Monday, April 30, 2012

OCF fire crew hopes to educate elders and reduce fire danger

This piece  first ran in the Eugene Weekly on July 6, 2006. It resulted from academic research I was doing at the time on Traditional Ecological Knowledge  (TEK) and the use of fire as a landscape management tool. It was also my first paid piece; I still have the check stub somewhere in my records.

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The Oregon Country Fair springs to life every summer on park-like 350-acre property next to the Long Tom River, 15 miles from Eugene. The land, a mixture of grassy fields with islands of shrubs and oak trees, is flooded for part of the winter by the river and its tributary creeks. Dense thickets of scraggly, 70-year-old Douglas fir dominate the uplands above the floodplain. For years, fire suppression has allowed dry wood and other fuels to build up, creating a potentially dangerous situation.

The site is usually still green in early June. But in drought years it dries out by fair time, usually the first weekend in July. According to fair fire crew co-coordinator Bill Pack, fire danger has been extreme for the last five years and was especially high during 2002 and 2003. "I think it's just a matter of time before we have a situation," says Pack, a 30-year U.S. Forest Service veteran. "We've been pretty fortunate."
The fair, in its publicity material, expresses a respect for Native American culture. Pack and others would like to see its community, known as the Fair Family, learn to use fire to help manage the landscape, much as former inhabitants, the Kalapuya Indians, did.


Archeologists and the fair's managers believe the Kalapuya used cyclical burning to maintain an open prairie with patches of large oak trees and firs when they used the area. These oak savannas provided the Kalapuya much of what they needed to live in the Willamette Valley, including such foods as camas, acorns and deer. Low-intensity controlled burning kept larger fires at bay.

Kalapuya elder and storyteller Esther Stutzman says that the use of fire was part of a sacred relationship between the people and the lands they inhabited. "It was something that was extremely well planned," she says. Women who were spiritual leaders directed the timing of the fires after holding council with community elders, and entire families played specific roles in lighting and controlling them.

But some in the Fair Family oppose the fair's plan to thin trees to increase the forest's biological diversity. The real fire problem at the fair, longtime fair volunteer and UO biologist Dennis Todd says, is people, not the landscape. "Pretty much, humans are going to be causing any fires out there," he says.
The fair has already banned candles and fire lanterns at campsites. But musicians gather around campfires to jam, adding to the fair's ambiance and community feeling, and thousands of people gather at night to watch fire dancers whirl and spin as they perform.

The fair encourages campers to build campfires in special fire pans in and the fire crew mows the grassy areas and chips some dry brush and other potential fuels. Still, every year people light campfires outside the designated areas. Campers and the fair fire crew have suppressed accidental fires every year since 1993 using 5-gallon buckets of water, wet burlap sacks, shovels and fire extinguishers — tools every campsite is supposed to have.

Chief Marty Nelson of Lane County Fire District #1, which shares responsibility for fires in the area with the Oregon Department of Forestry, says the fair has learned from its experiences with accidental fires. "They've got a very good fire crew," he says. "They're so self-sufficient it doesn't become a huge problem for us."
But Nelson says the fair is struggling with writing a distinct fire plan.

And Pack, a fire crew volunteer for 14 years and co-coordinator since 1993, is concerned that some at the fair don't take the fire danger seriously. Only a very small amount of the dead wood and dry brush has been dealt with, and the buildup increases every year.

"I've proposed, and it's actually been taken as kind of a joke, that we start burning some of the islands," he says. "These are closed areas that I think would be excellent for the reintroduction of fire."
Todd would also like to see fire used at the fair, at least in the grassy parking areas. But he says it would be futile to try it unless the cars were parked somewhere else for a year.

And UO landscape architecture professor Bart Johnson, who studies the area's endangered oak savannas, says that fire can control trees and brush, but the results may not be easy to predict. "You can't just re-introduce fire and assume you're going to get a high quality oak savanna."

Burning can either favor native biodiversity, which the fair wants to promote, or fire-tolerant invasive species already established on the site. A combination of fire and reseeding native plants is sometimes the best bet. "Fire Bill" Pack says the biggest challenge is educating the Fair Family about the potential fire danger facing the fair and overcoming resistance to actively managing the land to deal with the problem.

He wants to teach people about the long history of the Kalapuya people's use of fire to make the fair site an ideal place for people to come together. Scientists, including Johnson, believe much of the Willamette Valley would have been fir forests when settlers came to the area if the Kalapuya hadn't used fire to shape the landscape. "The area wasn't left unmanaged before," Pack says. "The Kalapuya knew how to manage it."

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