Author Tom Ribe speaks to a full house at Fuller Lodge Tuesday evening on ‘The Cerro Grande Fire and 25 Years of Mega Fires’. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
Local resident Alex Viech, right, waits for author Tom Ribe to sign his copy of Ribe’s book ‘Inferno by Committee II following Tuesday evening’s lecture. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
Santa Fe writer Tom Ribe held the room full of people in the palm of his hand Tuesday evening at Fuller Lodge during his talk about “The Cerro Grande Fire and 25 Years of Mega Fires”. Ribe is well-known in Los Alamos and the surrounding area, and the audience was completely engaged for more than an hour as he traced the Cerro Grande Fire, an escaped prescribed burn in 2000, from the strike of the first match to when it burned some 200 homes in Los Alamos.
Following the talk, which is presented below in its entirety along with the link to the video by Jean Gindreau of PAC 8, Ribe continued his discussion of the mistakes made by the prescribed fire crew and the failure of the Santa Fe National Forest to learn from the fire. He also signed copies of his fully revised ‘Inferno by Committee, A History of the Cerro Grande Fire and the Rise of New Mexico Megafires”, released in December, that includes sections on the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire and the 2011 Las Conchas Fire as well as an analysis of the role of climate change in the megafires New Mexico is experiencing.
The talk was part of the Los Alamos Historical Society’s 2024-2025 Lecture Series sponsored by TechSource.
THE CERRO GRANDE FIRE AND 25 YEARS OF MEGA FIRES
BY TOM RIBE
It’s been 25 years since the Cerro Grande Fire plunged Los Alamos into a disaster, burning homes, closing the lab for 2 weeks, and causing everyone immeasurable stress. For those of you who were here, you will recall the smoke from the mountains south of town growing for 2 days until it became a black column that began to gobble the forest rapidly toward Los Alamos and then into Los Alamos.
For those who lost homes, it was a wrenching experience. The Laboratory and the country lost historic buildings such as some at V Site that underpin the Manhattan Project physical history. Billions of dollars’ worth of property was lost. Sadly, the Cerro Grande Fire was inevitable, and if anything, it could have been worse.
Why were the Cerro Grande and the Dome Fire and Las Conchas such ferocious fires? Why have much of the Jemez Mountains and the Sangre de Cristos across the valley from Los Alamos burned to the point where tens of thousands of acres of former forest are now brushy grasslands? For those of us who have been in this area for a few decades, we know that big hot fires like these were virtually unknown here until 1996.
The high Jemez around the Valles Caldera was always a green forested area, wet in the summer, snowy in the winter. Now it has big fire scars. What happened?
For years I had worked as an on-call AD firefighter for Bandelier National Monument. I helped manage many prescribed fires that burned thousands of acres on the north and west side of Bandelier. When the Valles Caldera was transferred to the National Park Service in 2014, I helped the NPS crews carry out some burns on the National Preserve. I also helped with prescribed burning at Yosemite National Park. I helped with an earlier Cerro Grande Prescribed Burn in 1985 or so. We abandoned that burn because the fuels were too wet to ignite on that fall day.
I saw that the Bandelier fire staff usually knew what they were doing, so when the Cerro Grande prescribed burn got out of control and the media said the park staff was at fault, I decided to do some research and find out what really happened. My research resulted in my book Inferno by Committee II. I think it’s important that people understand why Cerro Grande and the Las Conchas Fire and Hermit Peak Fire happened and why more big fires like these will continue to happen in the future.
The crew that lit the Cerro Grande Prescribed Burn made mistakes, and the fire got out of control because of their mistakes and the mistakes of others in the firefighting establishment. I go into detail in the book about that, but the fire crews were absolutely doing the right thing in theory, but they got the timing and details wrong. They were trying to right the wrongs of generations of people in New Mexico who had unknowingly turned the Jemez Mountains from a fire adapted landscape into a powder keg.
We had crossed a line in time and methods of managing wildland fire over the last century would no longer work in 2000. It was a harsh lesson and one that the national wildland fire community paid attention to.
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Since Cerro Grande, we have had more very large high severity fires. We experienced the 2011 Las Conchas fire which burned 158,000 acres and the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in the Sangre de Cristo that burned 321,000 acres. For those of you who have lived here very long, you see the changes.
So, what happened? Why do we have monster fires killing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest around us. This is not normal
We must look way back in time to understand what happened to our forests.
