Blane Heumann is The Nature Conservancy’s director of fire management. He’s worked for the Conservancy for 20 years, and he has been pursuing excellence in burning for conservation for the past 27 years.

On April 26, 1962, at the Helen Allison Savanna Preserve north of Minneapolis, Dr. Don Lawrence set out to do what never had been done before in The Nature Conservancy: he was going to burn nature to save it.

After many months of planning and collaboration with other conservationists, Dr. Lawrence led a team that took a match to the preserve, sending flames sweeping across 20 acres of grasses and oak woodlands in a “controlled burn.” It was hoped that restoring fire to the preserve would help the prairie grasses and wildflowers to recover, and drive back invading hardwood brush that was degrading conditions for birds and other wildlife.

A life-long conservationist and a professor of botany and ecology, Dr. Lawrence advised the Conservancy on scientific matters and helped raise funds to protect special places in Minnesota, including Helen Allison Savanna. Dr. Lawrence was part of a small network of biologists in the Midwest who were among the first to notice that our country’s decades-old practice of putting out nearly all fires was leading to dramatic changes on many of our lands. Certain plant species were struggling to survive, or even disappearing, and Dr. Lawrence surmised that burning might just turn things around.

A radical concept? Not really.

For millions of years fire had shaped America’s forests and grasslands, to the point where many of our landscapes came to depend on fire almost as much as they depended on water.

Dr. Lawrence knew his natural history and sought to bring this natural process back to the preserve. In doing so he pioneered a cost effective land restoration tool that is safely and methodically applied across Conservancy lands today. Just last year we applied controlled burns to 130,000 acres of conservation lands.

What’s more, the use of fire as a conservation tool is needed today more than ever; the USDA Forest Service believes that nearly 82 million acres of National Forest System lands are in need of restoration. Adding in other federal, state, private and tribal lands, the Conservancy further estimates the restoration backlog is around 120 million acres (an area the size of California and West Virginia combined).

Keeping our forests and prairies healthy is essential. Forests provide half our nation’s water supply, support more than million jobs in the wood products industry and generate $14.5 billion annually in recreation income for surrounding communities. Our prairies are among the most endangered habitats in the U.S. and around the world, and support the majority of U.S. beef production.

Since 1988 the Conservancy has burned more than 1.5 million acres in more than 1,000 different places in an effort to spur the growth of native plants and wildlife, and reduce the spread of foreign invasive species. Some of our most notable results include:

• Increasing the number of  endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers at longleaf pine forests in the Southeast;
• Restoring hundreds of highly diverse prairie grasslands throughout the Great Plains, from small nature reserves within the urban landscapes of Chicago to vast rolling ranch landscapes of Oklahoma and Kansas; and
• Enhancing and restoring coastal habitats in Florida and Texas, improving critical habitat for the endangered Florida Scrub Jay and in Texas the Attwater’s prairie chicken.

Controlled burns also offer very real safety benefits for people. Today many of our forests in the West, for example, are choked with brush and an overabundance of small trees. These unhealthy conditions fuel unnaturally severe fires that threaten forests and people alike. By cutting and removing woody fire fuel and with controlled burning, we can reduce the impacts of dangerous “mega-fires.” (Unfortunately these extremely dangerous and damaging fires have become more common in the last decade).

Dr. Lawrence designed that first controlled burn as an experiment to test the effects of different frequencies of fire on the plants and wildlife. Our staff has maintained this tradition of learning from our fire work, and practitioners regularly exchange knowledge within the Conservancy, with our peers in local, state and federal agencies, and with private landowners. Staff from The Nature Conservancy also helps train agency and other partners in how to achieve good ecological outcomes using fire, which really is the Conservancy’s specialty.

Over the past 10 years much of this learning and training has been accomplished with help from the Fire Learning Network, a cooperative program of the Forest Service, Department of the Interior agencies — Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service — and The Nature Conservancy. The partnership has a 10-year proven track record of helping to restore our nation’s forests and grasslands and to make communities safer from fire.

But a visit to the Helen Allison Savanna today is all one needs to be convinced of the effectiveness of applying controlled burns to restore forests and grasslands. Fifty years after Dr. Lawrence’s first burn, the preserve is a pleasant rolling landscape of high grasses mixed with oak trees, eerily like the mixed savanna-woodlands where humans first evolved in Africa. This may not be a coincidence — because it is believed early humans likely used fire to kick-start the growth of new grasses to attract prey species.

