Coexisting With Fire

As wildfires and fire management evolve, communities must adapt

By Fiona Noonan, Wild Lands & Water Program Manager

Spring in Central Oregon means many things: sand lilies and bitterroot, farmers markets—and, lately, the gauzy haze of smoke in the air from nearby prescribed fires. 

Across the western United States, fire “season” now lasts all year, and Central Oregon is no exception. We live amid beauty, bounty, and a fire-adapted landscape that people have attempted to stifle and control for the past 175 years. Now, the confluence of climate change and long-term fire management decisions are forcing us to face facts: like it or not, we must learn to live with fire.

Life in the Cascades and Blue Mountains has always included fire. Picture any part of the Deschutes or Ochoco National Forests—purple cones of lupine, a bird making its home in a snag, the soft vanilla of Ponderosa bark—and you’re envisioning a landscape shaped by fire. Historically, lightning strikes ignited most wildfires, establishing the ancient fire regimes within which species evolved. Prior to the mid-1800s, many Tribes also used fire to manage meadows and forests, which benefited First Foods, basketry materials, and hunting conditions, as well as broader ecosystem diversity. With the influx of white settlers, however, cultural burning largely disappeared, banned by the government as part of its broader program of displacing and erasing Indigenous peoples. 

Meanwhile, communities based around logging and mining sprouted across the west. 

Unsurprisingly, the dry and mixed-moisture forests that offered attractive timber stands and mining claims also supported frequent, sometimes raging, wildfires. Informed by deep-seated fear and with human homes, lives, and industries at risk, the choice at the time seemed obvious: the fires had to be stopped. 

This drive didn’t just stem from a cultural fear of fire, it was  government policy. Having battled historic fires like the Big Burn of 1910, in 1935 the US Forest Service implemented the “10 am policy,” which stated that all fire starts should be extinguished by 10 o’clock the following morning. Thus began an even more aggressive era of fire suppression across the West. 

Rapid Growth, Choices Made 

Fast forward from 1935 to the 1970s, and Oregon’s population had more than doubled, spurring development into forests, grasslands, and shrublands that had by this point experienced decades of artificially infrequent fires. 

Like much of the rapidly growing West, the state faced a choice: sprawl into these rural and wild lands, or concentrate populations in cities and towns.

Oregon chose the latter. In 1973, Oregon established a statewide land use planning system centered around farm and forest preservation and encouraging development inside urban growth boundaries. These land use laws limit sprawl, which also reduces the amount of area where fire-prone landscapes and human development overlap. Better known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), this area of overlap often poses the greatest risk to communities, the place where lives and structures are exposed to increased ignitions and higher levels of fuel loading.

A Dangerous Cycle

Photo: James Parsons

Despite our land use system, however, the demand for development in fire-prone rural areas of Central Oregon has exploded in recent years. A dangerous cycle ensues: more development within the WUI leads to more exposure to wildfires, which then requires suppression to safeguard lives and structures, which then increases wildfire risk again, which leads to ongoing dependence on fire suppression. 

For 100-plus years, we have collectively taken for granted that government agencies should stop all wildland fires immediately, no matter how remote the fire may be. The problem is that when communities themselves grow into rural and wild lands, the fire comes to them, and the combination of climate change, drought, and suppression-induced fuel loading means that fires are of such speed, intensity, and scale that they become unstoppable. 

Wildfires turn from a natural process into a disaster when they threaten lives and property, so the solution to wildfire risks can no longer only be out in our undeveloped forests, grasslands, and shrublands. Prescribed fire, cultural burning, and science-informed thinning can contribute to slower, lower-severity fires and overall ecosystem health, but these approaches alone do not prevent megafires from impacting communities built into the WUI. 

Ensuring community safety in the face of devastating and sometimes deadly wildfires depends on thoughtful land use planning, defensible space, and home hardening. 

As Central Oregon grows, we can improve wildfire resilience by maintaining a buffer between ignition zones and communities, including limiting development in the WUI. 

Time and again, this strategy has saved homes and lives in Bend, Tumalo, La Pine, and Sisters when fires like Bridge Creek (1979), Awbrey Hall (1990), Skeleton (1996), Two Bulls (2014), Milli (2017), and Darlene 3 (2024) have burned on the outskirts of towns. In each of these cases, land use planning enabled targeted resource deployment to both prepare for and respond to wildfires, minimizing the number of homes facing the highest conflagration risk.

LandWatch's Approach

As we face the intertwined realities of growth and climate change and wildfire, LandWatch will continue advocating for wildfire resilience strategies grounded in science and informed by our expertise in land use, urban planning, and forest management. 

On our Cities & Towns team, LandWatch staff have helped steer the City of Sisters UGB expansion away from forested, fire-prone lands northwest of town and toward already-developed lands to the east. Attorneys on LandWatch’s Rural Lands program have opposed a substantial expansion of Crooked River Ranch, based in part on concerns about evacuation routes that would be insufficient in the case of a fast-moving range fire. Our Wild Lands and Water team has urged federal and county land managers to use the best available science to guide fuels reduction projects that meaningfully improve defensible space without eliminating wide swaths of habitat. And, across programs, LandWatch staff have dedicated hundreds of hours to advocating for legislation that would fund wildfire resiliency initiatives, support home-hardening programs, and prevent the expansion of development in the WUI.

Wildfire is essential in our landscape, and an expected element of living, working, and playing in Central Oregon. As we plan for the future, we must learn to coexist with fire.