Amid Foil-Wrapped Sequoias, Encouraging Signs of a Shift from Old Firefighting Norms

The aluminum shields for living landmarks hide wider work cutting wildfire risk where it matters most and letting the flames flow where needed most.

Sep 21, 2021

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Originally posted September 2021 -

As the climate scientist Daniel Swain tweeted on Monday night, Tuesday presented a rare reprieve in yet another grueling western wildfire year (don't think of it as a fire season) - with no dangerous fire weather in sight across North America.

There've been devastating losses for dozens of communities and more are surely nigh, so it's worth reviewing some wider lessons from the most recent news-making conflagration - the KNP Complex Fire.

Over the weekend, this fire threatened some of the greatest of the greats - the ancient sequoias of The Giant Forest, an 1,880-acre segment of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park more than a mile up in the Sierra Nevada east of Fresno, California. The flames there are still being managed by dozens of fire crews right now and likely into next month, according to the latest advisories. The Windy Fire, further south, has moved through several sequoia groves including one along the popular Trail of 100 Giants.

In the Windy Fire, a firefighter sprays the base of a giant sequoia. (Photo by Mike McMillan, BIA.gov, who also took the banner photo above in the same area.)

What's most notable so far is that a combination of decades of controlled burning in this part of the park system and discrete preemptive actions at points of greatest risk - including wrapping some trees in special foil - seems likely to have cut odds of a repeat of what happened last year in the catastrophic Castle Fire. (No one is calling victory yet this year because thorough damage assessments can't get under way while the fires are actively being managed.)

Park manager inspects giant sequoias killed by the 2020 Castle Fire in the Board Camp Grove, Sequoia National Park. (Photo, NPS / Anthony Caprio)

Last year was a traumatic one for sequoias and those who cherish them. In its initial report on the impacts of the Castle Fire, issued this summer, the National Park Service estimated that the mortality of mature trees in that one fire was so extensive that the losses amounted to "10 to 14 percent of all large sequoias across the tree’s natural range in the Sierra Nevada."

Imagine, for comparison, if COVID-19 had killed 10 percent of America's 55 million senior citizens.

Read or listen to Lauren Sommer's great NPR report on that ecological disaster, in which the sharp nudge from climate change almost surely played a role.

Emerging takeaways this year

Here are some wider emerging themes, with more detail from experts below:

If you treasure something like giant sequoias, work hard to cut risk of truly catastrophic fire by restoring the frequent-fire rhythm this species evolved with to its rightful place in the ecosystem. Give these fire-resistant trees a chance, and they may even outlast us.
Deploy what fire managers call "point protection" around the assets you care most about, whether built or biological, while letting fire flow elsewhere.
Stop fixating on fire size. The West is big, and huge areas need to burn after a century of suppression. Focus on reducing fire risk, not fire extent.
And, as always, work hard to slow human-driven global warming, which is worsening heat and dryness in the West in ways that intensify fires and can limit the viability of both these forests and the communities around them.
But don't think stopping warming will stop fires in a region where combustion is as natural as occasional seismic jolts - and so much risk has piled up through fire suppression and the "expanding bull's eye" of settlement in western danger zones. As the United States Geological Survey fire ecologist Jon Keeley put it in a 2012 film called Living with Fire, "Nobody talks about trying to stop earthquakes. Wildfires require the same kind of approach.”

Here's my deeper take.

Don't be distracted by foil

You've likely seen images of the insulating wrapping that firefighters draped around several landmark sequoias in the Giant Forest, including "General Sherman" - thought by experts to be the world's biggest tree (and organism) by volume. The same layered material has been protecting built structures, as well, although it has limits (it fails facing extremely hot, long-duration fire).

Wrapping the "General Sherman" sequoia in the Giant Forest (National Park Service photo)

The same treatment was given to other iconic trees, including the Four Guardsmen, as photographed and tweeted by Matt Mehle, a National Weather Service meteorologist serving on the front lines providing hour-by-hour weather insights to inform strategies for managing the fires.

Protective wrap was draped on several landmark sequoias as a fire entered the Giant Forest, part of Sequoia National Park. (Photo from a tweet by Matt Mehle, National Weather Service)

This is a simple form of protection and certainly made for a great media moment. But does it matter? After all, these amazing sequoias evolved with, and depend on, fire. The bark of the giant sequoia is both extremely fire resistant and shock resistant. Here's a scan from a 2020 open-access paper by Thomas Speck at the University of Freiburg and colleagues who have been studying sequoia bark for a decade as a model for future lightweight fiber-reinforced concrete:

I sought input from Stephen J. Pyne, the nation's preeminent historian of wildland fire (read his new book, details below) and a former wildland firefighter.

He was under-impressed with the aluminum wrapping but encouraged by the way the Park Service and other agencies were handling this year's sequoia fires.

"Three of America's first four national parks were established for giant sequoias," Pyne said. "We need to do whatever it takes to protect those groves. Wrapping may be appropriate, but it also suggests that wildlands can be treated like cities, that an urban model can be projected onto the countryside, a strategy that has failed. Happily, the groves have been thinned and burned, but far less burning than the historic record shows. So far the KNP Complex is shaping up as a nice contrast to Castle Fire."

He said a shift in thinking and practices is well under way from the days when all focus was on "fighting" fire, but noted wildland fire is still largely seen as a series of unfortunate events to which agencies and communities respond instead of a landscape and ecosystem process shaped by mingled human and natural systems.

I also reached out to Crystal I. Kolden, a University of California, Merced, fire scientist who also trained as a wildland firefighter. She said the layered covering could well have worked, but more from cutting chances that flames could climb the trunk than blocking heat.

