Rio Grande Valley Broadband • Entered by Susan Ostlie on December 30, 2020
NM Wildland Urban Fire Summit
October 22, 2020 – October 23, 2020
Participants and Hours
| Pre Planning hours | |
| Post Admin hours | |
| Activity Hours | 7 |
| Participants | 1 |
| Total Hours | 7 |
Key Issue: Multiple apply
Activity Type: Grant Funded Climate Education & Stewardship Program
Key Partners: Forest Stewards Guild,
Short Description of Activity
This was a two day summit on Wildland Urban interfaces and the role people must play to manage wild fires on mixed use landscapes.
Reflection/Evaluation
By suppressing all wildfires and incessantly burning fossil fuels, humans have upset the role that fire has historically played in providing ecological balance. We need to rethink our view of fire and accept its presence by changing how we manage lands and plan our communities.
In his article “Our Burning Planet: Why We Must Learn to Live with Fire,” environmental and fire historian Stephen Pyne describes three important paradoxes:
The more people attempt to take fire out of places that have co-evolved or co-existed with it, the more conditions change that worsen the fire scene.
Despite the expansion of feral flames, so abundantly recorded in global media, the amount of land burned on Earth continues to shrink.
As we ratchet down our binge-burning of lithic landscapes by cutting our use of fossil fuels, we will have to ratchet up our burning of living landscapes.