On September 29th, the National Park Service announced one hundred percent containment of the Dragon Bravo Fire, a megafire that for nearly three months had ravaged Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. The largest fire in the United States this fire season, Dragon Bravo burned 145,000 acres and 113 structures, most notably the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim.
Long before the fire was extinguished, controversy had flared up surrounding the approach the Fire Service may have employed to contain it. This strategy, known alternatively as managed wildfire, modified containment, or, more colloquially, the “let it burn” approach, entails allowing wildfires to burn within a contained area, in order to reap the benefits they provide to the landscape, including protection against future catastrophic fires.
Some say the strategy is risky. Others, like fire ecologist and prescribed burn expert Lenya Quinn-Davidson ‘04, say that without managed wildfire we likely won’t solve California’s growing wildfire crisis. Managed wildfire may be tricky to implement, but Quinn-Davidson says the real challenge is convincing people we need it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For over a century, the government employed a strategy of total fire suppression in California, one of the biggest drivers of our current wildfire crisis. Could you paint a picture of what the wildfire regime in California was like before European settlement and contrast that with what we see today?
Whether in forest, woodlands, or grasslands, a large proportion of California was historically adapted to high frequency of fire, maybe on the order of every five to ten years. And that frequent fire reduced vegetation density and kept things open and resilient. When fires would burn through, they wouldn’t actually kill all the mature vegetation. That was why the forests of early California were so incredible when people came here and they saw these huge trees that were widely spaced and the park-like conditions that people described. That was fire. Fire kept those forests healthy and open, and the trees big and strong and resilient.
But what we’ve seen as a result of forest management and fire exclusion is that those fire regimes have really changed, and that’s having some serious implications. We’re seeing a lot more high severity fire.
As I understand it, part of the problem is that while today’s fires are more intense, we’re actually seeing far less acreage burned overall. Is that right?
Right. Scott Stevens at UC Berkeley published a paper years ago where he compiled a bunch of fire history studies and estimated that, pre-European settlement in California, anywhere between four and eleven million acres would burn every year. As a reference point, 2020 was touted as one of our biggest wildfire years in recorded history in California at 4.2 million acres. So that was actually on the low end of the historical area burned in California annually.
Most of California is going to burn in wildfire before we get to it with any other kind of fuels treatment.
Prescribed burn is a huge focus of your work, but that’s just one strategy under the larger umbrella category of strategies known as beneficial fire. How does managed wildfire fit into that?
There are three legs of the beneficial fire stool. One is prescribed fire. Another is cultural burning by indigenous folks. And the other one is managed wildfire, which is the notion that [natural] wildfire can also be beneficial if it’s burning under the right kinds of conditions.
We have thousands of wildfires that start every year in California under mild and moderate conditions. And those are the ones we can easily put out. And so we just go put them out. And the ones that we can’t put out are the ones that burn under extremely severe conditions, under high winds when it’s really dry and we literally cannot put them out. Those end up burning most of the acreage in California.
We need to ask, how can we leverage those fires that happen under mild and moderate conditions, that basically act like prescribed fire? If they were allowed to burn, they would achieve outcomes that are similar to prescribed fire.
Prescribed fire is hugely important and has a lot of support and it’s very well accepted at this point, but it’s not going to solve the problems at the larger landscape level without having managed wildfire be a component of that.
How does managed wildfire currently fit into California’s overall fire strategy?
Well honestly, I think that managed wildfire is kind of the elephant in the room for the whole fire conversation in California. The reality that many of us don’t talk about or face in a real way is that most of California is going to burn in wildfire before we get to it with any other kind of fuels treatment like prescribed fire. And we just saw that with the Teakettle Forest in the Southern Sierra. It’s an experimental forest owned by the Forest Service with a lot of old growth. It’s highly valued for its ecological and forest values. And they got a $5.7 million dollar grant from Cal Fire a few years ago to do a big prescribed burn there to protect that forest from future wildfires. And last month it burned in its entirety in the Garnet Fire, a high severity fire, before they could implement the grant at all.
And so it’s a good example of how we can say we’re going to do something, but there are so many barriers in place and it takes so long to plan projects and to get the people involved. And a lot of these places are burned in wildfire before we ever get to them.
That’s kind of heartbreaking.
It’s super heartbreaking. There are some people who have poured a lot of their careers into that forest and into that project. Now it’s burned at high severity and a lot of it’s predicted to be dead. And these are old growth trees so… I think that’s why managed wildfire is such an important part of the conversation.
Both prescribed burn and managed wildfire involve some degree of risk of the fire escaping the planned boundaries and burners or firefighters losing control. When you speak to legislators and community members, you’ve said these fears often come up. How do you address their concerns?