"The wrapping is actually the product of an antiquated notion that the fire burns hot enough at the base to radiate into the cambium and kill it," Kolden said. "More recent science has shown that doesn't actually happen, but it certainly can still help reduce the likelihood that fire licks up the bark and gets into the crown."

A welcome shift from fighting fire to guiding it

In a text exchange, Kolden stressed the importance of looking beyond the flashy foil at the wider fire-management strategy used by the National Park Service in this case (I've cleaned up some shorthand):

"The tree wrapping is a great example of the Park Service doing what we advocate for everywhere: point protection and living with fire. They aren't trying to stop the fire.... Rather, they are letting the fire burn gently through and around the trees and historic structures they are protecting. This is point protection. Straight from the Indigenous fire playbook, but brought to the 21st century with aluminum foil wrap and some hand tools. And facilitated by four decades of prescribed fire that gives them the option to focus on point protection. In general, preparedness gives you options. In this case, it gives them the option to shut down the park to mitigate visitor-safety concerns, protect the top values at risk, and let fire play the ecological role it has for millennia."

It's worth including an image from one of the prescribed burns undertaken in the Giant Forest in 2011.

A prescribed burn in Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, 2011. (NPS photo / Anthony Caprio)

There's an enormous amount of backlogged burning to do and, sadly, more events like the Castle Fire are still inevitable in the meantime. But a shift is slowly getting under way. For a case study, read Laura Bliss's Bloomberg CityLab story on the role prescribed fire appears to have played in preventing the Caldor Fire from devastating the Lake Tahoe region.

But, as Crystal Kolden's research shows, overall the West saw a decline in efforts to fight uncontrolled fire with planned fire from the late 1990s through 2019.

There are enormous legal, political and climatic barriers to expanding prescribed fire where it's needed most. Lisa Dale, who teaches sustainable development at the Columbia Climate School and has worked in fire policy in the West for many years, laid out the realities in an email:

"The reality is there is very limited use for prescribed fire across the West for some very good reasons. For example, any planned fire has to get air quality permits from the state, which is always held to Clean Air Act particulate standards. So if the air is already bad for any number of reasons, the agency will deny the planned fire. Another reason is we have ever-shrinking windows of weather opportunity. You can’t burn when it’s too hot, too windy, or too dry, and we all know that describes most days in the West. Fire behavior is just too erratic under those conditions. As more and more people move into the [wildland urban interface] WUI, the risks of having a prescribed fire escape increase. I’m not surprised that the use of this tool has decreased."

I know more than a few wildfire experts who bridle at the pollution restrictions. There's no Clean Air Act violation when an unmanaged forest ends up burning "naturally"... I'll write more on that issue and other angles in the months ahead.

Focus on fire risk, not size

Both Kolden and Pyne say there's still a vital need to change how fire information is conveyed.

Pyne says things are better than in 1988 when fighting fire was still the norm, rather than accepting its essential place in western ecosystems.

One key is getting past headlines and official statements that focus on size. Kolden has been invaluably and repeatedly using social media to prod agencies, officials and media dealing with fire to change what they put in the foreground.

She made this point in an August Twitter thread building on two very different fires - one devastating but tiny, another huge and basically good. Here's an excerpt but please read and share the whole thread:

"I constantly bring this up because too often the focus is about preventing all fires (impossible) or keeping them small (also impossible), when it should be about mitigating disasters by reducing fire severity and supporting beneficial fire (absolutely possible to achieve)."
She added:
“We need to get over our obsession with size. Focus on what is at risk and what is not.”

[Insert, 9/21, 9:30 p.m.] On Twitter, Evan Frost, a forest and fire ecologist from the region, made an important point about considering the role logging history plays in the fire threat that's grown in areas outside the long-protected park groves. Please read his thread here.

And here's a great Twitter string on the importance of fire characteristics other than area burned posted by the Marmot Society, described as an organization studying and protecting ancient trees:

Ben Orlove, a climate-focused anthropologist who's worked in high mountain environments, added an amusing spin on the aluminum wrapping via his @GlacierHub Twitter account:

Particularly if you're from wildfire country, weigh in with your experiences or reactions in a comment below.

Resources and reading:

Get and read Stephen J. Pyne's latest book on fire and humans: The Pyrocene - How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.
Read and listen to this interview with Crystal Kolden by Vicki Gonzalez of CapRadio in Sacramento: "Pyrogeographer Crystal Kolden On Fighting California's Modern Megafires."
While it is a technical paper, I encourage you to explore this open-access 2009 study of several thousand years of the interplay of fire and life in the Giant Forest: "Multi-Millennial Fire History of the Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California, USA," by Thomas W. Swetnam, Christopher H. Baisan, Anthony C. Caprio, Peter M. Brown, Ramzi Touchan, R. Scott Anderson and Douglas J. Hallett. It's as mesmerizing as science can be.
Two papers on the remarkable bark of the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum): “The Protective Role of Bark and Bark Fibers of the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) during High-Energy Impacts,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, May 9, 2020, Georg Bold, Max Langer, Laura Börnert, Thomas Speck; “Insulation capability of the bark of trees with different fire adaptation,” Journal of Materials Science, November 2010, Georg Bold, Thomas Speck, Jan Blömer, Jürgen Bertling, Olga Speck.
Watch two highly relevant presentations on challenges and choices living with wildfire by Lisa Dale of Columbia and Kimiko Barrett of Headwaters Economics, which is a leading source of tools and tactics for fire-resilient planning. The talks were given at Columbia Climate Schools’ second international conference on Managed Retreat.

Finally, watch the great U.S. Geological Survey film "Living with Fire." Its focus is southern California, where the dominant fire-shaped chaparral ecosystem is profoundly different from the forests of the Sierra Nevada. But again, this line from Survey fire scientist Jon Keeley should resonate everywhere: “Nobody talks about trying to stop earthquakes. Wildfires require the same kind of approach.”

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