Dampening the flames of climate change
iOn Oct. 14, when the first autumn snow dusted the streets and mountains around Moscow, Idaho, Lovina Englund did more than enjoy the frosty ambience. After months of perilous heat, lingering smoke and anxious days when every kiln-dry tree felt prone to catastrophe, she breathed a deep sigh of relief. The fire season was finally over.
“Out here, everything is so exacerbated by climate change,” says Englund, executive director of the Palouse Land Trust. “Between the fuel buildup [in forests] and the drought, we’re constantly barraged by more severe fires that require more resources. We usually have seven to 10 days of extreme weather conditions, but this year it went on for weeks and weeks.”
This includes the heat dome event in July, a lethal weather phenomenon that Englund describes as “eye-poppingly scary.” It drove temperatures in Idaho to 95 degrees or higher for 20 straight days, a new state record.
Into this breach steps PLT and other land trusts like it in the Mountain West. Along with its usual work to save land, restore habitat and promote access to nature, PLT has become what the military calls a force multiplier. They have no heavy trucks, no legions of firefighters, no aircraft to rain tons of red fire retardant on smoldering forests. What they can do, however, is leverage the powerful tools of knowledge and prevention to stop fires from starting in the first place.
“This is an evolution of our programming,” Englund says. “We collaborate with landowners around fuel prevention and how to prepare for the fire season. We know it’s not if the fire is coming but when.”
With a staff of three, PLT covers a 12 million-acre service area in north-central Idaho and southeast Washington. The diverse topography includes federal wilderness, the loess soil wheatlands of the Palouse prairie and canyons along the Snake River. Setting clear priorities and building partnerships around stewardship has long been crucial to PLT’s success. Now, faced with the dire exigency of an extended fire season, PLT’s public engagement takes on new urgency. Their partners include Idaho Firewise, AmeriCorps and the fire ecology program at the University of Idaho campus in Moscow. This combined effort puts PLT among the 74% of land trusts that increased their focus on climate change in the last five years, according to the 2020 Census.
Much of PLT’s landowner outreach targets the “wildland-urban interface.” These are places where structures built close to forests create inherent fire hazards for homeowners. PLT’s guidance here focuses on the practical: Don’t use cedar shakes as shingles or siding; keep pine needles out of rain gutters; trim low-hanging limbs from trees and remove excess woody debris from the ground.
In August, PLT’s prevention measures — part science, part neighborly cohesion — were severely tested. It started with a faulty battery charger that set a barn on fire near the Stage Easement, an 81-acre PLT preserve. When a local farmer saw smoke, he jumped on his tractor and began to disc a firebreak to contain the flames. Meanwhile, landowners directed firefighting helicopters to fill their “Bambi buckets” with water from irrigation ponds. The fire destroyed the barn and a home that belonged to a PLT board member. Yet without a fuel reduction project carried out earlier by UI students and faculty, the fire could’ve been disastrous. They had thinned overstocked trees, removed dead trunks and cleared low-level “ladder fuels” that can carry flames into the overhead canopy.
"Their work was our saving grace,” says Jaime Jovanovich Walker, PLT communications and development coordinator. “If they hadn’t done what they did, the fire would’ve spread to the Moscow Mountain corridor. Instead of 116 acres, it would’ve burned hundreds of thousands.”
Despite a 35-mph wind, the wildfire singed trees but did little heavy damage. PLT staff consider it a “miracle” that the fire switched course and didn’t spread to their beloved Idler’s Rest preserve nearby. Still, PLT isn’t counting on fate to protect the people and wild places of the Palouse. “Now, the reality of being a Westerner involves living differently during the fire season,” Englund says. “We can’t always rely on firefighters to be heroes and save us. But a land trust can leverage its prevention resources in ways that have a meaningful impact.”