What You're Getting Wrong About Wildfire

If you live in the West, you've experienced the impacts of wildfire. In the last few decades, as the effects of climate change, unhealthy forests, and a drier west merge together, catastrophic wildfires have become a significant part of our lives. 

Communities across the West are threatened by massive, out-of-control wildfires. We're seeing wildfires outside of what we used to consider “wildfire season,” and those fires are burning hotter, faster, and longer than they used to. 

Headline-making catastrophes like the Marshall Fire in Boulder or the Palisade Fires in Los Angeles, which both ignited during the winter, have shown us that the idea of a “wildfire season” isn't realistic anymore.  

Colorado has over 14 million acres of national forest. Managing and protecting all of that from wildfire is complicated and challenging. Those national forests cover recreation areas, wildlife habitat, irreplaceable wilderness— and they border our homes and communities. 

Wildfire is often misunderstood, even within the environmental community. As out-of-control wildfire becomes a more present threat , communities are having to learn to adapt.  This means better understanding how fire actually works in the West, the threats and the benefits it brings, and how we can best limit risk and protect our communities.  

To help clear up some of those wildfire misconceptions, we talked to WRA’s resident wildfire policy expert. 

In this new podcast series, we are exploring the different threats to public land in the West and how we can conserve it for the future.  We will be covering wildfire, wildlife, recreation, and the threats of new development. 

2 Degrees Out West is a podcast from Western Resource Advocates, an environmental conservation organization that's focused on the Interior West. WRA works across seven states to protect our climate, land, air, and water. WRA protects and advocates for Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming.
 
2 Degrees out West is a podcast for advocates and decision makers who want to fight climate change and its impacts across the West.

On 2 Degrees Out West we talk with climate experts and advocates to bring you stories, experiences, and insights from their work in the places we call home.

It is Hosted by Dave Papineau 

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Transcript

Wildfire Podcast_01

Extra: [00:00:00] It only takes a minute to wipe out a century 

Dave Papineau (Host): wildfire. If you live in the West, there's a very good chance that you've experienced the impacts of catastrophic wildfire. 

Extra: Dozens of fires in the West now forcing authorities to issue new air quality alerts in six states tonight, from Washington State to Wyoming to Arizona.

Dave Papineau (Host): Climate change, drought, and poor forest management have all collided to make catastrophic wildfires a regular part of our lives. Headline-making wildfires, like the Marshall Fire in Boulder- 

Extra: Tonight, a life-threatening situation near Boulder, Colorado, where- 

Dave Papineau (Host): Or Palisades Fire in Los Angeles- 

Extra: As dawn broke in Pacific Palisades, we found a scene that can only be described as apocalyptic

Dave Papineau (Host): are showing us that the idea of one wildfire season just isn't realistic anymore, and communities are having to learn how to adapt. Colorado has over 14 million acres of national forest. Managing and protecting all that from wildfire is complicated and challenging, and it's often misunderstood. Those national forests cover recreation areas, [00:01:00] wildlife habitat, irreplaceable wilderness, and mountain landscapes, and critically, they border our homes and communities.

As out-of-control wildfire threatens the West, it's important to clear up some of these misunderstandings. This means understanding how wildfire actually works for the West, the threats and benefits it brings, and how we can best protect and prepare our communities. To help clear up some of those wildfire misconceptions, I've brought on WRA's resident wildfire policy expert to give us the facts.

In this new podcast series, we're exploring different threats to public lands in the West and how we can conserve it for the future. We'll be exploring and asking questions about wildlife, wildfire, recreation, and the threats of new development, and how they pertain to o- the areas that we love in the West.

Brendan Witt: So looking right here? Yes. All right. Hi, I'm Brendan Witt. I'm a policy advisor with Western Resource Advocates Western Lands team, and I work on wildfire resilience and forest [00:02:00] ecosystem restoration policy. 

