Fire and Forest

Fire has shaped North American forests for millennia. It maintains forest resilience and habitat diversity. Countless species of plants and animals depend on fire-created habitats to survive.

After colonization, European settlers began suppressing indigenous burning and wildfires. Without it, forests grew unnaturally dense, and eventually fires became larger and more severe. A new era of megafires now threatens vast swaths of forests, the rivers that flow from them, and the wildlife that inhabit them.

Today, land managers, firefighters, and scientists are working desperately to reintroduce fire to fire-dependent ecosystems. Doing this in forests requires thinning trees to pre-suppression densities first. Then, firefighters can introduce fire under conditions that keep the fire low in intensity. When we return natural fire, the land rebounds with abundance.

For the last eight years, I’ve documented fire-dependent ecosystems to help conservation organizations restore them. After a century of fire suppression, there are now many barriers to returning fire to the landscape. One of the largest is a societal fear of fire, which is driven largely by a lack of understanding of fire’s diverse and beneficial effects. By showing those effects, along with the benefits of prescribed fire, I hope to foster an acceptance of prescribed fire and other forms of management necessary for the restoration of fire-dependent ecosystems.

In 2021, I launched Fireforest, a long-term exploration of forest fire and restoration in Colorado.