Should fires in national parks be allowed to burn?

The increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires – not just in the American West but throughout the country – is becoming a fact of life, and it’s time we learned to live with it. Partly it’s a function of climate change, and partly it’s a result of the way U.S. officials managed fires in this country for nearly a century.

That’s the assessment of Michael Kodas, author of "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame," who argues that accepting fire as a part of the cycle is rapidly becoming a necessity.

“If we’re always thinking about fighting wildfires, then we’re not investing enough in learning how to live with them,” Kodas tells USA TODAY. “And we’re going to have to live with wildfires. It’s not what we thought a century ago; that fire in our forests was kind of like this unwanted beast we could eradicate if we just worked hard enough to hunt it down.”

The National Park Service has historically been an innovator in fire management – diverging from the U.S. Forest Service, which has a zero-tolerance forest fire policy – and parks have been a laboratory for those practices.

The landmark National Park Service wildfire was the 1988 Yellowstone fire. “At the time it was seen as a horrible misjudgment on the part of the park service, and senators in Wyoming and Montana and Idaho were just calling for the head of the director of Yellowstone National Park and even gunning at the director of the park service for letting these fires burn.”

Most of them were natural wildfires and the park service’s philosophy has always been that when it’s safe, to let a fire burn. This clears old built-up fuel and makes way for new life, especially species that are fire-dependent – like the sequoia, for example, which generates cones sealed with a resin that only opens with extreme heat.

But the Yellowstone fire grew far beyond the expected scale; about a third of park burned. “The story back then was that this was a terrible mistake, and that the park was destroyed,” said Kodas. “And then, not too many years after the fires burned through, we started to recognize that that wasn’t really the case. The general consensus was that Yellowstone was probably healthier 10 years after those fires burned than it was 10 years before those fires burned.”

Serious fires have swept through a number of U.S. national parks in recent years, but with the exceptions of the Carr, Woolsey and Camp fires, most have had a generally beneficial impact on the parks, according to the agency’s national post-fire programs coordinator Rich Schwab. Glacier National Park lost the historic Sperry Chalet, which Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke pledged $12 million to rebuild. But in terms of the habitat itself, portions of the fire were beneficial, Schwab said, as were wildfires in Crater Lake, North Cascades and the Southfork fire in Yosemite.

“It’s a fire-evolved ecosystem,” explained Schwab, “and so you had a mix of high burn severity, moderate and low severity in a mosaic pattern, and that’s a generally good thing. Most ecosystems have evolved with fire and need it for renewal. Most fire will come in and reduce the fuel loading and the brush component and allow timber species to get established – so it’s all a part of ecosystem management.”

A noted exception he mentioned was Whiskeytown National Recreation Area near Redding, California, which suffered severe burns in last year’s Carr Fire. Some areas are at risk for debris flows, which are like flash floods containing mud, gravel, rocks, boulders and burned trees. Some parts of the park had to be closed for stabilization and healing.

The Carr Fire, which was ignited by a spark from the rim of a blown-out car tire, is a prime example of a point that visitors to national parks and other forests should take to heart, says Kodas: Humans are the primary fire-starters.

A study conducted last year by the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Earth Lab showed that in a 20-year period across the country, 84 percent of wildfires in one way or another were started by humans. “In California, where we see these horrible fires, it’s well over 90 percent,” added Kodas.

“We think in terms of someone throwing a cigarette out of their car, or arsonists – and certainly those things start many fires, but not many as the public believes,” he said. More frequently, fires are started by downed power lines, sparks from catalytic converters or hot mufflers or blowouts like the Carr Fire. Hunting starts many fires, not just from campfires but from the sparks from firearms.

But one of the most important things for park visitors to keep in mind regarding fires is that they are a natural part of the cycle.

“Instead of thinking of the landscape as being devastated or destroyed by these fires, they should see it as this rejuvenating force that’s actually producing very beautiful landscapes and giving them opportunities to see things and experience things that they won’t see or experience elsewhere,” said Kodas.

This is important, because to some degree fire is inevitable, and with it, the eventual transformation of the landscapes we have come to love. Forests, especially in the Southwest but also in the East, may give way to grasslands or scrub.

“Nobody wants to see Glacier National Park not be those spectacular peaks above really dense forests – to see maybe grasslands or scrublands below those peaks,” he said. “But nature is a dynamic force and we’ve always seen long-term changes and long-term trends.”

Tracy L. Barnett is an independent writer covering environmental and human rights issues. Read a full transcript of her interview with Michael Kodas.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Should fires in national parks be allowed to burn?