Prescribed Fire and U.S. Wilderness Areas: Barriers and Opportunities for Wilderness Fire Management in a Time of Change

Fire is one of the greatest gifts given to humankind. Fire has lived on the North American continent since its beginning, shaping ecosystems and shaped by people. In the modern era, the balance between fire, land, and people has been unsettled, disrupting both ecosystems and society. Many of these challenges are expected to worsen in the years to come. 

Fire is a powerful force that humans have used to create a reciprocal relationship with the land, but which also carries danger. The power of fire to harm people and transform place led to land management policies that formed the basis of a century or more of widespread fire exclusion across North America. However, fire exclusion has produced many unintended and unwanted consequences. Landscapes across the continent increasingly do not resemble the lands historically shaped by millennia of lightning strikes and generations of fire use by Indigenous stewards. In rethinking our current relationships with fire and the land, we find opportunities to regain the living power of fire for land stewardship. This includes caring for places designated as wilderness, which are intended to be free from the influences of modern humans. 

This paper presents a framework for understanding how prescribed fire may be used to restore and maintain wilderness ecosystems in an era of intensifying environmental change. It further includes an assessment of current barriers for prescribed fire in wilderness identified by a group of experts in fire and wilderness management who participated in a workshop held in 2022 at Western Colorado University. Finally, areas of expert agreement around opportunities to overcome these barriers are presented as potential paths forward that could allow managers to more fully realize the benefits of prescribed fire in wilderness.