The Pueblo People have been living on and near the Pajarito Plateau and the Jemez Mountains for at least 3000 years. They may have lit fires purposely, but their fire contributions were lost among the incredible number of lightning fires that happened regionally. They abandoned the Pajarito Plateau because of drought and resource shortages just before the Spanish arrived in 1540. Undoubtedly, they had a big impact on vegetation and wildlife populations because of firewood gathering and hunting for meat.
The Spanish introduced cows, sheep and horses into this area when they arrived in 1540. None of these animals had ever been here before. Coronado brought several thousand head of livestock into New Mexico.
In 1826 James Pattie surveyed the Gila River drainage and said that after one day of travel “we were fatigued by the difficulty of getting through the high grass which covered the heavily timbered bottom.” Joseph Rothrock of the 1860 Wheeler survey described the “luxuriant bunchgrasses covering the ground as thickly as it could stand.” He was in northern New Mexico.
Aldo Leopold said, “All the old settlers agree that at the time of settlement, stirrup high gramma grasses covered the region.” And this grass extended out into the Rio Grande Valley from the Jemez Mountains. Lightning fires would burn over tens of thousands of acres in the mountains and burn out into the Valley. These fires burned close to the ground and nurtured forest and grassland alike.
The Hispano homesteaders that lived on the Plateau at the time of the Los Alamos Ranch School had small herds of cows and sheep.
When the railroad arrived in 1880, many trainloads of sheep were released into northern New Mexico. There were 5 million sheep here in 1890, and these animals spread over the region, pulling up grass by the roots and laying the soil bare. 500,000 cows were released at the same time over northern New Mexico. Keep in mind there was no regulation of grazing at the time anywhere.
WC Bishop brought 3000 cows to the Los Alamos area in the 1860s. Combined with sheep herds owned by others, his cows helped ruin the grass that had carried light fires over the land for thousands of years. Unfortunately for Bishop and his cows but fortunately for the land, the winter of 1866 was so harsh that it killed most of Bishop’s cows and he left.
Meanwhile the logger Harry Buckman arrived in 1898 and cut down tens of thousands of old growth ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees across the eastern Jemez and the Pajarito Plateau.
He dragged the logs out of here behind horses, gouging the land and leaving logging debris everywhere. He loaded the wood onto trains in White Rock Canyon at Buckman Crossing. Eventually he cashed out and left for Oregon.
Tree ring data shows that the last widespread natural ground fire burned in the Bandelier area around 1900.
The Pajarito Plateau and eastern Jemez was overgrazed, and the forests were tattered thickets by 1900. Sheep grazing continued, including in Bandelier until the 1930s.
Sheep decimated the ground cover. Much of that bare soil around the tree stumps filled in with small tree seedlings. With no fire to thin them, they grew thick across hundreds of thousands of acres.
The US Forest Service arrived in 1905 with the mission of regulating livestock grazing on the public lands and of extinguishing all forest fires. Their fire suppression allowed tree thickets to continue to grow and they ultimately created the fuel for the incredibly hot forest fires we experience today. By 1996, we crossed a line in time. The unusually wet 1970s and 80s were over and drought had set in, a drought that continues to today.
Craig Allen, the forest ecology researcher put it this way: “Drier winter conditions abruptly returned to the Southwest in 1996, with near-continuous and ongoing drought, along with historically novel warmer temperatures. As a result, over the past 29 years southwestern forests and woodlands have been subject to reduced plant available water, sharply reduced tree growth, much more extensive and severe fire activity, and major pulses of drought-induced tree mortality (including bark beetle outbreaks). The scale of these recent tree-killing forest disturbances is unprecedented in the Southwest since historic record keeping began around 1900, and almost certainly is unprecedented since the regional megadrought of the late 1500s.”
He goes on to say that the size of recent high severity fires is almost certainly unprecedented over the last 9000 years. As of 2025, 50% of our forest trees have died in the Southwest. Our forests are drying out. In the summer of 1996, an abandoned campfire south of Bandelier blew sparks into ponderosa forests and became the 17,000-acre Dome Fire.
It was a major firestorm, that killed thousands of acres of forest, raging across upper Bandelier and the Santa Fe National Forest. A skilled US Forest Service incident management team barely managed to stop the fire at Frijoles Canyon. If they hadn’t, the Dome Fire likely would have burned into Los Alamos.
