Conservation Northwest

Wildfires and wildlife Keeping the Northwest wild Winter 2015 3 View from the director unconventional Fire Management VIEW FroM ThE DIrECTor Mitch Friedman Executive director, mitch@conservationnw.org TABlE oF CoNTENTS 2 Advisory board Meet our new board of advisors 3 View from the director Unconventional fire management 4 Wildfire science Fire's role for wildlife and wildlands 5 Wildfires and people Preparing for wildfires 6 Wildfires and wildlife e impact to wildlife 8 Feature: Wildfire today Perspective from the Forest Service 9 Feature: Wildfire tomorrow Looking at the big picture 10 Interview series Chiliwist private lands conservation 12 Citizen wildlife photographs Highlights from our project season 14 You make the difference By attending our auction, making a gi, or purchasing our new gear Cinder, a young black bear badly burned by the Carlton Complex Fire, became an inspirational story nationwide as she recovered. Fire can be a threat for wildlife, but it can also improve forest conditions and provide better wildlife habitat. Photo: © Don Seabrook, The Wenatchee World I spent the evening of July 17, 2014, in a meeting on the deck of Conserva- tion Northwest outreach associate Jay Kehne's Omak home. To the west, a towering column of smoke from the Carlton Complex Fire rose like a thunderhead. We knew this fire event had crossed a threshold of intensity, gorging itself on Loup Loup Pass forests baked dry in the summer heat. By late that evening we learned that high winds had driven the fire's southern perimeter a dozen miles through the lowland brush to menace the town of Pateros, becoming a national story, the biggest wildfire in Washington State history. Wildfires—like wolves—trigger deep, innate fears. While science has greatly ad- vanced our understanding of fire behavior and the ecosystems it is part of, public debate can be driven away from rational thought by hot emotional winds. Anger, fear, and outdated canards show up as "common sense" in rural newspapers and from legislative soapboxes. is paradigm is likely to worsen as climate change brings conditions expected to increase major fire events; conditions that are also likely to further obscure solutions when taken up with hazy rhetoric: "If only the government would allow logging like it did in the good old days, the fires would purr like pussycats." But 75 percent of the acreage burned by the Carlton Complex was grass and brush, not forest. And initial research indicates that the forested acres that withstood the flames best had recently been selectively thinned and carefully control-burned to remove the fine fuels which carry fire, helping stifle the blaze. is issue of the Conservation Northwest Quarterly offers perspective on the Carl- ton Complex Fire, and on the issue of wildfire and wildlife more generally. For Conservation Northwest, our challenge is not only to understand the science behind today's wildfires but to have it inform policy at a landscape and regional scale. Much of what we do in our collaborative forest work is to improve forest resilience so forests have a better shot at enduring the age of climate change and more wildfire. is is part of what we mean when we speak of climate adaptation. Resilient forests are not only good for humans but also provide better wildlife habitat, al- lowing for adaptation, movement, and population resilience. In the face of growing wildfires and a changing climate, our work supports wildlife adaptation by keeping wildlands connected and forests ecologically healthy. Because wildfire is such an emotional and misunderstood topic, and the type of management we seek might be seen as counterintuitive and certainly not the most immediately profitable, it takes time and tact to move our objectives forward. But for people, wildlands, and wildlife, it's worth the effort.

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