Dave Papineau (Host): Brendan also used to host the Two Degrees Out West podcast. 

Extra: The Western United States is known for its beauty, 

Brendan Witt: its towering peaks, flowing rivers, and 

Extra: wide open landscapes.

Dave Papineau (Host): He's very well-versed in the landscape and nuance of wildfire policy in the West. In 2025, Brendan helped pass SB780 Colorado, which was a bill to increase prescribed burns in Colorado by establishing a prescribed fire claims fund. More on that in a second, but for now, myth number one, and one that you've probably heard at some point: all wildfire on the landscape is bad.

Brendan Witt: Fire is a natural and even necessary part of our Western ecosystems, particularly dry forest ecosystems and grassland ecosystems, where natural fire at low severity and higher frequency than what we see now has occurred for millennia. Indigenous communities have used cultural fire as an ecological maintenance and restoration tool for generations as well.

Over the past about 100 years or so, the institution of, um, priorities around fire [00:03:00] suppression, total fire suppression, and initial aggressive containment of fires that broke out across the West essentially eradicated fire from playing its natural role in our Western ecosystems. 

Extra: A lot of things come- or let fire be 

Dave Papineau (Host): A lot of the wildfire myths that we're going to cover today come from a foundational misconception of how we relate to landscapes and forests in the West.

For the majority of the times that Americans have been on the European continent, fire has been treated as an adversary, not a beneficial tool. That truth is at the center of this myth. 

Brendan Witt: This has resulted, in many cases, in forests with unnaturally overgrown, dense, and less resilient species dynamics and forest composition that are more prone to catastrophic or unnaturally severe wildfires, like we see in the news throughout the West.

Dave Papineau (Host): Okay, so fire by itself isn't bad for the West. It's more that we've just mismanaged the land, and now we're dealing with those consequences, more fuel that can drive a bigger fire. But wait, what [00:04:00] starts all these fires? Is it not climate change? That would be myth number two. It's more complicated than that.

Brendan Witt: Climate change doesn't really cause wildfires per se, but some of the impacts of climate change on our climate dynamics in the Western United States can increase the likelihood and severity in wildfire-prone condi- conditions that we see, uh, across many of our ecosystems. Climate change in general is making the Western United States drier and hotter, extending our seasons of where we might not typically see wildfire behavior, um, and making our forests more susceptible to fire ignition in times when they might usually be under snow cover.

Hotter and drier conditions, especially across seasons where we typically expect cooler and mo- cooler weather and more precipitation, can result in longer stretches of dry forest fuels, uh, that are susceptible to wildfire ignition. Additionally, climate change also means the snowpack melts earlier, exposing fuels to heat and aridity in the atmosphere.

Our atmosphere is drier, meaning that fuels and vegetation can dry out [00:05:00] sooner in the season or even sooner in the day than they typically have. And fires, uh, are prone to burn hotter and longer, even into the night, with less humidity to help hinder their progress. This all combines to make fires much more difficult to address, both for wildfire mitigation seasons, where we typically lose the windows where we have safe opportunities to apply prescribed fire to the landscape.

It also means that when we have wildfires, they're likely to burn hotter, have more fuel to fuel their progression and, and build the severity of that fire on the landscape, which makes it more difficult for wildland firefighters to confront, contain, and, uh, address and extinguish unwanted wildfires, or limits the amount of time that we have to use fire intentionally to help reduce the risk of unnaturally severe wildfires for communities.

Dave Papineau (Host): For Coloradans, this became all too real on December 30th, 2021, when the Marshall Fire ignited near Boulder, Colorado and burned over 1,000 structures. [00:06:00] It became the worst and most destructive fire in our state's history and a warning to Westerners. Catastrophic wildfires are no longer limited to just the summer or the hot season.

The Marshall Fire caused decision-makers, municipalities, firefighters, and utilities to reconsider how they think about fire danger. Mismanagement of forests has led to a situation that, combined with a hotter and drier climate, has made catastrophic wildfire more of a problem than it has been in the past.

