Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA NA . C O M 81 Since 1990, the rate of conversion of wildlands to wild- land-urban interface has grown at the astonishing rate of 4,000 acres a day, or about a million-and-a-half acres a year. Roughly 120 million people, or more than a third of all the people living in the United States, are living in the wildland-urban interface. Fully 60% of new homes since 2006 were built in the WUI, and over 85% of these lands are yet to be developed. WHY FIRES ARE BIGGER AND HOTTER Across thousands of years, about every decade or so, fairly modest "stand maintenance" fires burned across the landscape, cleaning fallen trees and branches from the forest floor. But then in the early 20th century, in the wake of a devastating fire in 1910 (known as e Big Burn), a fledgling U.S. Forest Service made its mark— and arguably, guaranteed its continued existence—by taking on the job of fire suppression in the West. ey were awfully good at it. Maybe too good. Without natural stand maintenance fires, the fuel load on the forest floor steadily increased. Although we changed our land man- agement practices decades ago, allowing lightning-caused fires to burn when and where appropriate, today there are still about 300 million acres in the West with unnaturally heavy fuel loads. To make matters worse, those heavy fuel loads are now coming smack up against climate change. e most comprehensive research to date concludes that since 1985 human-caused climate change has doubled the number of acres burning annually in the West. Rising temperatures and lower snowfall means snow packs are going off earlier and coming around again later in the fall. Since 1972, the fire season in Montana has lengthened by a whopping 75 days. And then there's drought. Even if drought doesn't kill trees outright it often leaves them weak, far less able to fend off pests like pine bark beetles. In California alone, 2016 saw the death of 60 million trees. WHAT TO DO Much can be done to make human communities less prone to going up in smoke in the face of wildfire. in- ning the forest around subdivisions, creating a five-foot apron of non-flammable material around homes, clean- ing gutters and covering attics and crawlspace vents with screens, cutting lower branches from nearby conifers to Deer in Fire Pyrocumulus cloud over Beaver complex fire in 2014 Wallow Fire KARI GREER JOHN MCCOLGAN

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