This event was recorded on March 6, 2025 at the Pitkin County Library, produced by ACES and Wilderness Workshop, as part of the 2025 Winter Naturalist Nights Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
About the Presentation
Historical and contemporary policies and practices have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across much of the US. Within designated wilderness areas, the exclusion of fire constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Here we present a framework assessing the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire exclusion on the natural conditions of fire-adapted wilderness ecosystems, including unnatural fuel loads and anomalously severe fires, compounded by a warmer and drier climate. To untrammel more than a century of fire exclusion, human-ignited fire may be critical to restoring the natural character of fire-adapted wilderness landscapes while also supporting ecocultural restoration efforts sought by Indigenous peoples.
About the Speaker
Clare Boerigter is a fire research fellow, science writer, and former wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Her work on fire, climate change, environmental research and more has appeared in publications for the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Minnesota, and in literary magazines such as Guernica. In 2021, she graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota; she is currently at work on a science memoir about her experiences as a woman in the world of wildland firefighting.
Jonathan Coop, Ph.D, is a professor in the Clark Family School of Environment and Sustainability at Western Colorado University. He is a forest ecologist who studies how natural systems are affected by land use legacies, altered disturbance regimes, and a changing climate. Coop also works with land managers to develop and test intervention strategies to sustain forest ecosystem function during an era of intensifying change.