for public attachment to these places, because people do not love, defend, or fund what they cannot use. I wrote in 1994 that “America’s public lands are the only wildlands most of us will ever own.” Like a personal family cabin in a forest now burned to black ash, our now inaccessible public lands are losing the intrinsic value they once enjoyed. The loss of multiple-uses is a Pyrrhic victory in the most literal sense: what, after all, is total control over resources the public has quietly stopped caring whether anyone protects? Ironically, total control now manifests as no control. After all, if firefighters aren’t defending timber interests, they are also not defending core critical riparian habitat for flycatchers.

7. The Bill Is Now Coming Due

This is not a hypothetical consequence. In 2026, the Forest Service announced it is moving its headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, closing its ten regional offices in favor of fifteen state directors, and shuttering more than fifty research stations — the largest structural reorganization in the agency’s history, undertaken without prior congressional authorization. Former Chief Dale Bosworth’s successors have called it a state-based management model; critics, including a former Forest Service chief, have called it the leading edge of a land-transfer movement, noting that the new headquarters sits in the state most associated with public-land sell-off politics in the country. I do not think this reorganization happened because the agency suddenly discovered a more efficient org chart. I think it happened because the federal government, and a meaningful share of the public, no longer sees a compelling reason to keep national forest management centralized, expert, and Washington-run, when the agency itself has spent thirty years signaling that active management, timber production, and the human use of these lands are the problem rather than the mission.

If the agency’s own doctrine no longer treats trillions of dollars in timber, water, and resource value as worth protecting from fire, and treats large, uncontrolled fire as an acceptable or even desirable outcome, then the public is entitled to ask a blunt question: what, exactly, is the Forest Service still doing? And once enough of the public can no longer answer that question, state takeover starts to look less like an attack on federal land management and more like a reasonable response to an agency that walked away from explaining its own value. Out of sight, out of mind, out of business.

8. Why Firefighters Stopped Fighting Fire the Way They Used To

This brings me to the part of the argument I feel most strongly about, because I have been the Hotshot squad boss, led Hotshot crews in battle, championed Hotshot crews and all manner of firefighters throughout my career, have a firefighting son-in-law, and I know what firefighters are thinking and why. For thirty years, I have heard the same message aimed at our intrepid crews: that they are the reason fires are so bad today, that their aggressive suppression history created the fuel-loaded landscape now burning, that the compassionate, ecologically literate choice is to stand back and let fire do what fire does. Tell a workforce often enough that its core mission was a historic mistake, and do not be surprised when that workforce stops treating the mission as worth fighting for. I do not believe entrapment deaths fell only because tactics got smarter, though they did. I believe they fell, in part, because the institutional conviction that a fire was worth the risk of direct engagement has eroded in direct proportion to thirty years of being told the opposite. Why aggressively attack a fire when your own agency’s doctrine, and a great deal of the public conversation around it, suggest the fire might be doing the forest a favor?

I do not offer that as an excuse for anyone to take foolish risks, and I am glad fewer firefighters are dying in burnovers. I offer it as the other half of the explanation the entrapment-fatality trend never tells you by itself: casualties went down partly because we got better at avoiding entrapments, and partly because we stopped believing, as an institution, that most fires were worth the risk of a direct fight in the first place. Those are two very different stories, and only one of them is praiseworthy.

9. Conclusion

Entrapment deaths are down, and that is real. But firefighter deaths overall are not, because vehicle, hazardous exposure to smoke, and cardiac deaths from longer, more diffuse assignments have taken entrapment’s place as the leading cause of death (the emotional toll on firefighter families is another article). Civilian deaths, meanwhile, have risen sharply, and at least one of those events — Berry Creek — has a documented firing-operations record specific enough that my colleagues and I are prepared to defend it in court. Millions of Americans a thousand miles from any fireline have breathed hazardous smoke for weeks at a time. An unremarkable owl that triggered forest wars my entire career lost more habitat in two years than in the previous thirty-five. Watersheds have failed, sometimes fatally, months and years after the flames went out. And the agency that is supposed to steward all of it is now being dismantled and handed piecemeal to the states, in no small part because it stopped being able to say, in language the public still recognizes, why any of this land was worth protecting in the first place.

We flipped the risk from a small number of trained professionals, working under real but bounded danger for days at a time, onto an unbounded and unconsenting public — downwind, downstream, and downslope — for months at a time, and we told ourselves this was progress because the entrapment numbers went down. I do not think it was progress. I think it was a transfer of risk dressed up as a safety improvement, and I think the growing civilian death toll, the ruined watersheds, the vanished owl habitat, the smoke over New York, and the agency’s own collapse are the bill for that transfer coming due. You have to touch the land to know the land. We stopped letting anyone touch it, and we are now finding out, at considerable cost, what happens to a public resource that nobody is allowed to use, love, or defend.

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Principal Sources

Cook, James R. “Trends in Wildland Fire Entrapment Fatalities…Revisited.” NWCG Lessons Learned Center, February 2013.

National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) and National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), historical wildland firefighter fatality archives, 1910–2018.

