Rethinking Forest Management in the Pyrocene

A thin-and-burn site in the Santa Fe National Forest. Critics of aggressive fuel reduction treatments say they degrade ecosystems and increase flammability. Photo: Dominick DellaSala.

Feature: Rethinking Forest Management in the Pyrocene

By Lauren E. Oakes

As destructive fires have ripped through towns from Lahaina, Hawaii, to Paradise, California, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the public conversation often misses a key point: These urban fire disasters aren’t the same as wildfires burning through remote forests — and they won’t be fixed by managing forests alone.

At the same time, climate change and decades of fire suppression are reshaping wildland fire behavior, leading to larger, more intense blazes across the West and beyond.

Experts in forest management, fire ecology and conservation explored that question during the recent Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Tempe, Arizona, offering up a sobering yet nuanced look at the intersection of fire, climate change and the future of our forests.

Quick fixes are not enough, they made clear. The worsening problems require a deep reimagining of how we deal with forested landscapes and neighboring communities.

They also had advice for journalists covering these issues in this age of runaway fire — or what some are now calling the Pyrocene.

 

A fire historian’s perspective

Fire historian and author Stephen J. Pyne coined the term Pyrocene in 2015.

He opened an SEJ session by framing today’s wildfire crisis as the result of centuries of human-fire interaction.

“We have broken the serial ice ages of the Pleistocene and transformed a minor interglacial into a fire epoch — what I call the Pyrocene,” Pyne said, likening this new era to a fire-driven ice age, where large-scale combustion is reshaping ecosystems and societies in irreversible ways.

 

Pyne described the crisis as

a ‘fire triangle’ of too much

bad fire, too little good fire

and too much combustion.

 

He described the crisis as a “fire triangle” of too much bad fire, too little good fire and too much combustion.

While destructive urban fires dominate headlines, the absence of beneficial fire — like low-intensity burns — leaves forests vulnerable.

The biggest driver, Pyne emphasized, is fossil fuel combustion, which is intensifying climate conditions that make wildfires more extreme.

Addressing the crisis, he argued, requires phasing out fossil fuels and adopting regionally tailored fire regimes that treat fire as a natural, necessary process.

 

Misguided focus on fuel treatments

A member of the Hogback Ridge Fuels Crew after igniting a pile near Kelseyville, California in February 2024. Photo: U.S. Forest Service/Andrew Avitt via Flickr Creative Commons (United States government work).

Despite widespread investment in fuel reduction projects, some scientists have challenged the assumption that mechanical thinning is a catchall solution.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, presented data showing that roughly 80% of fuel treatments are located more than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from structures, doing little to protect homes or communities.

“It’s like a needle in a haystack,” he said, describing the slim odds that a fire will intersect a treated area.

DellaSala also warned of a dangerous feedback loop: large-scale thinning and logging release greenhouse gases, degrade ecosystems and can increase flammability in already fire-prone areas.

Studies show that the most fire-susceptible landscapes are often not untouched forests, but those heavily degraded by logging.

Instead of scaling up treatments, DellaSala called for protecting intact forests, reducing industrial logging and confronting the root causes of the fire crisis.

He outlined five such drivers: climate change, logging, an expansive road network that facilitates human ignitions, unchecked development in fire-prone areas and a lack of fire-adapted communities.

Solutions, he argued, must target these drivers through zoning reform, home-hardening, emissions reductions and limiting development in hazardous zones — rather than relying on landscape manipulation alone.

 

Fire-resilient forests and communities

While acknowledging the risks of overreliance on fuel treatments, Brian Kittler of American Forests emphasized the value of targeted, science-informed forest management.

In certain fire-adapted ecosystems, thinning combined with prescribed burns has helped reduce fire severity, he said. He pointed to the Bootleg and Caldor fires as examples where treatments carried out in previous years moderated fire behavior — though he agreed these are not substitutes for systemic changes.

There is, however, an ongoing debate about the effects of such thinning treatments and the high cost of implementing them in the hopes of engineering lower fire intensities.

Kittler stressed that building fire resilience means preparing communities, not just forests.

 

‘Home-hardening’ is often more

effective than fuel treatments in

determining home survival.

 

“Home-hardening” — using ignition-resistant materials, installing ember-resistant vents and maintaining defensible space — is often more effective than fuel treatments in determining home survival, he said. Updating zoning codes and escape infrastructure is also critical.

Research consistently shows that a home’s design and its broader landscape context — including topography, vegetation, wind exposure and nearby housing density — are stronger predictors of fire survival than proximity to treated forests.

“In many cases, we have to accept that we can’t keep fire out of these landscapes,” Kittler said. “So, we need to shift our focus toward living with fire, not just fighting it.”

 

What the media should be watching

The panelists urged journalists to scrutinize assumptions underlying fire management policy — especially as climate-driven fire seasons intensify in the face of a rapidly changing climate and funding priorities shift under the current administration.

Legislation like the Fix Our Forests Act could advance during the 2025 fire season, so it’s important for journalists to examine whether new policies help communities adapt to living with fire or perpetuate problematic approaches.

Although thinning and prescribed burning are often presented as scientific consensus, some conservation scientists warn that their benefits are overstated — and their ecological and climate impacts understated.

Similar tensions are playing out across fire-prone regions from western North America to Europe and Australia.

DellaSala called on the media to cover this underreported story: that large-scale fuel treatments may be undermining, rather than enhancing, forest and community resilience in a warming world.

[Editor’s Note: Material for this story was drawn from a panel session moderated by Oakes at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference in Tempe, Arizona, in April 2025, whose sponsors are listed here. Listen to the panel’s full audio recording here (SEJ members only) and read a write-up from SEJournal’s student newsroom coverage. For more on this topic, check our Topics on the Beat: Wildfire page, with more than a dozen and a half SEJournal stories, plus wildfire headlines from EJToday.]

Lauren E. Oakes is an ecologist and freelance writer. She is the author of “Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future” (2024) and “In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World,” which was a second-place winner for SEJ's 2019 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. She covers stories on forests, climate and our complex relationships with the natural world. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Nautilus, Emergence Magazine, Literary Hub, Undark, The New York Times and other media outlets. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University's Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 25. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.