Dr. Craig Allen spent most of his career beginning in the 1980s studying the Jemez
Mountains. He figured out the fire history of the Jemez Mountains by sampling fire scars
all over the mountain range. Craig’s reconstruction of past fire helped fire managers
understand that they need to try to restore forest conditions that prevailed before the
onslaught of livestock grazing and fire suppression.
Beginning in the 1970s the NPS developed a national policy of putting fire back in its
natural place in the national parks. This policy had its roots in research done in the big
national parks of the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite and Sequoia NPs.
Extensive studies in the Jemez Mountains show that almost all acres in the Jemez
Mountains were burning every 5 to 20 years before 1900. Starting in 1980, Bandelier
started to reintroduce fire to correct this damage, and they had good results with 67
prescribed fires. Cerro Grande was their only mishap. (Cerro Slide)
Thus, the NPS fire crews at Cerro Grande were reintroducing fire onto the upper Bandelier landscape consistent with national policy in the Park Service. Bandelier is an island among lands managed by the Santa Fe National Forest and the Lab and the Valles Caldera. Problem was that the national forest land north of Bandelier was even in worse shape than the burn unit. It was thick with needles and logs and thickets of small trees over thousands of acres for the reasons I just discussed.
The NPS crew wanted to remove debris and kill lots of small trees so future fires coming from the south toward Los Alamos would run out of fuel in the treated area. But they were trying to hold the fire inside the assigned area without natural features or old roads as boundaries. Remember that the Cerro Grande Mountain area had been purchased from the Baca Ranch owners by the Park Service in 1978, and it had been heavily grazed and logged before the park got the land. So, it was ecologically disturbed.
After the Dome Fire, Bandelier had two big “units” or areas of unburned forest in the upper part of the park. Both needed prescribed fire as fire hadn’t touched them since the late 1800s. One was the south side and base of Cerro Grande. This area went right up to the Forest Service boundary at the top of Cerro Grande and over to what was then the Baca Ranch to the west. The other area was the Upper Frijoles Canyon area that extends from Graduation Flats to Highway 4 along the top of the canyon. The Upper Frijoles unit was considered a difficult and risky area for prescribed burning, but it needed to be burned to reduce fuels and restore watershed health. Wildfire in this area could exhibit extreme fire behavior given the topography. Given how complex this burn would be, park staff decided to burn the Cerro Grande unit first, to provide a fuel buffer between Los Alamos and the eventual Upper Frijoles burn.
For the record, the Upper Frijoles burn unit was ignited in 2007 with a robust staff of fire people from all over the West, State crews and NPS crews from the region joined USFS crews. It was a highly successful burn, and I was fortunate to be able to join the burn.
When the Las Conchas fire roared into that area in 2011, its behavior was moderated by the fuel reduction our burn had created, though Las Conchas still burned too hot in upper Frijoles Canyon.
Let’s look at the Cerro Grande burn briefly so we can see how prescribed fires are executed and what went wrong. People ask me how firefighters keep a prescribed fire under control? Of course, they don’t always, but in most cases, prescribed fires are successful and do what their
managers want. Where fighting wildfire is a combination of science and warfare, prescribed burning is more of an art, driven by science and experience.
In a nutshell, prescribed burners understand how weather affects fire behavior based on extensive research by fire scientists over decades. They know generally how fire behaves in various fuel types, and they can predict with some accuracy how fire will act on a particular landscape depending on what the weather is like when the plan to burn. They look at aspect, slope, fuel types, elevation etc. They look at relative humidity, wind direction and speed and temperatures over the burn period. They look at weather forecasts well into the near future. All this comes together in a matrix. From this complexity they decide how many people and what equipment they need to help light and hold the fire and how long they need to do the work. They create boundaries for the fire using roads, cliffs, lines dug in the dirt by firefighters and other methods.
On the 2007 Upper Frijoles burn we had 100 interagency firefighters, including 8 engines, 1 helicopter, and several water tenders. It was an expensive operation, but it worked. We burned out the upper end of the canyon, improved the ecology and had only minor control problems that were routine at best. The vegetation there thrived until Las Conchas.
Cerro Grande was another issue. I read volumes of investigative reports, talked to most of the main players in the burn and the subsequent wildfire, and I got a good sense of what went wrong.
The Park Service had a group of fire people who were based at Bandelier. In 2000, they had 12 people who could ignite the fire and they had a group of 20 firefighters from the Northern Pueblos who came to help them on the first afternoon.
