The Sierra Club supports the use of prescribed fire in certain circumstances in fire-adapted ecosystems as a practice to promote biodiversity, to restore vegetative communities and natural fire regimes, and to provide an additional wildfire safety buffer for communities. Individual burns should respect Tribal treaty and consultation rights, prioritize the safety of firefighters and residential communities, comply with applicable environmental laws, minimize air quality impacts, and be based on best-available ecological and fire science - including traditional ecological knowledge.
Further, the Sierra Club recognizes the important cultural and ecological role of Native American cultural burning, and supports reducing or removing policy barriers that impede such practices. Indigenous peoples in many ecological zones of North America engaged in cultural burning for millennia. Indigenous people burned – and continue to burn – for a wide variety of reasons, including to produce basket materials and materials for arrows, to stimulate growth of preferred foods, to create deer and elk habitat for hunting, and to protect villages from wildfire. These acknowledgements are important for understanding the context of this Prescribed Fire policy, which may or may not be applicable to Indigenous cultural burns.
The Sierra Club is concerned that there are ways that prescribed fire has been and is being misused on public lands. The Sierra Club seeks to avoid: (1) programs or practices that involve commercial logging as a part of prescribed fire activities, or post-fire salvage logging after prescribed fire; (2) the application of prescribed fire in ecosystems that currently have an unnatural excess of fire, or where such application would create an unnatural frequency of fire at an unnatural hyper-frequency; (3) the implementation of prescribed fire during times and circumstances that are damaging to ecosystems, or in circumstances and conditions that create an unnecessary risk to nearby residential communities.
Prescribed burning is a tool in the toolbox of land managers. It is important to note that prescribed burning as described in this document, while necessary, is not a substitute for natural fire in ecosystems that evolved to depend upon fire of various intensities as an ecological process. There is broad agreement among scientists that the monitoring of wildland fire (naturally-ignited fire, such as from a lightning strike) is an ecologically appropriate strategy for most fire-adapted ecosystems, particularly in areas distant from communities, to maintain and restore habitat heterogeneity and native biodiversity with a natural mix of fire intensities.
The term ‘prescribed burn’ is widely used in a variety of circumstances, and can often lead to confusion. This policy and the associated criteria offer perspective regarding prescribed burning as a means to achieve a desired ecological condition, which can help restore a natural fire regime. The following types of intentional burns can sometimes be loosely referred to as ‘prescribed burning’, but this policy and criteria are not intended for use in their evaluation:
- burning for agricultural purposes
- backburning as a strategy to stop spread of wildfire during the event
- burning of logging slash debris
Criteria for evaluating prescribed burns
- Safety
- Preservation of cultural values: Involvement of original land managers
- Preservation of ecological values
- Safety of burn crew
- Safety of community
- Smoke (eg. particulate matter exposure)
Note: prescribed burns can qualify as ‘exceptional events’ under EPA air quality standards - Chance of fire escape
- Smoke (eg. particulate matter exposure)
- Desired future conditions (ecosystem-specific):
Does burn mimic the appropriate kind of burn, based on the particular ecosystem and characteristics below (eg. treatment, fire regime, etc)? - Natural fire regime (ecosystem-specific)
- Frequency: Fire rotation interval
Eg. Is there already too much fire in the system (one example of this, but not the only one, is southern California chaparral)? Or, too little? - Intensity: High intensity vs. mixed-intensity vs. low-intensity
- Frequency: Fire rotation interval
- Treatment
- Support removal of small trees, lower limbs, shrubs, and grasses adjacent to homes
- Oppose logging or thinning activities in old forests prior to or following prescribed fire
- Oppose post-fire logging
- Utilize carbon sequestration and storage goals to shape treatments
- Seasonality
- Consideration should be given to whether the burn is being conducted during an appropriate time period in terms of nesting and denning
- Weather conditions
- Wind
- Temperature
- Moisture
Adopted by the Board of Directors, February 2018