So how can we fix it? That leads us to myth number three: the best way to prevent wildfire is to put them out quickly and stop fires from igniting. 

Brendan Witt: As we said earlier, fire is a natural and even necessary part of many of our forest ecosystems. It's something that's going to occur, so preventing wildfires or preventing ignition is, uh, something that- think more of being resilient to wildfires when they do occur.

Of course, being careful with wildfire, being careful with fire and, and anything that could ignite a wildfire is something that everybody should keep at the front of their mind at all times and be very cautious [00:07:00] about, um, anything that could help ignite an unwanted wildfire on the landscape. But we also need to focus on pre-wildfire mitigation, reducing the likelihood that when fires ignite, they're going to build into severe and difficult to contain or catastrophic wildfires, um, and helping communities build resilience and be fire adapted to a world where fire has naturally occurred for millennia.

Dave Papineau (Host): Say, aren't you Smokey the forest fire preventing bear? Boy or bear, you've got a great place here. I'm nuts about it. 

Extra: Then why burn it down? 

Dave Papineau (Host): Me? Why, I wouldn't hurt the tiniest little- An older line of thinking is the old Smokey the Bear campaign. 

Extra: Remember, only you can prevent forest fires. 

Dave Papineau (Host): In reality, it's more complicated than that.

Our best method to mitigate fire isn't just about not starting them. It's about creating a managed environment where we can better prevent catastrophic wildfires and allow healthy fire back on the land and effectively handle fires as they come. One of the most important tools that we have to [00:08:00] do all of this is called prescribed fire.

Brendan Witt: Prescribed fire allows us to pick when we want a fire on the landscape, where we want that fire to be, under what conditions atmospherically and also socially, what we want to be, um, happening around a community when a fire is put on the landscape and un- with what resources at hand, making sure that we have the right capabilities to address a fire once it's used as a tool on the landscape so that it does what we want it to do, accomplishes the objectives that we're asking fire to- to accomplish on the landscape, um, and doesn't have any unintended consequences.

Dave Papineau (Host): Prescribed fire isn't the only tool either. 

Brendan Witt: We can also accomplish this through forest thinning. Forest thinning is a very effective tool when used appropriately in the right ecosystems with the right outcomes and measures. But forest thinning is essentially removing smaller diameter, smaller, um, s- uh, stature trees and vegetation that has grown to a point where it [00:09:00] could fuel a wildfire into older trees that are typically more resilient to wildfire spread.

Forest thinning is not logging per se. Typically, forest thinning projects cost us money to get that material out of the forest, um, to have crews go in and do that work. And so WRA works with partners to ensure that our state, our communities, our states and our communities have the resources that they need at hand in order to be able to do these projects to reduce hazardous fuel loads, to use prescribed fire to help bolster resilience if a wildfire, if and when a wildfire ignites on the landscape.

Dave Papineau (Host): Another line of defense is protecting your house from fire. 

Brendan Witt: Additionally, there's a lot of things that communities can do directly to help reduce their exposure if a fire does ignite, um, and approaches the community. Thinning defensible space, so clearing brush within the home ignition zone are typically from about five out to 100 feet from your property, taking care [00:10:00] of limbs that might overhang your house, clearing brush from five feet out, reducing overgrown vegetation in that window can be a really effective way of reducing a fire's flame height and severity if embers are thrown from a wildfire into an area in your community or near your home.

And the last line of defense, home hardening, is essential as well. That's the process of replacing combustible materials and exposed intakes for embers that, uh, typically drive home ignitions in a wildfire event, uh, from being around your property. So this is replacing your decks and put it r- replacing them with more wildfire resilient materials, covering up vents and intakes with ember screens and fire resistant ember screens and taking other precautions, um, that many communities are working with their neighborhoods to put into place to ensure that through all of these lines in, of defense, our communities are more adapted to a world where fire is a regular occurrence in our ecosystems.

Dave Papineau (Host): If you've ever had to evacuate because of fire or watched a [00:11:00] fire burn close to your community, then you know just how scary and out of control fire can be. Fear of fire means that people are often scared prescribed fires will put their communities at risk. And there's myth number four, prescribed fire is too risky because it's likely to break out into catastrophic fire.

Brendan Witt: Prescribed fire allows qualified professionals called burn bosses to determine when, where, under what conditions and with what resources we want fire to be on the landscape. Prescribed fire is typically a very safe tool. While all fire carries some risk, just like driving a car carries some risk, prescribed fire applied by qualified professionals and burn bosses is typically very safe.

99% of the prescribed fires applied by the US Forest Service go according to plan. While all fire releases smoke and some particulate matter, prescribed fire typically only burns through natural vegetated materials and what's been compiled on the landscape in advance of a prescribed [00:12:00] fire, which means that the smoke is more natural in composition and less severe and less harmful than a wildfire that may burn through, say, uh, a community like many of our catastrophic wildfires over the past 10 years in the west have.

In those instances, fires can ignite construction materials, industrial materials, and many other harmful pollutants that otherwise wouldn't be contained in smoke ignited from a prescribed fire under a prescription plan Prescribed fires also burn at a lower severity and a lower temperature than unnatural and catastrophic wildfires.

Recent research has shown that unnaturally severe and hot wildfires in the west on certain soils can convert naturally occurring minerals into carcinogens and release those carcinogens in smoke, and also hold onto them for a while and release them into our water sources. So choosing when and where we want fire and at what level of severity and with what resources to ensure safety on the landscape helps us ensure that the impacts of that fire are as minimal as possible [00:13:00] 

Dave Papineau (Host): It's true that fire does inherently carry some risks, but prescribed fire is a tool that's used with a lot of preparation and care.

Only qualified individuals with extensive planning and permission can perform a prescribed burn, and they carefully monitor conditions to be sure that a fire will stay within set boundaries and produce minimal amounts of smoke. However, there's often no liability protection for these qualified experts called burn bosses, even operating under the best of safety standards.

This can mean burn bosses are hesitant to use prescribed fire, even in scenarios where it makes sense and can be done safely, which means we're not using this tool as often as we need to actually prevent more damaging wildfires. WRA worked to address this issue in the Colorado legislature. 

Brendan Witt: In order to help bolster confidence and ensure that we have our qualified professionals using this tool when and where it's appropriate on a landscape to the level that we need in order to, uh, restore a more natural fire regime, WRA worked with partners in 2025 to [00:14:00] pass Senate Bill 25007, which created a prescribed fire claims fund or a financial backstop.

Think of it like a rainy day fund that can kick in in case there are some additional damages outside of the planned burn area that may not be significant, but fear of which may dissuade, uh, qualified burn bosses from using fire as a tool on the landscape to help protect our communities. 

Dave Papineau (Host): Besides prescribed fire, another tool that can be used to minimize fuel loads in forests is called forest thinning.

Forest thinning can also work in conjunction with prescribed fire. One myth about forest thinning is that it's the same thing as logging, which is not true. 

Brendan Witt: Forest thinning and logging are pretty distinct in the fact that logging is typically a commercially beneficial process for private operators.

Forest thinning, on the other hand, almost always costs money for crews to go in and operate and remove less desirable, unmarketable, smaller diameter timber and vegetation on the landscape that is also [00:15:00] very, uh, high risk and hazardous in terms of wildfire conditions. Forest thinning ensures that hand crews can go through and reduce the likelihood that overgrown and unnaturally dense forest conditions might be able to spread a fire into the crowns of trees where it can move faster and increase fire severity, uh, encroaching more quickly on communities than firefighters are often able to contain.

Forest thinning can also often be a critical precautionary tool to help ensure that prescribed fire behaves the way that we want a fire to behave when intentionally applied on the landscape 

Dave Papineau (Host): There's one key issue we haven't really covered in this whole wildfire discussion, and that's the cost of all of this.

All of this work costs money. Of course, an uncontrolled catastrophic wildfire is extremely expensive. Destruction of people's homes and property is a real and salient threat to the West. Additionally, there's ecological damage, like soil erosion and reservoir sedimentation, that can dramatically affect water quality and needs to be handled after a catastrophic wildfire.[00:16:00] 

It's much better and cheaper to prevent huge fires from reaching that size. But how much can that cost, and are we doing enough? Next myth: We already spent enough on wildfire mitigation, and we don't need to worry about increasing our wildfire capacity or funding. 

Brendan Witt: Catastrophic wildfires are a growing threat for Western communities and for Western ecosystems.

While many Western states have dedicated considerable amounts of funding to wildfire, uh, risk, wildfire suppression, and wildfire risk mitigation and, uh, preventative work, we still need more in order to address the concerns. Oftentimes, climate change expanding the amount of time that fires can occur on the landscape and increasing the intensity at which fires burn throughout our Western ecosystems means that they're more costly to address and contain and recover from.

Those dynamics mean that there's less funding available to do the kind of effective risk mitigation work that we know [00:17:00] will help reduce the likelihood of these costly, catastrophic, and unnatural wildfires. Ensuring that we have enough funding to get ahead of wildfires before they're destructive, reduce the risk on our landscape, and res- restore forest health means that we have to add investment on top of what is already costing our communities.

In Colorado alone, the Colorado State Forest Service in its 2020 forest action plan estimates that just to restore the top 10% of at-risk watersheds across the state to a resilient state of forest health will cost approximately $4.2 billion in 2020 dollars.

Additional funding is also needed to ensure that we have enough qualified burn bosses and trained professionals who are able to use fire as a tool to promote fire-adapted communities and wildfire resilience across our landscapes. Ensuring that we have enough funding to train and support projects across Colorado is gonna be a key provision to ensure that we're able to restore a more natural fire [00:18:00] regime and more frequent lower intensity wildfire that will make us more resilient against unnatural and catastrophic wildfire across our state.

Dave Papineau (Host): Along with extreme heat and drought, impacts like smoke destruction to our communities are very real and tangible impacts of climate change for Westerners. For Colorado and WRA, addressing that threat is a top concern. 

Brendan Witt: WRA is working with our partners to help make communities more resilient, forest ecosystems better adapted to our changing climate dynamics, and ensure that we're prepared to live in a world with more frequent fire.

Dave Papineau (Host): Across the West as climate change worsens, we will continue to have to learn to live with fire and limit risk to our communities and land. This includes making sure that we're using the best strategies and fully funding programs to use all of the tools that Brendan mentioned in this podcast: control burns, forest thinning, home hardening, and of course, plans to actually deal with catastrophic fire if and when it occurs.

Strong forest management programs that are well-funded aren't optional when our communities live on the borders of [00:19:00] forests and grasslands. The health and wellness of our landscape's ultimately tied to the health and wellness of our communities in the West. And that's our podcast about wildfire myths in the West.

Did you like that? I really hope you did because we're planning on doing more of these. We're gonna have another podcast coming up about protecting water and one about protecting land, so stay tuned for that. If you wanna keep up with our work, you can subscribe to our email list and get action alerts for actionable things you can do to help protect the West, and subscribe to our social media to keep up-to-date on all the different things that we're doing and advocating for across the West.

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Lastly, we'd like to thank our sponsors who enable our work in the West. Our champion sponsor is FirstBank. Our signature sponsors are Denver Water, Torch Clean Energy, Scarpa, GOCO, and Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. Our supporting partners are BSW Wealth Partners, Meridian Public Affairs, Group 14 Engineering, and [00:20:00] Kind Design.

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