So, while Dr. Lawrence was not the first person to use fire to restore a natural landscape, he certainly was a pioneer within the Conservancy.

To learn more about our fire-related conservation work, visit us on the web at nature.org/fire and follow us on Twitter: @Nature_Fire.

[Image 1: 50 Years of controlled burning at the Conservancy. Image source: TNC. Image 2: The Conservancy's first controlled burn, taken April 26, 1962, at Helen Allison Savanna Preserve by Dr. Don Lawrence. Pictured are Dr. Frank D. Irving (left), a colleague of Dr. Lawrence's on faculty at the University of Minnesota and an early proponent of the use of fire to restore ecosystems, and Alvar Peterson (right), resident manager of the adjacent Cedar Creek Reserve. Image source: 1962 Dr. Donald Lawrence.)

The following post is written by Jon Schwedler, communications manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program. For the past 14 years, Jon has worked on forest conservation efforts in Maryland, Virginia, Montana, New Mexico and California.

America’s forests are getting some love this Valentine’s Day.

This good news came in the form of two gifts wrapped in one announcement from the U.S. Forest Service last week. With 193 million acres, the Forest Service is the single largest manager of forested lands in the U.S., which roughly translates to them overseeing about 1 in 5 of our country’s trees.

The first gift is that the Forest Service said it will be increasing the pace of forest restoration by at least 20% over the next 3 years. That means in 2014 they will look to restore 4.4 million acres — an area a little bit less than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon National Parks put together. Not bad, eh?

The second morsel was extra love shared with 14 states, in the form of new local investments in the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLR). This relatively new program, created in 2009, brings together folks who used to be at loggerheads over the management of our forests — industry, environmentalists, recreationists, sportsmen — to improve the health of our forests for people, water, and wildlife.

One of the forest health issues that the CFLR program is addressing is wildfire danger. Pioneering conservationist John Muir once said he could ride a horse at full gallop through the widely spaced trees of his beloved Sierra Mountains. Today in many of those same places you couldn’t even crawl through the forest. Why?

Because in some areas of the country one hundred years’ worth of putting out all natural fires has allowed our forests to become jam-packed like canned sardines — they’re now choked with thickets of small diameter trees instead of stocked with well-spaced, healthy trees that can survive natural, low intensity wildfires.

Just as being packed in tiny areas is bad for people’s health, this pickled forest condition also makes these forests less healthy, and less able to provide the live-giving services we rely on. For example, America’s forests store and filter half of our nation’s water supply. They also provide jobs to more than a million wood products workers.

Unnaturally dense forests also have a dangerous side — they can fuel huge, dangerous, costly mega-fires that burn too hot and too fast, like the ones we saw last year in the Southwest.

So while not exactly a box of chocolates, the Forest Service’s announcement last week to increase the pace of forest restoration was a welcome gift. We are blushing green.

The map below shows the new full list of CFLR projects, plus the three bonus projects (projects with involvement from The Nature Conservancy are in bold). Can you feel the love?

[Click to download a larger map]

[Top image: Mirror Lake in Yosemite Valley in California. Image source: Patrick Smith.]

1. NASA spacecraft sees massive solar blast, how will effect your weekend? (msnbc)
2. Roughly 10,000 people have been evacuated as Reno wildfire burns homes. (Huffington Post Green)
3. A nearly extinct species of monkey has been rediscovered in Borneo. (Wired)
4. Exxon Mobil will pay Montana $1.6M in penalties over the Yellowstone oil spill. (AP via Washington Post)
5. The endangered Catalina Island fox has made an astounding comeback. (LA Times)

The following post is written by Jon Schwedler, communications manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program. For the past 14 years, Jon has worked on forest conservation efforts in Maryland, Virginia, Montana, New Mexico and California.

Was 2011 the year of mega-fire? The answer to that question depends where you live.

If you live in the American Southwest, 2011 indeed was the year of fire for you. Arizona, New Mexico and Texas all had record fires. The “mega-fires” in these states burned an area larger than New Jersey.

