How Florida became the leader in fighting fire with fire

Sam Van Hook is itching to burn. He has pulled on his boots, floppy white hat, and protective fire shirt, its bright yellow dulled by the smoke and ash of previous burns. He and his crew ­– his son, Zach, and a hired man named Franky Garcia – have used a tractor to bare a 6-foot-wide fire line around the 275 acres of grass, bushes, and small trees they plan to burn. They have filled their drip torches. Above all, they’ve got their fire permit in hand, granted that morning by a state forestry official.

And yet Mr. Van Hook hesitates. It’s still early, but the wind is already blowing hard across the DeLuca Preserve, 27,000 acres of semi-wild ranch land where he has conducted burns many times before. It bends the tall, brown prairie grasses and rustles the leaves of the wax myrtle bushes that are growing up too thick among them.

“It really needs to burn,” he says, half to himself.

Florida is the leader of prescribed fire, or controlled burning, in the United States. Fire bosses like Sam Van Hook burn more land in Florida than in any other state – and until recently more than all of the Western states combined. The Florida Forest Service says prescribed fire burns more than 2.1 million acres each year in the state. That’s about a fifth of the 10 million acres burned across the country in 2019, according to the most recent data published by the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils. The aim of all this burning is to maintain the state’s diverse ecosystems, including prairies, savannas, and pine flatwoods, but also to prevent more dangerous wildfires.

“You’ve got to fight fire with fire,” says Mr. Van Hook, a respected burn boss with five decades of experience. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Even as other places struggle to catch up with Florida, prescribed fire is getting harder in the state.

Wildfire is a growing scourge across the American landscape. In California and other Western states, a combination of prolonged drought and climate change have heightened the risk of uncontrollable and sometimes deadly fires. But it’s a problem in many other places. This spring, fires ravaged large areas of Nebraska, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Fires are increasing in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. And a February United Nations report warned that climate change and land-use change could increase wildfires 50% worldwide by the century’s end.

One solution is more fire. Fire experts, land managers, government agencies, and even the public have increasingly embraced the idea that the best defense against wildfires is regular burning. They say low-intensity, carefully managed fires can thin overgrown forests and reduce the buildup of fuels like pine needles, dead grass, fallen trees, and thick brush that produce more intense and destructive fires. But it’s also important to the land itself. Ecologists have long observed that many landscapes have been created by regular fire and need it to persist.

There is also a growing recognition of the importance of prescribed fire to endangered species. Mr. Van Hook has been burning areas of the DeLuca Preserve that are home to the endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow. In the West, scientists have suggested that even the northern spotted owl, once the focus of a bitter fight over the logging of old growth forests in the Northwest, needs a landscape shaped by fire.

Florida’s familiarity with fire

For much of the 20th century, the federal government worked to suppress fire. Now, the importance of prescribed burning is the new orthodoxy in forestry circles. But it’s one thing to embrace an idea and quite another to carry it out. In many places, that’s the struggle today.

In Florida, prescribed burning never really stopped. It’s an old tradition that mimics the work of nature itself. Most of the landscapes of Florida – and the rest of the southeastern states – have been shaped by frequent fire. (It’s not a coincidence that Florida ranks high in lightning, too.) Native Americans and early settlers burned their lands. Fire also was important to the plantation landowners who hunted bobwhite quail, a small and much-loved game bird that lives on lands subject to frequent fires. It was critical to ranchers, who used it to keep woods and prairies open and to encourage the tender young grass that cattle love. And it’s been used widely in agriculture, to burn away sugar cane and clear tomato fields.

“All the federal agencies began their turn away from fire suppression in Florida,” says fire historian and Arizona State University Professor Emeritus Stephen Pyne. “Florida has been a remarkable story and made possible the revolution in fire policy when it happened.”

Florida law also makes prescribed burning easier by reducing the legal liability for those who do it. Trained and certified “burn bosses” are liable for mistakes only if they show “gross negligence.” California adopted this standard last year, to the acclaim of conservation groups and prescribed fire advocates. Florida did it 32 years ago.

Meanwhile, tradition has given birth to influential institutions in the world of fire. The Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy in Tallahassee, established on an old quail plantation in 1960, is a national leader in the research and promotion of prescribed fire. And people come from all over the United States – and the world – to learn how to burn at the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center in Tallahassee. Florida is also the birthplace of prescribed fire councils, organizations formed to promote burning, especially among private landowners. These councils have since expanded to 33 states.