Th idea was to burn a swath of grass at the top of the burn unit and put it out so that they had an area of burned fuel to stop the advance of fire from below over the next few days of igniting the whole burn area. Grass burns fast and goes out fast, so their idea was to light the grass and then swat it out, creating a blackline.
They had hauled water up from the highway on their backs to help squelch the fire. They did not bring any trucks up to the top of the mountain. Everything was on foot and by hand. On May 4 they lit the fire at 7 p.m. As they moved to the east and the west, they were putting the fire out on the bottom edge of their blackline. But eventually they were exhausted from this work and at 10:30 p.m. they stopped putting out the lower edge and let the fire advance slowly downhill. Fire was moving down into the darkness below. They burned at night because fire is usually much less active at night. But now they had departed from their plan to have an extinguished blackline around the top of the fire. Now they were actually lighting the inside of the burn unit.
By midnight everyone was tired, and the Northern Pueblo crew was clearly exhausted. They were dismissed from the burn and the remaining 12 people kept going. Three people left for rest. Those remaining kept an eye on the interior fire and tried to keep their blacklining ahead of the fire advancing down the hill. Tiring work.
They knew they needed more help, but they didn’t have anyone to call immediately. In fire, you either have people on the fire or you have people you have identified that can come when you call. Bandelier staff had called Santa Fe National Forest dispatch a few days earlier and dispatch told them certain people and apparatus were available to come when called. These are called contingency resources and Bandelier was counting on them actually being available to call.
The burn boss called SF dispatch at 3 AM and asked the person who answered the phone for a crew of 20 hotshots to come right away to help contain the fire. The dispatcher heard that it was a prescribed burn and said he couldn’t send a crew without higher up approval, and they should call back at regular business hours. This is not what they had been told when they identified contingency resources. This turned out to be a major turning point for the fire as the crew on the mountain was exhausted and understaffed and no help was coming for a long time.
At 7AM SF dispatch called back and the burn boss asked for a helicopter and a 20-person hotshot crew. Dispatch responded that that would be hard to do but they would try. The problem was, the USFS wanted to fire to be declared a wildfire, not a prescribed fire, before they would be able to pay for the resources they sent. John Romero, the dispatcher did his best to find a way to dispatch suppression resources to a prescribed fire being done by a different agency. It took an experienced person to do this but he pulled it off.
It was 5 and a half hours until the Santa Fe Hotshots arrived at Cerro Grande and by then the fire had spotted outside the fireline on the east side. The hotshots immediately got busy fighting that spot fire. At 10:30 a.m. the Sandia Helicopter from the Cebolla National Forest arrived and supplied 2 firefighters and then went to get water in its 400 gallon bucket to dump on the spot fire. They got the water from a cattle pond in the Valles Caldera but realized after one load they didn’t have permission from the Baca Ranch owners to do that so they started to get water from Cochiti Reservoir for future drops.
Bandelier’s staff was trying not to declare the fire a wildfire at this time. It is a major black mark on an organization’s reputation to have a prescribed fire get out of control and they still felt they could contain and finish the burn. But the winds had picked up above what the National Weather Service S predicted, and the winds were pushing the fire toward the northeast. New spotfires were appearing over the fireline on the northeast side of the burn and they were exhibiting extreme fire behavior. The hotshots and their supervisor strongly urged the burn boss to declare the fire a wildfire so they could get virtually unlimited resources to fight the fire. The hotshots said they needed a slurry bomber to drop a stripof fire retardant on the east side. You don’t call slurry bombers for prescribed fires and at this point, Bandelier’s top staff declared the fire a wildfire and admitted defeat. It was 19 hours after the first match was lit.
But it took until 4 in the afternoon for the air tanker to come because the first one dispatched had engine problems. By then the hotshots and four other firefighters were really tired. The Mormon Lake hotshot crew from Arizona under Russ Copp arrived and started to work on the west side of the fire.
By the next morning, on May 7 there were more hotshots and more retardant loads hitting the fire on its unruly east side. There had been 20 spot fires outside the fire line by then. The crews worked carefully down the east line toward the highway. Meanwhile the Mormon Lake Hotshots had reached the highway with their fireline. It was about noon May 7.
Things got very scary very fast. Two things happened at once. The wind picked up substantially and blew the fire at the base of the west fireline to the southeast. The fire climbed up into the treetops and roared into upper Frijoles Canyon below the hairpin turn. Meanwhile, the wind created a new spotfire of the upper east line that quickly got out of control and that spotfire burned rapidly to the north, crossing the ridge above Water Canyon and burning toward Los Alamos and the Camp May Road. Suddenly the fire was no longer only on Cerro Grande and it was racing to the north.
