Appropriate Management Response allows wildland fire managers to use all available techniques to manage fires, from bulldozing firelines and igniting backfires to aerial monitoring and remote sensing. Photo courtesy Bureau of Land Management
With little fanfare, one of the most significant changes in federal fire management policy in the past thirty years was authorized in March 2008. The new policy promises to end the bifurcated system of classifying ignitions as “good” fires—ones that can be managed for resource or ecological benefits—versus “bad” fires that have to be attacked with aggressive fire suppression. The new integrated approach will minimize the adverse impacts and maximize the beneficial effects of any wildland fire.
The Wildland Fire Leadership Council, a group comprised of the heads of federal land management agencies, approved the use of the Appropriate Management Response on all wildfires. Under AMR, both fire suppression and wildland fire use objectives, strategies and tactics will be combined on a single wildfire incident. For example, aggressive suppression with perimeter control might be applied on one portion of a fire to stop it from spreading toward a community, but the same fire might only be monitored in other areas to gain the ecological benefits of burning. In the future, a single tactic—such as lighting a backfire—might be used to simultaneously “put out” a fire to contain it and to “put in” a fire to achieve restoration goals of fire reintroduction. Beyond trying to stop or start fires exclusively, firefighters will attempt to slow fires during adverse weather conditions and steer fires into areas that need some burning for ecological health.
The new AMR policy has the potential to fundamentally change how firefighters work with fire, but many contingencies remain that could limit or even negate its impact on management practices. Some of these uncertainties reflect the long history of failed attempts by the U.S. Forest Service to reform its fire management policies and practices. They include the considerable level of internal confusion among land and fire managers over the concept of AMR as well as the current presidential election, which will affect the political control of federal land management agencies.
FIRE MANAGEMENT IN TRANSITION
Thirty years ago, the Forest Service formally changed its fire management policy from fire control to fire management in recognition of the benefits of using controlled burns to reduce fuel loads and maintain fire-dependent ecosystems. But despite the change, risk-adverse managers rarely opted for anything other than aggressive initial attack and full suppression against wildfires. In 1995, the Forest Service signed onto the interagency Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, which strongly promoted using wildland fires to restore the role of fire in fire-adapted ecosystems. Wildland Fire Use fires—lightning-started fires allowed to burn in wilderness areas—offered an alternative to fire suppression. But despite an increasing number of Wildland Fire Use fires in recent years, the Forest Service still suppresses more than 98 percent of all ignitions.
The 1995 and 2001 Federal Fire Policy introduced the concept of AMR when it stated that “it is the current and predicted conditions of a fire that determines the appropriate management response to it, not the fire’s location or source of ignition.” Accordingly, any and every ignition could potentially be managed to restore fire’s ecological role if the fire behavior and effects were deemed acceptable to managers. Wildland Fire Use no longer had to be restricted to lightning-caused wilderness fires. However, in 2003 the Bush administration came out with its misnamed “Interagency Strategy for the Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Policy.” That document decreed a “simple, straightforward, unambiguous” approach to managing wildfires that, in effect, functioned more like a non-implementation strategy, undermining the letter and spirit of the Federal Fire Policy and negating the concept of AMR.
The reauthorized use of AMR in 2008 acknowledged the growing dissent within the progressive ranks of federal fire management, especially from the National Park Service and Forest Service fire use managers. The AMR policy also acknowledged the changed reality on the ground. Large-scale, long-duration wildfires defy standard “contain and control” strategies and “anchor, flank and spank” tactics. These megafires have compelled fire managers to devise innovative strategies and tactics, and have highlighted the need for the increased managerial flexibility of the AMR policy.
The Bush administration now believes that the flexibility granted under AMR will help contain suppression costs. The policy’s expansion of managerial discretion also confoms to the administration’s notion of the “Unitary Executive,” where incident commanders are unconstrained by any laws or regulations during wildfire emergencies.
It remains to be seen whether the new AMR policy will live up to its original promise of a holistic fire management program that transcends the former fire control mentality and fully integrates fire use with fire suppression, or if will it suffer the fate of previous reforms and be reduced to a kinder, gentler form of fire suppression.
A CENTURY OF SEMANTICS
Confusion within the Forest Service over the concept of AMR also makes the fate of the new policy uncertain. Some folks within the agency—call them the old guard—reject the notion that AMR is new at all. In their eyes, the agency has always been appropriately managing wildfires, including the “out by 10 a.m.” policy mandating aggressive initial attack and total suppression of all wildfires. To suggest that the agency will now begin a new policy of appropriate management implies that what was done before was inappropriate. Their reaction goes beyond simple psychological defense mechanisms to avoid cognitive dissonance; it also signifies a worldview that believes ecological processes, such as fire, should be subservient to management objectives.
Some progressive fire managers also argue that AMR is not new, and they point to the fact that the concept comes out of the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. AMR has been applied in the field occasionally on large wildfires for a number of years, they say. In fact, some people refer to the Yellowstone fires of 1988 as an early example of AMR because some wildfires were managed with mixed confinement and control strategies, along with minimum impact suppression tactics. Consequently, these progressive managers believe the only thing new about AMR is that it has now been authorized by government officialdom and will be practiced more deliberately, rather than employed when traditional suppression methods have been deemed futile.
But after nearly two decades of assuring the public that a century of fire suppression created a forest health crisis and forests are now even more prone to severe wildfires, it is not in the interest of the fire management community to claim that the AMR is business as usual. The public is clamoring for change in a number of policy areas, and it is a strategic necessity for public land stewards to demonstrate a willingness, if not eagerness, to fundamentally change fire policies and practices. Staying the course with the same fire control mindset practiced by fire managers for the past century will not suffice for managing the wildfires of the new millennium.
JUST MANAGE IT
Whatever the debate over the semantics of AMR, the hope is that land managers, when confronted with wildfire, will use all the strategies and tactics available to achieve multiple social and ecological objectives. That would be a genuinely new approach. AMR represents a renewal of the Federal Fire Policy and integrates fire suppression, fire prescription and fire use programs into a holistic system of fire management. Perhaps that’s what the new policy should be called—fire management. The agencies could drop the hubris that comes with calling all actions “appropriate,” get beyond assuming a reactive posture by framing actions as a “response” and focus on proactively managing fire.
The new AMR policy holds the best hope of genuinely making the shift from fire control to fire management, and it offers the opportunity for reducing the risks, costs and impacts of traditional wildfire suppression. In the not-so-distant future, the agencies may never “fight” another fire, but instead will take full advantage of every ignition to restore desired stand structures, species compositions and ecological processes while protecting human communities and natural resource values from undesirable fire damage.
The actual implementation of the new AMR policy depends largely on the outcome of the presidential election. Will AMR become a new suppression surge in an escalation of the “war on terra,” or will it become the change we need to initiate a detente and gain peaceful coexistence with wildland fire? Either way, fire management policies and practices are changing in fundamentally new ways at a dramatic pace.