Living with wildfire has made the need for proactive forest management, coordinated fire response, and durable federal action impossible to ignore. 

Growing up on the coast of Oregon, my passion for hunting, fishing, and conservation began like many others who had the good fortune of living on a farm with ample land to explore. With a growing family of my own, in 2021, my wife and I stretched to buy land that borders BLM so that our kids can build those same experiences through backyard adventures.  

We also learned what it means to live in the wildland-urban interface. 

Filling the inflatable backyard pool while very large air tankers fly overhead has become a summer expectation. The kids see a place to swim, and we see a thousand gallons of backup water that could help protect our home if a wildfire reaches the canyon rim above us. 

As I write this, Oregon has become the center of the nation’s wildfire response. Dozens of large fires are burning; communities are under evacuation orders, and smoke is settling over much of central and eastern Oregon. The Northwest is at the highest national preparedness level, and Oregon has deployed its last available complex incident management team. We are not yet through July. This problem is no longer unique to the west either, as colleagues who work in the TRCP headquarters in D.C. stare through their office windows into an orange haze that’s encompassing the Capitol.  

Last summer, the Flat Fire burned within two miles of Sisters, eventually growing to more than 23,000 acres with more than 1,400 homes threatened. I watched and prayed as the fire reached our backyard and helicopters dropped water in view of our new home while airtankers laid retardant across the canyon. For weeks after, our small community was covered with thank-you signs and potlucks for the many firefighters that saved countless homes and stopped its forward progress. 

Across the West, summers increasingly involve watching smoke columns, checking evacuation maps, keeping trailers hitched, and wondering whether the next red-flag wind will send a fire toward home. 

But this “new reality” does not have to become the permanent definition of summer in the West. 

More Than One Problem 

There is no single cause of today’s wildfire crisis and there will never be a single solution. 

Warmer temperatures and reduced snowpack are lengthening the period when forests and rangelands can burn. Oregon entered this fire season after a widespread and severe snow drought like never before recorded. At the same time, more than a century of aggressive fire suppression has changed many forests that evolved with frequent, lower-intensity fire. In dry forests around communities like Sisters, dense stands and accumulated surface fuels can carry fire into the canopy and create conditions that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, for firefighters to control. 

Research has found that mechanical thinning followed by prescribed fire is generally the most effective combination for reducing fuels and fire hazards in degraded dry-conifer forests. It’s important to call out that not all fires are bad; in many forests, they are a natural and necessary part of the landscape. Carefully managed fire can improve forage, recycle nutrients, maintain open forest conditions, and create diverse habitat. 

The problem is the growing risk of uncharacteristically severe fire and warmer temperatures that threaten communities, degrade watersheds, eliminate habitat, and consume firefighting resources and funding needed elsewhere. 

Hunters and anglers see the consequences of uncharacteristic fire long after the smoke settles. Fires can close access, severe burns can eliminate winter range, accelerate invasive weeds, damage spawning habitat, and send ash and sediment into cold-water streams. At the same time, thinning, prescribed fire, and other active management can stimulate grasses, shrubs, and other forage that benefit deer and elk, while healthy wetlands, meadows, floodplains, and connected stream corridors retain water, provide refuge for wildlife, and make watersheds more resilient before, during, and after fire. 

That is why our response must extend beyond simply putting fires out. 

A New Fire Service Must Look Beyond Suppression 

This year, the Department of the Interior established the U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS) to unify wildfire prevention, suppression, and recovery across more than 500 million acres of Interior-administered and Tribal lands. The new organization represents a significant opportunity to improve coordination, modernize the federal response, and better support firefighters.  

Its success, however, cannot be measured only by how quickly aircraft arrive or how many fires are extinguished. 

Aggressive initial attack will always be necessary when lives, homes, infrastructure, and important natural resources are threatened. I am deeply grateful for the firefighters and pilots who have repeatedly stood between my community and disaster. 

But the country cannot suppress its way out of the wildfire crisis. 

The new service must remain closely coordinated with the Forest Service, Interior land-management agencies, Tribes, states, counties, rural fire departments, private landowners, and restoration partners. Separating wildfire response from land management could reinforce the suppression-focused approach that contributed to today’s conditions. 

Fire management is an important part of holistic land management for healthy forests and rangelands. Decisions about fuels and fire affect elk habitat, trout streams, municipal water supplies, recreation access, grazing lands, timber resources, and the long-term health of public lands. To be successful, the new USWFS should help connect emergency response to the work needed before a fire: prescribed and cultural burning, strategic thinning, invasive-species control, watershed and wet-meadow restoration, community preparation, and maintenance of previously treated landscapes. 

That coordination must continue after the flames are out. Post-fire work should be invested in to protect soils and streams, limit invasive plants, restore fish and wildlife habitat, and help native forests regenerate where possible. Repeated high-severity fire, drought, and invasive species can push some landscapes beyond their ability to recover as forests. Responding faster is important, but preventing ecological type conversion and sustaining fire-adapted habitats must also be measures of success. 

This broader mission requires more than a new organizational chart. Land-management agencies still need foresters, wildlife and fisheries biologists, hydrologists, prescribed-fire specialists, contracting officers, and local employees who understand the landscapes they manage. States, Tribes, local governments, collaboratives, rural mills, and private contractors are essential partners, but they cannot replace a capable federal workforce. 

A Different Kind of Summer Is Possible 

I do not expect wildfire to disappear from Central Oregon. Nor should it. We live in a fire-adapted landscape, and learning to live with fire is part of living here. 

But that should not mean accepting increasingly destructive fires as inevitable or remaining indoors for weeks each summer when smoke fills the air. 

It should mean creating defensible space around homes, restoring natural fire to appropriate landscapes, thinning overgrown forests, connecting fire and fuels projects to the many co-benefits they provide to wildlife and watersheds, supporting firefighters, and ensuring agencies have the people and resources to act before an emergency begins. 

At TRCP, we are working with conservation organizations, forest collaboratives, businesses, and elected officials from both parties to advance those solutions. That includes supporting the Fix Our Forests Act, engaging the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, working closely with the U.S. Forest Service on projects and planning decisions, advocating for stable agency capacity and wildfire funding, and ensuring that forest-health projects also benefit fish, wildlife, and public access. 

As I listen to our three kids splashing and yelling out in that simple, summer-time joy, coupled with the air traffic above our home speeding to the ongoing fire, I am reminded how much is at stake. We owe it to the many firefighters working all summer away from their families and to the places we hunt, fish, and call home, to find solutions at scale. Before the next column of smoke rises.

Learn more about the Fix Our Forests Act HERE

Two TRCP voices, one in the West living with fire directly, one in the East experiencing its smoke, on what this fire season means for hunters, anglers and the forests we depend on.

Read: A Dispatch from NY: This Isn’t Someone Else’s Fire Season Anymore  | Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership