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Response to the Hermits Peak Fire could make forest management more challenging in the West, despite the urgent need for it. The Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, now over 300,000 acres, started as a prescribed or controlled burn that got out of control and later merged with the Calf Canyon fire. Ecologists and forest management experts are concerned that the public response to this incident will mean that this essential forest management tool will be not be available in the future.
After New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for a halt to prescribed burns, Chief Randy Moore announced Friday that the U.S. Forest Service would suspend all prescribed fire operations across the country while it conducts a review.
The severity of this fire highlights the need for more forest management on federal lands. Controlled burns, when used safely, are an effective way of reducing wildfire fuel and have been used by Indigenous people for centuries. Instances of a prescribed burn escaping fire lines are extremely rare.
Gridlock in Congress stymies land protection across the West
The CORE Act, which would bring legislative protections to 400,000 acres of public lands across Colorado, remains stalled out in Congress. The slow progress in protecting land in Colorado and the West is highlighted in a Center for Western Priorities report entitled Conservation Gridlock. According to an opinion piece in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Colorado still has huge swaths of unprotected public land that face threats from mining, oil and gas development, and expansion of roads.
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While I once thought that these aridification scenarios were kind of abstract and way out in the future, I don’t think that anymore. It’s absolutely urgent that we start thinking now, while there’s time, about how we adjust the compact, the regulations, the necessary reductions, in the most careful way so that we limit the damage, which can really be extreme.”