If the last seven years is any measure, these extreme fire events could become the new normal at a national scale. Indeed, the five biggest fire years in U.S. history have all come since 2004 (which includes 2011 — the 4th biggest year).

[Image: Only five years have more than eight million acres burned in the United States; all have occurred since 2004, including 2011.]

Why? And more importantly, what can be done?

First, in talking about mega-fires it is important to understand the context of what is “natural.” Prior to European colonization, wildfires sparked by lightning and Native Americans were common (Native Americans often used fire to encourage new plant growth as grazing areas for game). Fire experts tell us that more than two-thirds of North America’s forests and grasslands burned regularly — at least once every 30 years.

Thus, over many thousands of years, America’s outdoors evolved with low-intensity, recurrent wildfire. Indeed, many of our natural areas actually need fire just as much as they need water.

But today a perfect storm of events has pushed forest conditions past their tipping point, and created an uncharacteristic plague of mega-fires that burn too big, too hot and too fast.

First, Smokey Bear has done too good a job. A century of suppressing all fires has created an incredible backlog of overgrown brush in our forests. For example, one hundred years ago noted conservationist John Muir described being able to gallop a horse through the Sierra Nevada’s wide-open forests; today it would be difficult to even crawl through these same places.

Second, changing temperatures have simultaneously dried out forests and extended the living season for bugs that weaken our trees. When colder temperatures come later in the year, or don’t go low enough, these insects buy more time to eat, breed and damage forests.

The result today is a tinderbox of weakened forests about the size of Montana. The fires we’ve had since 2004 are a symptom of this cause, 100 years in the making.

But, ironically, part of the solution is more fire.

Not the kind of mega-fires we’ve seen this year, but rather much smaller controlled burns that are purposely planned, set and managed by the fire professionals in the U.S. Forest Service, state and local forest agencies and The Nature Conservancy. These “prescribed burns” remove overgrown brush in our forests, reducing the woody fuel that creates conditions for dangerous and costly accidental fires. The Nature Conservancy performed controlled burns on more than 130,000 acres of our own land last year.

Another thing we can do is actively thin some of our forests in overgrown areas so they can be healthier, which will provide benefits to people, water and wildlife.

A new federal program that invests in just these kinds of projects, the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), has already shown great results in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. And besides lowering the risk of mega-fire, this program has also helped create or maintain more than 1,550 jobs.

Fortunately it looks like Capitol Hill is paying heed to this kind of success. In the 2012 budget Congress has fully invested in CFLRP, which means more communities will share its benefits.

On a personal level each of us can also pitch in, by being smarter about how and where we build our communities, and make our properties “firewise.”

While the smoke of 2011 has cleared, for many the mega-fires of 2011 will remain burned into memory. If we are able to fully embrace long-term investments in healthy forests, hopefully that’s where these mega-fires will stay.

[Image: 2011’s historic Wallow Fire in Arizona's Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. Image credit: Jayson Coil, US Forest Service]

1. Have a cruelty-free holiday and adopt a (live) turkey.  (Green)
2. After burning for three+ months, the Great Dismal Swamp wildfire has finally been extinguished.  (AP, via Huffington Post Green)
3. A bathtub-sized sea sponge has been rediscovered after a century of extinction.  Wonder where it was hiding… (Mongabay)
4. This Friday isn’t just Black Friday, it’s also Buy Nothing Day.  (And don’t forget to celebrate Green Gift Monday next week!)  (Grist)
5. Who takes the longest showers?  Twelve-year-old boys, says a new survey.  (Treehugger)

1. Dogfish Head Brewery is honoring Pearl Jam with a new beer. And they’re honoring The Nature Conservancy too! (Dogfish.com)
2. A stubborn swamp fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, a damp Virginia bog, has been burning for more than two months. (Washington Post)
3. Emergency drills are a sign Turkey is doing its part to protect the Mediterranean Sea. (Treehugger)
4. Are women and adolescent girls in poor countries fundamental in feeding the world? (Guardian).
5. Attention gardeners: keep your plants alive. Just add batteries. (Treehugger).