Carroll, Franklin O., Joseph G. Reddan, and Van C. Elsbernd (PFMc Professional Forest Management). “Wildfire Impact Analysis: 2020 North Complex, Camp Okizu.” Prepared for FCO Foresters, Inc. dba Forester’s Co-Op, September 2022 (Federal Tort Claims Act supporting document).

Contemporary incident reporting on the North Complex/Bear/Claremont Fire (2020), including Wildfire Today and Plumas News coverage of the September 3\u20139 firing operations and Red Flag Warning.

Ayars, J., Kramer, H.A., and Jones, G.M. “The 2020 to 2021 California megafires and their impacts on wildlife habitat.” PNAS 120: e2312909120.

Audubon and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reporting on California spotted owl habitat loss and the 2023 Endangered Species Act listing proposal.

Hanson, M.P., et al. “Disentangling post-fire logging and high-severity fire effects for spotted owls.” 2021, cited alongside Jones, G.M. et al., “Megafire causes persistent loss of an old-forest species,” Animal Conservation 24 (2021), representing the two sides of an ongoing scientific dispute.

News coverage of Canadian wildfire smoke events affecting the U.S. Midwest and East Coast, 2023 and 2026 (CNN, CBS News, ABC News, Fox Weather).

Reporting on the 2026 USDA Forest Service reorganization and headquarters relocation to Salt Lake City, including Stateline/News From The States, NRDC, and USDA press releases.

Contemporary news reporting on the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire and Tecolote Creek flooding (2022), and the January 2025 Los Angeles fires.

Contact: Frank Carroll, Vice President, National Wildfire Alliance

Email: Frank@wildfirePros.com

Phone: (605) 440-2039

The officers and Board of the National Wildfire Alliance are pleased to release the NWA Wildfire Suppression Support Card for the Seven Cabins Fire in the Lincoln National Forest, from May 14 to June 12, 2026.

Wildfire suppression policies are notoriously difficult to assess. Only evaluators with decades of experience and who have attained senior leadership and policy roles in the heat of battle can acquire the knowledge, experience, education, and insights needed to judge complex firefighting in real time and in the aftermath.

Our approach to grading an array of factors throughout the life of the fire—and in the aftermath, as post-fire flooding continues to damage downstream communities. What did leadership intend? How did IMTs meet those expectations? Did crews support Incident Commanders? What is the agency's mission, and how did the firefighters fulfill it?

The Wildfire Suppression Report Card is an earnest critique of wildfires on federal lands or those managed by federal incident management teams. The report also includes assessments of other factors. Did Hotshot crews perform as expected? Were issues involving private wildfire contractor companies and cooperators handled openly, considering cost, closest forces, and other merit factors?

Key Points:

• This Report Card does something most wildfire criticism doesn’t: it separates strategy from execution. The hotshot crews get a B−. The strategy that used them gets a D−. NWA is precise.

• Every grade is sourced — public incident reports, InciWeb, NIFC, the Lincoln National Forest’s own closure order and BAER release, and NWA’s independent panel review. Anything not independently verifiable is labeled as the panel’s professional judgment, not asserted as established fact.

• The comparison points are the 2026 Fire Season letters from the two Chiefs’ of the Federal Wildland firefighting organizations, in their own words: USDA Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz’s ‘keep fires small,’ USWFA Chief Brian Fennessey’s ‘full-suppression’ presumption. NWA is not inventing a standard — we are grading against the standard the agencies set for themselves for the 2026 wildfire season.

The Report Card is deliberately structured to critique the pre-May-30 strategy decision, not the incoming command team, which is credited with a disciplined course correction back toward suppression fundamentals. Where NWA cannot independently verify a claim beyond its own panel’s assessment, the document already labels it as such.

Finally, NWA’s experts serve—or have served—as expert consultants and expert witnesses for the plaintiffs or defendants in multiple legal matters across the West since 2010. Our professional opinions carry the weight of our experience and judgment. We indicate professional judgment where needed for clarity.

The agencies are welcome to comment or push back on the facts and findings. We offer the agencies a ‘right of reply’ before the Report Card goes public, and we are ready to publish any corrections transparently.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. We welcome comments.

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The Wildfire Suppression Report Card

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:us:11d76b6f-679d-4447-bbd6-63b4fa4ed433

Page 1 of 7 in the NWA Wildfire Suppression Report Card. Follow the link for the full Report Card. Frank Carroll image.

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Forester Catalina Vigil lines out Hotshot superintendents in initial attack on a fire threatening a local community. Illustration by Frank Carroll, PFMc. (Nano Banana 2)

There was a time, not so long ago, when the purpose of wildland fire suppression required no explanation. You put the fire out. You anchored, you flanked, you held the line with one foot in the black, and you did it while the fire was small and the window was open. That doctrine was not reckless. It was the most disciplined, most humane, and ultimately the safest approach we ever devised, because it committed a few well-trained people to a brief, controlled fight instead of committing thousands to a long, desperate one.

We have walked away from that, and we are paying for it in scorched watersheds, incinerated communities, and forests that will not return in our children’s lifetimes.

