Fighting Fire with Fire
Why Planned ‘Burns’ Can Avert Disastrous Wildfires in the Western US
For generations, Americans have been taught to think of wildfire as an enemy: Flames “destroy” acres, firefighters “battle” blazes, and successful fire management means extinguishing fire as quickly as possible.
But a growing body of fire science suggests that this familiar story is incomplete—and, in some landscapes, dangerously backward.
Fire is an essential ecological process in many North American ecosystems. Some forests evolved with frequent, low-intensity burns that cleared accumulated vegetation, recycled nutrients, and helped maintain resilient landscapes.
Yet more than a century of man-made “fire exclusion”—a policy to not start controlled burns and quickly suppress any known fires—combined with logging, grazing, development in fire-prone areas, drought, and a warming climate, has profoundly altered many fire regimes.
The Case for Prescribed Burning
Wildfire experts across the country are now building a case for using prescribed fire to help address the wildfire threat. In an online discussion on the issue with the author and a group of experts, Michelle Greiner, a senior research associate with the Public Lands Policy Group at Colorado State University, explained that countering fire with fire has been an essential part of a forest’s cycle since time immemorial.
“We have fire-adapted forests that are accustomed to fire in the West—it’s about correcting this misconception that fire is a negative,” Greiner said.
“In prehuman times, [fires] would burn naturally at a really low level. It was when we started excluding fire from these landscapes that we [became] at larger risk of crown fires,” she said, referring to the deadly wildfires that speed through the tops—or crowns—of trees in a forest.
“These forests are supposed to have wildfires in their regime,” she said. “Since we have removed that from the system, we have created the opportunity for bigger, more catastrophic wildfires that aren’t part of their natural regime.”
Addressing Fire Deficit
A 2025 Nature Communications study found that a widespread “fire deficit” persists across diverse North American forests, despite recent increases in acreage burned. Using more than 1,800 tree-ring, fire-scar sites, researchers found that the 2020 fire year burned about 6% of the study sites—approximately the historical average and far below the 29% that burned in 1748.
A 2025 Nature Communications study found that a widespread “fire deficit” persists across diverse North American forests, despite recent increases in acreage burned.
To redress the fire deficit balance, James Johnston, a fire ecology expert at the University of Oregon, explained that prescribed burns are needed to remove the fuel a fire needs.
“It may seem counterintuitive that we would use fire to fight fire, but it is actually the most effective way to prevent forest fire, particularly in the western United States,” said Johnston, who is an assistant research professor in the university’s Institute for Resilient Organizations, Communities, and Environments.
“What’s driving large and severe wildfire is the accumulation of dead fuel on the forest floor,” he said.
Johnston cleared up another common misconception about wildfire: “It’s sort of a ‘fun fact’ about forest fires that what most people don’t appreciate is that it is not necessarily live trees that are burning; in fact, a very small percentage of the live tree is combusted in a fire event.”
He added that burning is more effective than raking, collecting, or vacuuming to remove the highly flammable forest floor litter that has accumulated over decades. “So prescribed fire is actually the key to mitigating the effects of fast-moving wildfire in the western United States.”
Challenges to At-Scale Application
Despite prescribed fires being acknowledged as the best way to prevent an out-of-control wildfire, they are not being set at the proper size.
“One of the significant challenges is the capacity to set prescribed fire on the scales that are necessary. There are millions of hectares of land out in the western United States that are extremely vulnerable to fast-moving, high-severity wildfires as a result of fuel accumulation, and we really need prescribed fires across millions of hectares,” Johnston said.
“Unfortunately, due to a variety of regulatory restrictions and, more importantly, a lack of agency capacity, we are typically only treating tens of thousands of hectares a year; we are very much behind in terms of applying prescribed fire on the necessary spatial scales,” he added.
“We are very much behind in terms of applying prescribed fire on the necessary spatial scales.”
Greiner added that a lack of resources, equipment, and staff is a specific barrier to burns in California—something she believes is true across the West.
“To prepare for a burn, you have to have proper equipment and staffing in place, but across the board this is really strained. If there happens to be an active wildfire, a lot of staff that were originally assigned to prescribed fires are typically pulled off onto the wildfire—this is a key barrier we hear,” she said.
Another barrier is the atmospheric condition.
“Aside from funding and capacity challenges, I think there are limitations of burn windows—the time of year that is appropriate to burn doesn’t always align with when air quality windows are good. In California, there might be a day when conditions look good for air quality for health reasons, but it is not necessarily a good window to burn,” said Greiner.
Jess Downey, manager of the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice at the University of Oregon, added that Oregon faces other difficulties: “The season between the spring burning and the wildfire season is shortening … [and] the wildfire season is going longer—so there are some challenges there, too.”
Risks Involved
Johnston added that there are two basic risks to a prescribed fire. First, that it escapes control, but this is a really low risk, he said.
“The second risk is smoke production. Prescribed fire does involve smoke, which can impact vulnerable populations, but the impact of this smoke is significantly less than smoke from wildfires, and furthermore it tends to reduce the impact of smoke from large wildfires. Those are the basic trade-offs we need to evaluate.”
He added: “The major benefit of a prescribed fire is we get to choose the time and the place, and we can often pick weather windows when smoke is being transported away from communities or when atmospheric conditions mean that wind disperses smoke instead of trapping it over human communities.”
“The major benefit of a prescribed fire is we get to choose the time and the place, and we can often pick weather windows when smoke is being transported away from communities.”
Alerting Communities
Downey, whose research looks at the intersections between smoke and public health, explained that when notifying a community about a prescribed fire, public health concerns about smoke need to be addressed.
“What we hear from some communities is that they view smoke preparedness for prescribed burn season as preparation for wildfire season—making sure you know what to do and have what you need to reduce your smoke exposure,” she said.
Pre-fire health messaging might include telling the public how to set up a box fan filter for smoke, where to purchase an air purifier, or when to change the filter.
“It’s important to have more communication, outreach, and connection with public health,” she said. “Public health is well connected with community-based organizations. They know the events to go to and people to reach out to in the community.”
Getting Community Buy-in
Downey’s colleague, Heidi Huber Sterns, director of the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice at the University of Oregon, added: “Even when people understand the role and benefits of prescribed fire, their fatigue from repeated air-quality events can shape how they respond to it. Clear, actionable guidance about what to do can help people feel more prepared when smoke is present."
And when people understand the purpose of a prescribed fire, they are usually in favor of it, Downey said.
“When [researchers] ask about public perception of prescribed fire, what we found in the peer-reviewed literature is generally support, particularly when prescribed fire is framed as a tool for forest health and wildfire risk reduction,” Downey said.
In California, citizens seem to understand the paradox of using fire to fight fire, Greiner said.
“Largely in our work in California, the public has generally been more supportive [of prescribed burning], especially over the last couple of years when we have had a few really bad fire seasons,” Greiner said. “This has helped people to come around to the idea of prescribed fire. However, investing in education and public outreach is still really important, and we are continuing to pursue that.”
Johnston outlined challenges they still face: Climate change is a challenge, as well as “past land-use history, which has left us a ton of accumulated fuel on the ground,” he said. “But the overarching challenge here is of politics. We are navigating a really polarized political system in order to craft wise natural-resource policies.”
*Gordon Cairns is a freelance journalist and teacher of English at the Forest Schools, based in Scotland.
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