I point to the data. We can look at the rate of damages from prescribed fire. How often do these prescribed burns escape control? It’s a pretty small number. We have data that put it anywhere between .02% and 1% of prescribed burns that escape and where you need to call in additional resources to get them under control. But an important nuance of that is that most of them don’t cause damage. It may be that it burns a couple extra acres. An escaped burn does not imply that anything was damaged or anyone was hurt.
I did a survey of burns conducted by Prescribed Burn Associations in California between 2019 and 2024. I think it was 486 burn projects with zero escapes and zero damages to people’s property. And the same goes for the California Prescribed Fire Claims Fund [which provides liability coverage for burn projects]. It’s been active for more than two years now, and we’ve had hundreds of projects enroll. And we’ve had no claims against it. We’re seeing an incredible success rate with this work.
But the other piece is helping people understand that when we do have damaging escapes, (there was an example in New Mexico a few years ago), they are few and far between. The real liability is the vulnerability on the landscape that we’ve created by poor management of our forests. It’s misguided to blame the prescribed burn or wildfire that burns through the super vulnerable overstocked forest that’s been a casualty of fire exclusion for the last 150 years. It’s like if you’re really unhealthy and so you go for a run and have a heart attack. The run didn’t kill you. These are human decisions that have gotten us to this point. We are responsible for the health of our landscapes. And so the more we can do to be proactive and to create more resilient landscapes the better. The main thing that’s going to make these forests more resilient is to get fire back into them.
We can’t shut down really successful programs when they make one mistake.
I could imagine someone rebutting that argument by acknowledging that, as you say, today’s forests are vulnerable to high intensity fires, but arguing that that makes prescribed burning all the more risky.
The cool thing about prescribed fire is that we can control when we do it. That’s not to say people don’t make mistakes and do it at the wrong time. Humans make mistakes. But in general, with prescribed burn we have so much control over when and how we want it to burn. We can really decide to burn under certain conditions and, in a vulnerable forest, we can go in multiple times and kinda chip away at it. That’s the art of this work. That’s the beauty of it.
In the case of this summer’s Dragon Bravo Fire in the Grand Canyon, there’s some lack of clarity about what happened and whether mistakes were made by the Forest Service. But either way, it got a lot of press, and I could see how it could become a poster child for the dangers of managed wildfire.
My understanding is that they were expecting some moisture that didn’t come. They have very different weather than we do here in California. We have extended drought throughout the summer and into the fall. And that’s not true in most of the country. So we can’t make generalizations necessarily about decision making at a weather or season scale.
The thing about this fire, from talking with some of the people I know that worked in the Grand Canyon for many years, is that they do this kind of thing all the time. This is not some out-of-the-blue project. They have had a ton of successful managed wildfires in the Grand Canyon. They’re actually one of the standout programs for that. So I think it’s important to also view it in a larger context. They’ve managed fire in that place for a long time, and it’s one of their big successes as a program.
And I assume it’ll continue.
Yeah, I hope so. We can’t shut down really successful programs when they make one mistake. That would be a bad decision, I would say. We have to learn and grow and adapt, but you can’t shut things down anytime something goes wrong.
We have to accept that there’s some inherent risk in this work. I don’t know what the best way to communicate that is, because it doesn’t seem like people are grasping the idea that we’re actively selecting for high severity fire right now by putting out all the fires that would have beneficial impacts. And then we let these high severity fires burn because we have no other choice. But in the climate changing scenario, where we’re getting more of those extreme weather days every year where we have that confluence of high winds and extreme dryness, we’re going to keep having more of those extreme events that we’re selecting for. So it’s in our best interest to start selecting for better fire.
Is it fair to say that at this point the conversation about managed wildfire is a more difficult one to have than prescribed burning?
Oh yeah. Prescribed fire is not controversial. It has broad public support. People understand that we need it. Managed wildfire is in a very different place. It remains incredibly controversial, and many people don’t really even know what it is. It had a name in the past that people still latch onto that was the “let it burn” policy. And that’s a misnomer. It makes it really hard to tell the story of managed wildfire.
All wildfires are under some kind of containment strategy. If you talk to people who work in operational fire suppression, they’re not using that terminology. It’s all just different flavors of fire suppression. It’s either, we’re gonna suppress that fire immediately because it’s in a high risk area next to a community. Or it’s gonna be, that’s rugged country. We can’t get crews there. So there’s no real category of managed wildfire that’s easy to point to or easy to talk about. And so it makes it hard to talk about the benefits of it too. They’re all just wildfires and someone’s managing all of them. It’s always an active response.
So the task at hand is really how can we leverage the most benefit out of it too? Yes, let’s suppress it. Let’s confine it. Let’s contain it. But let’s also, if it’s burning under good conditions, get some treatment out of it.
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Coby McDonald, M.J. ’17, is a freelance writer and podcast producer based in his hometown of Berkeley.