1. Scientists learn more about a rare animal called “the ghost of the mountains.” (The New York Times)
2. Research shows big wildfires could hit Yellowstone by 2050. (Mongabay)
3. A new study identifies 3 common characteristics of climate change deniers. (Conservation Journal Watch)
4. Guess who doesn’t like the University of Wyoming’s new anti-coal art project? (Grist)
5. If one of your worst fears is getting attacked by a lion, this study explains when you should be most afraid. (HuffPostGreen)

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a bit like a family, and its General Assembly — which just convened and is held every three years — is like a big holiday dinner with all your relatives. (See my video from the meeting.)

It’s something that you want to join despite the fact that you could do without the predictable opinions of that one distant relative. You know it may be messy, but you also wouldn’t want to miss it and you even look forward to the next one. (And, thankfully, that’s a few years down the road, anyhow.)

Let me explain.

From the boreal forests of Canada to the tropical forests of Borneo, the FSC is the standard for good forest management. FSC certification has become a globally recognized indicator that a product’s wood comes from a forest that has been managed to protect social, environmental and economic needs.

Protecting that balance is crucial in the global marketplace, where “sustainability” is becoming an increasingly important buzzword. It’s why the FSC tree-and-checkmark logo is popping up on furniture, decking material, copy paper and even diapers.

The FSC is not your normal organization with a well-oiled and hierarchical decision-making machine. Rather, the Board of Directors, the membership, issue-based working groups and every other entity or process associated with the FSC seeks balanced representation from the economic, social and environmental communities. These groups must also include representation from both the “north” and the “south,” or from both developed and developing economies. In other words, the FSC is designed to ensure that the interests and perspectives of its diverse stakeholders are adequately considered at every step of the process.

Is this slow, cumbersome, complicated, frustrating and contentious? Yes, at times. Is it necessary? Absolutely. It works for two principle reasons.

The first is that while people may not approach many of the issues from the same perspective, they are in pursuit of a shared objective — forest management that adequately balances multiple values — and know that they must find ways to make things work to achieve the greatest good.

The second reason? Generally speaking, the members respect, are impressed by and often even admire each other.

This year’s General Assembly was held in Kota Kinabalu from June 25th to July 1st. Kota Kinabalu lies in the state of Sabah, located on Malaysian Borneo, and it was a strategic choice.

Sabah has a 40-year-history of bad forest management, which the charismatic Director General of the Sabah Forestry Department (SFD), Sam Mannan, openly admits. But it also has the world’s first FSC-certified lowland tropical forest, the Deramakot Forest Reserve, and it has committed to bringing all of its forests under independent third-party certification by 2014.

Just last week, the SFD and FSC announced the certification of another 300,000 hectares of prime habitat for orangutans and pygmy elephants, as well as hundreds of lesser known species comprising Borneo’s rich biological wealth. This means that the forest will continue to generate timber to feed an increasingly hungry global market, but will also preserve the other values that lie within.

That’s the type of balance that FSC seeks to achieve. And it is through the General Assembly, for all its controlled chaos, that the FSC will be able to get there.

(Image: Orangutan. Image credit:©TNC. Video: How was the Forest Stewardship Council’s recent General Assembly like a big family dinner? And how did it help save forests? The Conservancy’s Asia Pacific forest program director Jack Hurd has the answers. )

1. Solar and wind developers are making use of abandoned lands known as “brownfields.” (YaleE360)
2. Play a video game and solve climate change. Really, it’s that simple. (Treehugger)
3. One of the world’s oddest animals might have trouble adapting to climate change. (Conservation Journal Watch)
4. Victory in the Serengeti! The Tanzania government cancels plans to build a road through the park. (Mongabay)
5. The Arizona wildfire hasn’t been kind to endangered wildlife. (HuffPostGreen)

The following is a guest essay by Robert Stieve, editor-in-chief of Arizona Highways magazine. It first appeared on the magazine’s blog on June 9, 2011.

It’s hard to watch the news, but there’s no point in turning off the television. The images are everywhere: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter. Especially Twitter. Of all the mainstream social media, Twitter is the best for breaking news. Coups in Egypt. Earthquakes in Japan. Wildfires in Arizona. The information is essential, but it’s hard to look at the catastrophe that’s unfolding in the White Mountains.

As editor-in-chief of Arizona Highways, I’m often asked about my favorite place in the state. It’s an impossible question, because there are so many places, but when I’m pushed, I usually admit it’s a toss-up between the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and Hannagan Meadow in the White Mountains. Unfortunately, because of the cataclysm known as the Wallow Fire, there’s no longer a debate. It’s hard to imagine there will be anything left of Hannagan Meadow and the surrounding forests by the time the fire is finally put out.