“We’re a half century behind,” says Jeb Barzen, a fire ecologist and founder of the Wisconsin Prescribed Fire Council. “Florida is more densely populated than the Midwest, yet they burn more than us. Wisconsin burns 50,000 acres a year. We need to be doing a million acres a year. … Florida is able to do it. There are a lot of lessons that we can adapt to the Midwest.”

Maybe Florida’s biggest advantage is a vast human infrastructure developed to carry out prescribed burning. This includes thousands of burn bosses like Sam Van Hook, many of whom grew up burning on their ranches and are simply carrying on an old practice.

Growing struggles over burning

Despite its long history and deep cultural roots, burning in Florida today is strictly regulated. A trained and certified burn boss is required to plan and supervise a burn, which can range from hundreds or even thousands of acres to just a few wild acres in a city. Whatever the size, burn bosses need a permit from the state forest service, which works with them to identify areas that may be safely burned and consults meteorological data ­– especially wind speed and humidity – and model smoke plumes to determine when conditions are safe.

Yet despite its success with prescribed burns, Florida isn’t an easy example to follow. Florida is flat and humid, with water on both sides. Smoke blowing east or west quickly drifts out over the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. In the West it drifts over the whole country. Also, dryness and mountain topography make prescribed fire much more difficult than in Florida.

And sometimes things go wrong even in Florida. Smoke is the biggest problem. In March, three people died on Interstate 95 in eastern Florida when smoke from a prescribed burn mixed with fog – not uncommon with Florida’s humidity – and caused five accidents. In 2012, 11 people died on Interstate 75 in accidents also caused, in part, by smoke from prescribed burning.

Moreover, even as prescribed fire gains traction elsewhere, it’s meeting new challenges in Florida. The state is among the fastest growing, and newcomers often lack the same tolerance for fire as natives. Managing public relations has become as important for burners as understanding wind speed and humidity.

“We’ve been doing it a long time,” says Reed Noss, an ecologist who has written a book on fire in Florida. “It’s established here. But it’s in danger here. So many people are moving into Florida from the Northeast and Midwest, where fire isn’t accepted. They find it scary. They don’t like the smoke.” He adds, “With this new population, it’s going to be a challenge to burn as much as we have.”

Russell Priddy, a rancher in south Florida agrees. He puts up signs on the roads when he burns to warn residents of a nearby planned community. But his burns provoke more complaints than ever. He says he can’t do one without people who don’t understand it making alarmed calls to the local fire department.

“I’m afraid in three to five years we won’t be able to burn at all,” he says.

Mr. Van Hook, too, says he’s facing more restrictions. He’s a short, energetic man with white hair, drooping white mustache, and skin weathered by years of sun and smoke. Unlike many in Florida who do prescribed burning, he did not grow up doing it. Instead, he went to college, took a course in burning, and fell in love with it. He worked for three decades on the Avon Park Air Force Range, then started his own company.

“In this work, everything gets harder rather than easier,” he says. Still, on almost every day, he says, he can find a place that is safe to burn.

Today, on the DeLuca Preserve, he sees both sides: The patch he wants to burn needs it. Bushes and trees – wax myrtles, willows, palmetto palms – are growing up on “semi-improved” pasture, a mixture of prairie and planted grasses not uncommon in Florida. There’s no town or highway for many miles downwind to be troubled by smoke. And yet the wind is rising, the humidity is low, and he wants to be careful.

Finally he decides: He’ll burn, but he’ll scale back in order to protect a forested area just to the east.

“You’ve got to build in safety in burning,” he says. “And you learn that by messing up.”

Everything happens quickly now. His son and Mr. Garcia have already worked their way along the downwind side of the area, lighting a backfire that will help contain the burn. Now they circle around to the upwind side in their big four-wheeler. As they bounce along, Mr. Garcia extends his lighted drip torch, leaving a small trail of fire flickering in the grass behind them. In some places it smolders and dies. In others it flares up, the tongues of flame devouring dried grass and old thatch and sending billows of white and gray smoke high into the air and slanting southward with the wind.

Mr. Van Hook looks on with quiet pleasure. Later, he rides over what’s left of the burn. The blackened ground still smolders. The leaves of scorched myrtle bushes hang dull and lifeless. Smoke drifts in the air. A smile flickers across his face.

“It burned off pretty decent,” he says.