Fighting ‘fire with fire’ grows in Eugene, Springfield

On a chilly spring day two years ago, Amanda Rau stood in wetland prairies where small bell-shaped flowers bloomed before Mount Pisgah. 

The white petals of the bittercress, a species unique to the Willamette Valley, were bright against the green grass, on a spot where fire had burned the previous fall. It was a careful, deliberate burning of the prairie, east of the arboretum. Rau and wildland firefighters had used canisters with a metal torch to drip fuel onto the ground, setting lines of fire. 

This proactive, low-intensity fire keeps trees and shrubs within their boundaries of the forest, allowing native plants to grow. It also reduces the risk of extreme wildfires that burn long and hot. 

Rau is the prescribed burn coordinator with the Oregon Department of Forestry. The work is called prescribed burning, because much like a doctor treating a sick patient, they are writing a plan to restore the land back to health, land that needs fire. 

As Rau looked around at what had risen from the ashes, she reflected about how her team had only scratched the surface. Scaling prescribed fire to other areas in Eugene and Springfield is far beyond what her department can handle alone. 

“Getting more people out doing this work and training and working together to learn is an important part of increasing our capacity,” Rau said.

Now, after years of work, that is exactly what is happening. In March, Rau and a group of passionate fire organizers and experts launched the South Willamette Prescribed Burn Association, one of nine such groups across Oregon and Washington. The association equips and trains people — including those outside the fire profession — and brings them together to carry out burns collaboratively, often in places such as private land that might not otherwise see what they call “good fire.”

It’s part of a growing movement in Eugene and Springfield to make prescribed fire a routine practice, something as regular as mowing the lawn or trimming hedges. To do that, advocates know they need to empower everyday people in adapting to the area’s new wildfire reality. 

“We see fire season after fire season,” Rau said. “It’s about people being worried and concerned about what to do. They want to know what to do.” 

How did we get here 

For some, using fire to make communities healthier and safer may seem counterintuitive. 

But fire is a tool, and has been a cultural practice that Indigenous peoples have used since time immemorial. The Kalapuya, who once lived on the land that is now Eugene and Springfield, burned the oak savannas to support food systems. Bare ground gave seeds the space to germinate and grow into strong seedlings. This supported both plant cultivation and created feeding grounds for hunting.

When settlers arrived in the region a couple of centuries ago, that fire stopped. The U.S. government forcibly removed Indigenous people from the area, and later, federal policies required firefighters to suppress every wildfire across the western U.S. These mandates nearly erased a cycle of fire that had shaped the landscape for thousands of years. 

“We’ve excluded fire from ecology at our own detriment,” said Scott Polhamus, board president of the Willamette Ignition Network, an organization dedicated to training that supports responsibly prescribed and wildfire burns. 

Getting fire back on the landscape has been a challenge in a society that has grown wary of fire, fearing it could escape and become something worse. (Such escapes involve less than 1% of prescribed burns each year, according to the U.S. Forest Service.)

Support for prescribed fire in the region has grown amid climate change. Warm, rainless summers and overcrowded forests create tinderbox conditions, where a single spark from human activity or lightning can ignite a wildfire.

While much of the landscape is primed to burn, applying prescribed fire isn’t something you can just go out and do. It requires a permit from the Oregon Department of Forestry and Lane County Regional Air Protection Agency, with specific conditions in place — temperature, humidity, and wind — to keep smoke manageable for public health and keep fire within its bounds. 

“We’re in this pinch where there seems to be a decent amount of landowners and land stewards that want to do prescribed fire,” Polhamus said. “But they don’t know how to get into it. It’s very intimidating and rightfully so.” 

As a solution, the Willamette Ignition Network offers a course catalog that resembles something you’d find at a college. It starts with basic firefighter training and builds up to advanced classes covering the science of fire ecology, including how fuels, weather, and topography interact. All of it is guided by federally mandated standards set by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

Lessons in fire

In late May, the network held one of its advanced courses in the West Eugene wetlands. The class was geared toward experienced fire practitioners — people with about a decade in the field — who were training to become crew bosses, a supervisory role for firefighters working on both wild and prescribed burns.

Students gathered around a conference table in a red house owned by the Bureau of Land Management. With yellow fire-resistant shirts hung on the back of chairs, students and instructors walked through scenarios designed to test their applicability of safety protocols, such as evaluating the behavior of fire moving downhill and deciding whether it was safe to engage.

They flipped through pocket guides like textbook pages and watched a simulation of a computer-generated forest, hypothetically burning.

After completing several, days-long exercises, these students have jobs to return to with a private firefighting company. Companies like this often have the resources to provide their crews with gear, liability insurance, and ongoing training, support that many individual landowners or community-led efforts often lack.

That’s where the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Certified Burn Manager program comes in. The network is offering training through the program curriculum this fall, and the forestry department posts other training opportunities on its website here. 

Those who get a certification get access to the Prescribed Fire Liability Program. Then organizations such as the South Willamette Prescribed Burn Association helps those individuals with obtaining equipment, getting hands-on experience with fire, and finding others who also want to put fire back on the landscape. 

‘Be fire with fire’ 

About 80 people packed into a small auditorium at The John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts for a public lecture hosted by the Eugene Parks Foundation last month. Bart Johnson, professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, gave a detailed account of the southern Willamette Valley’s fire history, tracing its transformation from oak savannas to dense forests. He also discussed future wildfire risks and land management strategies, including what some describe as “fighting fire with fire.”

Johnson offered a different perspective, borrowing from Shakespeare to suggest that we should “be fire with fire,” embracing fire as part of a natural cycle rather than something to be feared. 

Making that shift, he said, requires collaboration across property lines, both public and private, federal and state.

“It’s a large vision that will take long-term commitment,” Johnson said, reminding the audience that the real choice is between large wildfires and smaller, prescribed burns. “It’s not a matter of if something will burn in the West, but when.”

Rau was there, witnessing the culmination of Johnson’s decades of work coming together at a moment when the community seemed ready to listen and take action. 

In Eugene and Springfield, the burn season typically ramps up in the fall. People who sign up for notifications from the South Willamette Prescribed Burn Association will get an email when a burn is scheduled. 

Those who show up to events include a mix of lifelong fire practitioners and newcomers just starting to learn, Rau said. It’s a chance to observe, ask questions, and find out how to get trained to use fire themselves. 

“Get your feet wet, learn, shadow,” Rau said. “You have people there learning and then other people who are doing the thing. So that’s how anybody gets involved.”