As I write this blog, the blaze, which began on May 29, has already consumed 336,000 acres, and the wind gusts of more than 60 mph are making matters worse. At this point, zero percent of the fire has been contained. Zero percent. The fire is now the second largest in Arizona history, and it’s probably only a matter of time before it surpasses Rodeo-Chediski—two fires, both caused by human negligence, that merged as one.

It seems like just yesterday when that inferno was raging, but it’s been almost 10 years. And time isn’t healing the wound. Not for me, anyway. I still get heavy-hearted when I drive across the Mogollon Rim and see the apocalyptic devastation. It’s upsetting, and so is the Wallow Fire. Upsetting, depressing, sorrowful … there aren’t any words strong enough to describe what I’m feeling. I never thought I’d live to see anything as bad as Rodeo-Chediski, much less something worse. But that’s how the Wallow Fire is playing out, and like Rodeo-Chediski, we’re all in a state of shock.

It’s the same shock we feel during any other disaster. Certainly, you can’t compare Engelmann spruce and Douglas firs to the victims of a tsunami or an earthquake, but there is a similar feeling of helplessness and hopelessness when you see the dramatic photos, and when you think about what’s been lost and how that will decimate the local economies. And just when you think you couldn’t feel any worse, you think about how the Wallow Fire shouldn’t be burning at all. Although lightning fires do occur, this one was started by someone who forgot to pack his thinking cap when he headed into the great outdoors.

The details of how the fire got started are still being investigated, but according to officials of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, it was caused by a human being. Whether it was ignited by a cigarette butt, fireworks, an unattended campfire … we don’t know. Either way, somebody made a mistake. A big mistake. I was fortunate enough to be raised by an avid outdoorsman who taught me how to be careful in the forest and how to properly extinguish a campfire. But even without that training, you’d think common sense would prevail when it comes to fire. It doesn’t. It certainly didn’t for the person or persons responsible for the Wallow Fire. Or the person or persons responsible for the Horseshoe Two Fire in the Chiricahua Mountains, the Murphy Fire in the Atascosa Mountains, and all the others.

Ironically, unlike a raging forest fire, it’s pretty simple to put out a campfire. However, before you even think about firing up a portable stove or building a campfire, check with the area’s governing agency beforehand. Fire restrictions may apply during times of high fire danger. Times like now. DO NOT IGNORE THE WARNINGS.

When there aren’t any fire restrictions in place, and you’re at a campsite where fires are allowed, use only established fire pits, and put out your fire at least 60 minutes before you start to break camp. Let the fire die down, then pour water over the wood and ashes and cover them with soil. Mix the soil, water and ashes until the fire and any embers are completely out. Then, wait around for at least another hour to make sure it’s safe to leave. Again, use common sense and always adhere to the Leave No Trace Ethics.

If there’s a bright side to the Wallow Fire, it’s that no one has been seriously injured so far. Some of that is luck, but most of it is a credit to the incredible men and women who risk their lives to save our forests and our cabins and our favorite places. Last summer, almost to the day, I was stranded at Hannagan Meadow Lodge because of the Paradise Fire, which was burning in the adjacent Blue Range Primitive Area. The firefighters used the lodge as a staging area, and I had an opportunity to interact with many of them and talk about their heroic efforts. Of course, they didn’t see themselves as heroes. It was just another day on the job for them. But they are heroes, and we owe them a sincere debt of gratitude — for what they’ve accomplished so far, and for what lies ahead.

Time will tell what’s left of the woods when the Wallow Fire has finally finished burning, but this much we know: One of the most beautiful places in the world, one of my favorite places in Arizona, is being destroyed, and it’ll never be the same. Not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, and not in the lifetime of the perpetrator who ignited this mess. I have no expectation that the authorities will ever track down the people responsible for the three large fires now burning in Arizona, but at the very least, I hope they’re sitting at home, glued to their televisions and thinking, How in the hell could I have been so stupid?

Let’s learn from their mistakes, and let’s hope history quits repeating itself. Meanwhile, let’s all pray for rain.

(Image: The Wallow Fire. Source: US Forest Service, Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.)