Media Distortion of SW Indigenous Fire Management

A  new paper, Indigenous fire management and cross-scale fire climate relationships in the Southwest United States from 1500 to 1900 CE,  was recently published. Based on solid scientific research, it makes the important point that indigenous fire management was local rather than landscape or forest scale in nature.”

Media response has characterized Indigenous burning as somehow a major feature of the landscape and implies if Indians hadn’t been suppressed or eliminated, we would not have large landscape blazes. A few representative media articles are below.

Though prescribed or cultural burning may have strategic value, it is not going to be a solution to climate-driven fires, which are the result of human-induced climate warming. Beyond the fact that Indian burning never did mitigate climate-driven landscape-scale fires as detailed in the paper, there are huge limitations on using prescribed fire.

As one of the news media reports says: “Devastating megafires are becoming more common, in part, because the planet is warming. But a new study led by SMU suggests bringing “good fire” back to the U.S. and other wildfire fire-prone areas, as Native Americans once did, could potentially blunt the role of climate in triggering today’s wildfires.”

However, if you read the study, it doesn’t say this. More on what the study said is below.

In this study, there are a number of problematic issues that readers should be aware of.

One is that they list Navajo livestock grazing as part of the “Indigenous fire management,” a detail that does not come across in the numerous media articles. Of course, if overgrazing by livestock is part of the traditional ecological knowledge of the tribe, they have no insights that later ranchers also practiced to the detriment of the landscape.

Another problem is that they specifically focused research on areas of higher Indian population centers and landscape use. This could bias the study in numerous ways, again increasing the influence of native burning in specific areas which may have been localized rather than across the landscape. The sites they reviewed were small 5-100 ha.

The research depended on fire scar studies which are problematic for several reasons.

The media also assume that high-severity fires are “bad” and must be avoided, and they continuously assume that Indigenous burning contributed to “healthy” forests.  The media has adopted the narrative that if we only initiated widespread Indian cultural burning or prescribed fires, somehow high severity blazes would be precluded.

One has to ask how did these forests (like ponderosa pine which has existed for 55 million years) survive all those millions of years without human intervention? If forest health is dependent on human manipulation, this is problematic since human presence in NA is relatively recent, most likely less than 15,000 years.

Finally, even in their results, they acknowledge that climate was the major influence on fire in the region–though you would not get this impression from all the media summaries. Below are key quotes from the paper that contradict or at the least soften the conclusions of the media that Indigenous burning is the panacea for preventing large wildfires.

“Across the entire Southwest U.S. dataset (N = 4824 trees and
N = 451 sites; table S1) and over the entire record from 1500 to
1900 CE, climate exerted strong controls on fire activity. Seasonal
climate was significantly wetter in 1 to 3 years before regional
fires (>10% trees scarred) and significantly warmer and drier
during the year of fires, corroborating previous observations
(Fig. 1, C to G) (11, 21).”

“Local sites were grouped by cultural landscape to examine variability
in site-level fire-climate patterns across the three different
landscape contexts. At these small (ca. 5 to 100 ha) local scales,
climate drivers of fire were rarely significant during periods of intensive
cultural use but were more consistently significant at most
sites during periods of light use.”

“Using cultural periods of intensive and light use to partition the
Southwest U.S. regional-scale dataset (all 4824 trees across the
region), every period demonstrated the canonical pattern of signifi
cantly wetter climate in the 1 to 3 years before fire, and significant
drought during the fire year, regardless of the intensity of use
(Fig. 4). Therefore, the influence of Indigenous burning on fire
climate relationships is undetectable at this scale”

And below is a key phrase from the study acknowleding that human use and thus influence was not across the entire landscape because, just like now, people are drawn to certain areas to exploit resources, and large areas are seldom visited. The idea that Indians “managed” the North America landscape with fire is a gross simplification. Yet this is often used by anti park and anti wilderness advocates to suggest there is no such place of “self-willed” land because Indians were setting fires everywhere.The results of human influence were variable depending on the timing and locations of the most intensive Indigenous fire management.

“human influences results from variability in the timing and locations
of the most intensive Indigenous fire management. Land
use was spatially heterogeneous because the resources that people
used and managed were not evenly distributed, generating considerable
spatial variability in human impacts on ignitions and fuels.”

Most studies purporting that Indian fire was a significant factor on the land extrapolate from localized studies and assume this fire regime was applied broadly across the land.”

“at a given cultural landscape, the number of local sites with muted climate drivers was always lower as the geographic scale broadened”