Various crews raced to Camp May Road and met the fire as it came up to the edge of Los Alamos Canyon afternoon May 7. They burned out some of the woods to create a blackline.
The fire held at Camp May Road. Everyone was cautiously relieved. A helicopter had been dousing fires with its buckets from the Los Alamos reservoir. Meanwhile other firefighters were working along West Jemez Road, securing the fire line next to the LANL lands.
By then a type one incident command team from Arizona was taking over the fire under Larry Humphrey, one of the best fire strategists in the Southwest. He had helped stop the Dome Fire from crossing Frijoles Canyon in 1996. He assumed control over the two days the fire lingered on the south side of Los Alamos Canyon. The fire remained calm until a new cold front came across the region, raising wind speeds and making the fire flare up.
I was sitting on the north side of Los Alamos Canyon watching much of this action on May 7. Western Area evacuated Sunday. I helped an elderly friend gather his things and leave his house while air tankers rumbled low overhead.
On May 10, 30 mph winds blew a new head of fire that developed in upper Pajarito Canyon across Camp May Road and into Los Alamos Canyon. That fire was unstoppable, and the fire burned across the canyon, into the woods above Western Area and started to run hot to the north in thickets of fuel west of town.
Its head grazed North Community at 4:30 PM, burning houses on 47th and 48th Streets and burning multiple houses on Arizona Avenue. The Los Alamos fire department assisted by other departments from around the state could not keep up with the burning houses as each house set the one next door on fire. Fire investigators realized that many of the houses in the north community were ignited by low groundfire creeping on the ground rather than by a large flame front.
The flame front roared off to the north, toward the Santa Clara Canyon where it did serious damage to the Santa Clara watershed and the Santa Clara community.
Just as a footnote, the prescribed burn that the Pecos Las Vegas District of the Santa Fe NF did in April 2022, was a repeat of the mistakes made at Cerro Grande 22 years earlier. I guess those firefighters hadn’t read the earlier version of my book.
The FS sent out a crew of 31 people out to burn 1200 acres in a dry, windy area near Las Vegas, NM. Just like at Cerro Grande they started to burn around the top of their sloping burn unit near the El Polvanire campground. They had a crew on each side of the unit burning down the hill. Within an hour they had spot fires outside their control lines and people were pulled off the fire line to run around putting out spot fires. Eventually some of these spot fires got too big to fight by hand and they called for aerial support but it was so early in the fire season, the helicopters and air tankers were not locally available yet. Within 4 hours, they declared their prescribed burn a wildfire and it roared away toward Las Vegas, ultimately burning 341,000 acres and burning 900 structures. This was the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.
Overall, prescribed burning is a necessary and critical tool for land managers working to restore our abused and degraded public lands. But it must be done with adequate personnel, and it must be timed extremely carefully in terms of current and future weather and fuel conditions. More than 90% of prescribed burns go off without problems.
We all need to focus on what is happening in our environment to make these fires so extremely destructive to our forests. We are seeing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest converted into brush and grass, probably permanently in many cases.
Not only are we seeing these big fires like Las Conchas and Hermit Peak, but we are also seeing mass die-offs of trees in NM and Colo. Bark beetles kill tens of millions of trees because the trees are weak from the warming and drying of the climate. Fire and bark beetles go hand in hand and other diseases like dwarf mistletoe are killing trees as well. Recent research finds that 50% of the forest between Wyoming and northern New Mexico has died due to temperature related mortality. Some scientists predict that most of our forests will be dead in the Southwest by 2050.
The climate is getting warmer largely because of people burning fossil fuels and the air pollution that results. None of this is news. As air temperatures rise, the air can hold more water vapor and evaporation from trees and the soil increases. In the Southwest where the relative humidity is already normally low, the evaporation from trees is worse than it would be in a humid area.
We are seeing living trees being stressed as the warmer atmosphere evaporates more water from the tree’s leaves than the soil and roots can supply to the tree. This is the vapor deficit and if trees experience high temperatures with drought, then their water plumbing system in the tree fails and the trees die. Larger trees are more vulnerable to vapor pressure deficit. Nate McDowell here at LANL has been pinpointing the exact physiological mechanism of tree death related to high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits.
