'Megafires' spark fresh thinking

Surrounded by forest, we should get fired up about fire.  

The room at Flathead Valley Community College packed out early last month for the FireSafe Flathead event where the presenter had to give the talk virtually because his house had burned nine months ago in central Washington and he was busy rebuilding. Conversational but skilled at delivering a mountain of data and modeling culled from about 40 leading institutions, Paul Hessburg may have been remote, but he also managed to be riveting. 

The longtime research ecologist, now working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, noted that there were about 72,000 fire starts in 2025. 

Hessburg provided background for how American forests got to be so fire prone as well as ideas for action for a more fire-wise future. First, he called out as myth: “We can live without fire.” 

Humans used to view fire as a friend, one that resulted in more patchy landscape and open canopy conditions. Blackened areas can’t carry a flame, and nonforest elements — prairie, grassland, wetlands and shrublands — also make excellent human, bear, elk and other ungulate forage. 

“We have to be thinking about the patch sizes in the landscape,” Hessburg said, pointing out that “we’re well over carrying capacity in forests now.” That resulted in the record-breaking number of fire starts last year, for which the stage was set over the last 250 years. 

According to Hessburg, greatly reduced Indigenous burning — as a result of reduced populations, brought on by inadvertent and intentionally introduced smallpox and other factors — took a toll, as did draining of wetlands for agricultural production and livestock. Then the new practice of fire suppression meant that fire was generally excluded from American forests, which subsequently filled with fuels primed to burn and dense canopy that attracted beetles. 

Now, with summer “projected to last nearly half a year by 2100, pinching out spring and fall,” Hessburg said we should revisit the mindset and management of the first peoples tending the land. “They used fire to live safely.” 

This was the right room to learn these things, packed as it was with representatives from state and federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, as well as county staff and owners of private acreage. How able they could be to carry out some of these ideas is another matter. 

Among Hessburg’s solutions: increase the burn window, create more patchy areas, re-establish hardwoods and bring back sawmills. He also mentioned the importance of working closely with neighbors and tribal partners to create a more resilient landscape. 

“This isn’t the forestry I was taught,” he said, having cut his teeth logging in Minnesota. “This kind of understanding has rocked my world, but the tools are fantastic.”

Pressure builds on other fronts, too, to improve land — and therefore fire — management practices. Hessburg pointed to megafires’ outsize health and other effects, saying, “Insurance and human health are going to drive the bus in the future.”  

Hessburg called the idea of a “zero-risk environment” another myth. “We spend billions of dollars a year putting out fires,” he said. “It’s crazy.” 

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.