Somewhere along the way, the mission changed without anyone voting on it. Wildfire stopped being something we confront and became something we are told to live with, an ecological process to be managed, accommodated, and philosophized about. We replaced fire officers who believed it was their duty to fight fire with a generation that is no longer sure it should. We traded institutional courage for a checklist. And we dressed the whole retreat up in the language of safety.

That last part is the lie that deserves to be dragged into the light.

Safetyism Does Not Save Lives. It Moves the Body Count.

The prevailing culture insists that declining an aggressive initial attack keeps firefighters safe. It does no such thing. It simply relocates the hazard and delays the bill.

Casualties during a genuine initial attack are rare precisely because small fires offer the narrowest possible window of exposure. Crews move fast, engage decisively, and go home. The danger does not disappear when we choose not to fight. It compounds. Every hour we let a small fire grow is an hour we trade a short, controlled engagement for weeks or months of extended assignments, night operations, complex logistics, and defensive stands where crews are placed directly in the path of a running front.

There is no safety in watching a small fire become a large one. That decision does not protect anyone. It takes a manageable risk to a handful of skilled professionals and converts it into a prolonged, catastrophic risk to hundreds of responders, tens of thousands of civilians, and the communities we were sent to defend in the first place.

Safety is, and must remain, the first consideration. But safety without mission is not prudence. It is risk avoidance wearing a badge, and it works by quietly transferring danger from trained people operating under controlled conditions to families who never signed up for the fight and never got a vote.

The Strategy Is Being Hijacked from the Bottom

Here is what is actually happening on the ground, and it should alarm every citizen who lives downwind or downstream of a forest.

Elite crews are increasingly declining direct assignments, refusing to line and cold-trail a fire while it is small, and pushing instead to fall back and burn. The country is too steep, the packs are too heavy, the ground is too rough. Never mind that firefighters worked that same ground safely for decades. What we are witnessing is the selective refusal of lawful assignments being used to dictate large-fire strategy from the tactical level upward. The people best equipped to end a fire early are, too often, the ones talking themselves out of it.

This is not a personnel problem confined to a few crews. It is a doctrinal collapse. When the muscle memory of aggressive initial attack fades, new firefighters arrive without the training, the instinct, or the philosophical conviction to accept short-term exposure for long-term containment. Many of them, told repeatedly to get back to basics, genuinely do not know what the basics are. Anchor, flank, hold. The words land like a foreign language.

We did not lose these people to incompetence. We lost them to a culture that told them resources do not matter, that property is replaceable, that the forest will grow back in three centuries, and that their personal comfort outranks the mission. Somebody taught them to think that way. That is the real indictment.

The Good Fire Theology Has Costs

We are told this is all justified by ecology, that fire belongs on the landscape, that we are simply reintroducing a natural process to fire-dependent forests. There is truth buried in that idea, but it has curdled into dogma, and dogma is dangerous in the hands of emergency forces who need clear objectives, not seminars.

The science is no longer on the side of complacency. Recent research on these forests documents that the historically dominant low-severity fire is being replaced by high-severity, stand-replacing fire, now the most common type in some regions. These forests are increasingly burning at intensities they cannot survive. This is not the gentle, restorative good fire of the brochures. This is forest loss, with all the socioeconomic and hydrological devastation that follows: flooding, erosion, destroyed infrastructure, and communities left exposed for years after the smoke clears.

When we let small fires run in the name of ecology, we are not restoring anything. We are presiding over the conversion of living forests into moonscapes.

Leadership Has to Say the Hard Thing

None of this changes until leaders decide to lead.

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Supervisors at every level need the institutional backing and the personal nerve to demand adherence to the core tactical sequence when conditions allow it. That means being willing to confront the refusal to carry out a lawful assignment. It means being willing to replace a crew that repeatedly declines direct work, and to remove overhead who treat strategy as a negotiation rather than a command responsibility. It means leading by example instead of delegating risk downward while hedging behind doctrine.

And it means telling the public the truth: that when we fail to fight aggressively on the front end, we guarantee we will fight defensively on the back end, after the window has closed and the only options left are bad ones.

The choice before us is not comfort versus danger. It is which danger, borne by whom, and for how long. We can accept a short, sharp risk to three well-trained crews for three days in the rocks. Or we can refuse it and accept a long, grinding risk to twelve hundred firefighters, ten thousand civilians, thousands of acres of irreplaceable forest, and billions in infrastructure, because the packs were heavy and the ground was steep and we were afraid.

We forgot how to fight. Worse, we forgot why. Firefighters deserve to know their leaders, and the public still believes in the mission for which we send them into harm’s way. The forests, the watersheds, and the communities downstream are counting on us to remember before the next fire makes the decision for us.

Get back to the basics. Anchor, flank, and hold. One foot in the black. That is not the old way. It is the right way, and it always was.

Frank Carroll for the National Wildfire Alliance. Illustration: Forester Catalina Vigil rides among the ghosts of the Gila Wilderness, by Frank Carroll, PFMc. (Nano Banana Pro)

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