At the same time, the dry soils and dry living trees lead to ideal conditions for hot, active fires. As temperatures increase, fires become more active, and scientists see the size and severity of fires increasing with temperature and more frequent wind events. As temperatures increase, the atmosphere is more unstable and wind increases, making for firestorms like Las Conchas and Cerro Grande.
These realities affect all forests in the West. We are seeing Giant Sequoia that are 3500 years old succumb to fire in the Sierra Nevada. A 3000-year-old alligator bark juniper in upper Bandelier was killed by the Las Conchas fire. So, the ferocity of these firestorms is unprecedented. Las Conchas was a much bigger firestorm than Cerro Grande. It started from a tree falling on an electrical line southwest of the Valles Caldera National Preserve on June 26, 2011. Bandelier’s engine crew was the first on scene and they did their best to contain the fire, but it got in the treetops almost immediately and burned 46,000 acres in one day, burning an acre per second. It ran right toward Los Alamos, then split into two heads, one running toward Cochiti Canyon and the other north along the mountains above Los Alamos. Had the Cerro Grande fire scar not acted as a buffer, the Las Conchas fire most likely would have hit Los Alamos from the west with much greater ferocity than the north-running Cerro Grande Fire had years earlier.
Putting our heads in the sand and following people who deny global warming is not going to work out for humanity. The longer we delay dealing with the situation, the more it will cost in lives and money. We need to stick with our science and act together regardless of short-term political problems. We don’t have time for backtracking. LANL has been a real leader on this topic.
Finally, I want to talk briefly about our public lands and our national parks. In this talk I’ve discussed our national forest and our national parks in the history of these big fires that affected us all. I’ve been critical of our agencies and at the same time I’m highly supportive. The idea of public lands is uniquely American, and it is an excellent idea. But things are changing fast for these agencies. The agency world I describe in my book, that we’ve all experienced over decades, may be changing radically in the near future.
Here we have three units of the national park system in and near Los Alamos, and they not only protect and explain our national heritage, but they provide a big boost to our local economy.
The NPS has been a continuous tradition of systematic protection for the most important cultural and historic sites in the US for the last 109 years. The NPS manages 85 million acres and 433 sites.
The Park System is a repository of our most important places, of our history and our natural world. The parks including small historic sites like Minuteman Missile NHP and huge parks like Yellowstone and Gates of the Arctic in Alaska. We steward these places and hand them to the next generation.
We have a pact with our ancestors and future generations to preserve and protect. Bandelier is experiencing record visitation this year and overall, the NPS system hosted a record 332 million people last year with big economic benefits for local communities. So, what if I told you that it is likely that Bandelier, the Valles Caldera, and the Manhattan PNHP could close in the next year or two? According to Trump’s 2026 budget, the NPS would face a 75% budget cut which could cause the NPS to close 350 of the 433 national park units. He plans to fire national and regional office staff and staff in parks. At some point the agency can no longer function.
Outdoor recreation supports a $1.2 trillion economy in the West and sustains five million jobs, powering local businesses and gateway communities like Los Alamos.
We’ve all seen what is happening to various federal agencies and research groups under this administration. They are making big staff cuts at the VA, the Social Security Administration, NOAA, US Forest Service, and the National Science Foundation.
Already the NPS has lost 3500 employees in the last three months nationally from a workforce that most experts agree was already a bare bones staff working with an inadequate budget. Yet polls show that 70% of the public including 60% of Republican voters want public lands protected. The NPS budget is 1/15th of 1% of the federal budget so these cuts are not about efficiency or fiscal restraint.
Now we learn that the US Geologic Survey that provides science for the NPS is losing a lot of staff including those who provide fire and climate science for our local parks.
The national parks are managed by teams of experts from natural resource managers, scientists, maintenance and education staff and law enforcement rangers. They are owned by all Americans and no one administration should dismantle what generations of Americans has put together and maintained for our children’s children. I sense a big backlash to these park cuts brewing in this country.
We’ve come full circle. When we think about the evolution of our understanding of fire on the landscape we can look back to the 1905 when all fire was bad. We can think about the 1970s when Harold Biswell was introducing fire back into the landscape at Sequoia National Park. Fire science is a big field and it underlies much of the work at the Park and Forest Service nationally. We need to maintain science in our country in all fields and at all levels. We cannot let one administration damage this public trust. Let’s work together to hold on to our public lands, and all our national heritage.