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Laxson over the Years

A Fire Burns through It

Ronald Hodgson Helps Communities
Improve Their Defense against
Wildfires

hen he was a boy growing up in Kalispell, Montana, Ronald Hodgson, professor in the Department of Recreation and Parks Management, learned a lot about fire from his father, a national park ranger and fire management specialist for Glacier National Park. Later, during college, Hodgson himself worked as a fire guard for the National Park Service. He also read the famous Montana writer Norman Maclean, whose Young Men and Fire became a national best-seller. It recounts the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire near Helena in which twelve young fire fighters lost their lives. It's a persuasive tale, but Hodgson would be the first to tell you that Maclean's view of fire is woefully one-sided.

"In this area, most communities are built in forests that were once fire-adaptive," Hodgson explained during a recent interview. In the past, "the native forests of Cohasset, Forest Ranch, and Paradise probably burned once every five to twenty years. Many of those fires were started by Native Americans as management fires, as part of their agriculture. What fire does is help control insects and fungi, so the acorn and pine nut harvests are better and more available as food. Burning also helped produce materials for their manufacturing." Escaped fires and those caused by lightning also swept regularly through the ancient forests. And not only the forests. "Some people believe the whole northern Sacramento Valley burned off every year. Native grasses were just as dependent on fire as the ponderosa pine and black oak forests."

Professor Hodgson is taking this message to communities throughout California, particularly those in areas regularly threatened by wildfire. As part of a team funded by the CSU, Chico Foundation Research Center, Hodgson and his colleagues are beginning to transform the public attitude towards fire and, just as significantly, to transform communities themselves from potential tinderboxes into towns a fire can burn through with relative safety.

As radical as this sounds, Hodgson insisted that it makes sense. "Because fire was a very common event in the forest for probably the last ten thousand years, from the time of the last ice age," he continued, "the forest adapted to fire to the point where, in order to have a stable ecosystem, it was as necessary as sunshine and water. Then, in the 1850s, we came in and began logging, which changed the structure of the forest. Loggers cut down the large trees." Shorter, smaller trees were left, and the distance between the forest floor and their lower limbs reduced from what it had been. "A lot of the slash was left lying on the ground, so the next time a fire burned through, it burned through much hotter than many of the species could tolerate."

The result? A different ecosystem far more vulnerable to fire. This, in turn, engendered an extremely aggressive fire suppression philosophy. Explained Hodgson, "We put out all the fires and we prevented fires from starting. It was probably essential because at that time fires killed the small trees. Unfortunately, once the trees grew to such a height that they could survive a fire, so did the understory." Forests became crowded with species such as white fir, cedar, and so-called ladder fuels-vegetation that allows fire to climb from the forest floor to the crowns of trees. Meanwhile, the distance between crowns decreased. "Because they haven't been spaced out by periodic burning, fire can spread from crown to crown and you have fires like the Fountain Fire or the Forty-Niner Fire. They're very difficult to stop, very expensive to fight."

The Mann Gulch Fire, viewed at the time as catastrophic, burned some 4,500 acres. By contrast, the fire that burned near there in 1988 was a 250,000-acre blaze. Whole communities in the West now find themselves in the path of possible devastation by wildfire, but Hodgson believes it doesn't have to be that way.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer whose graduate studies combined resource development and economics with communication theory and human ecology, Hodgson is wonderfully suited to be a "good fire" ambassador. "I came from a land grant university, which has a strong public-service component," he said. "The approach we always used was to work with the community. Rather than imposing something, we provided assistance and helped the people get what they wanted. It turns out that's a good philosophy, but it's also the most effective way to get something done. Even in these wildland/urban-mix communities where everybody's very independent, they're not independent of each other. They watch out for their neighbor and like working with their neighbor. One of our mottoes is 'This is a local project supported by government, not a government project supported by locals.' Locals are always in charge."

Using community structures already in place, such as road associations, well-sharing groups, garden clubs, and even in one case, a pizza club, Hodgson and his team meet with the groups in informal settings-living rooms, backyards, someone's deck-and begin by answering questions and giving a little bit of fire and forest history. If there is interest, the groups recruit others and map out a holistic strategy for transforming the community from a disaster waiting to happen to one that fits more defensibly into its environment. "We try to re-landscape the entire community, not just a house here and a house there. We take an approach that's both ecological and logical from a fire perspective: where would the fire burn naturally?" In every community, he said, "There are certain topographic boundaries and vegetation changes. We'll draw a boundary around where a fire would naturally burn and address that area." It can be tricky. "To do that, you have to work across all these land ownerships where everyone has different objectives and perspectives on what ought to be done, and if you've got commercial timber land in there along with residential land and federal land, that mix can make it difficult."

Difficult, yes, and time-consuming, but it works. The list of communities that Hodgson and his team have advised includes O'Brien Mountain, Victoria, Middle Creek, and Shingletown. "We're into our sixth year in Shingletown," Hodgson said. "Every spring, residents organize to do a hazard clean-up, and though I'm not sure of the numbers, I'd guess 50 percent of the households there have participated at least once." The residents clear their properties, haul the trash and clippings out to the road, where they're chipped up by a vendor, who then hauls the load to Anderson. There it's converted into electricity. Now that the "easy work" has been done, Hodgson said, the more difficult properties are being tackled. The University Foundation has helped with putting together a crew that can assist older and disabled property owners and do some of the more taxing physical labor. The group owns a chipper and leases something called a zigzag yarder, which uses pulleys, cables, and baling twine to collect brush from "pretty steep terrain. It hardly even disturbs the leaf litter so it's a very environmentally safe way to do the work." At the same time, residents learn which species are native to their area, which are most flammable, and how to prune them correctly. "We also talk about how to make building more fire-safe, how to safely use mechanical equipment, and how to survive a fire." Evacuation routes, the importance of house numbering, and identifying safe zones are likewise part of the learning process. "An interesting question is 'How do you put fire back into a community?'" Hodgson said. "But we can do it. Actually, in a few more years we could probably safely burn a fire right through the settlements of Shingletown Ridge."

When looked at long-term, Hodgson's philosophy seems not only sensible but imperative. Forest health is decreasing as fire danger is increasing. Right now, he said, fire is the most serious threat to the ecological stability of the Sierra Nevada, but, he added, it also needs to be reintroduced into most of the western forests. Such a paradox translates into a lot of hard work ahead and a lot of community meetings. But Hodgson seems undaunted by the scope of it all. You might even say he's fired up.

Beth Spencer, University Publications (Part of this article appeared in Inside Chico State, March 12, 1998.)