In the mountains of western North Carolina Adam Warwick and his team are working with The Nature Conservancy to return a natural balance to the habitat. Fighting fire with fire sometimes works.
By JESSICA BRADLEY WELLS
Adam Warwick drives his white truck up a mountain near North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest taking note of his surroundings. It’s late March, and the trees have yet to bloom. The forest floor is denser than the canopy — a brown mosaic of dead leaves, twigs, and flowerless vines of mountain laurel and rhododendron. I sit in the backseat with a yellow hard hat resting on my boots while Warwick tells me in his Tennessee accent how high the risk of wildfire could be with such thick vegetation.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “This place is dying to burn.”
Warwick is the stewardship manager for 10,000 acres of the North Carolina Nature Conservancy’s land in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains. His goal is to preserve and restore as much biodiversity as he can, but his work can help prevent wildfires, too.
Unexpected as it may seem, fire is his favorite tool. He uses controlled burns, a forest management strategy where sections of land are burnt on purpose to restore the native landscape and reduce the thick brush that could fuel future fires.
A few weeks earlier, he invited me to join his burn crew for the day, after I sent him an email to learn more about his work. When he responded, he noticed we shared an 850-area code from the Florida Panhandle. I grew up there, and he worked in the area’s vast longleaf pine forests when he started his career. It’s such a rural area that when you leave and meet someone who knows it well, you share an instant connection and appreciation for the region. He highlighted the area code in his email signature and said, “Holler at me.”
Photo by Adam Warwick, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
Warwick is of average height and build, with short, dark hair and a face that matches the easy-going nature you might expect from someone who says things like “holler at me” in email. When I arrived, he, a Knoxville native, joked that he might not let me in his truck while wearing my Florida Gators baseball cap, but he did, and he lent me a pair of khaki pants and a green shirt made of Nomex, a flame-resistant material, so I could hike alongside them.
In between conversation about fire technique, he turns over stones in a creek to look for salamanders — he loves them — and gushes over a little hemlock growing out of a smooth rock. He considers how cool the unusual rock would look in his garden. Warwick is a scientist by training, but he’s had years of experience giving tours to Nature Conservancy donors and perfected his ability to make science conversational, and more importantly, relevant. It wasn’t until listening to him as we drove up the mountain that I felt the enormity of the challenge we face in learning to live with fire.
From where we were parked — one of the highest ridges in the range — we would have seen smoke billowing from every mountain in sight when a series of wildfires tore through the Southeast in the fall of 2016. The fires affected nearly 119,000 acres in eight states – enough land to cover most of New York City. The smoke was inescapable for hours from the source. I was living about 3 hours away in Charlotte, and the smoke was so thick that someone offered to give me a ride home so I didn’t have to walk through the burnt-orange haze to my apartment. The devastation reminded the East Coast it’s not immune to the wildfires that burn hotter and faster each year in the West.
Nationally, 2017 was the United States Forest Service’s most expensive year, while 2018 brought some of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires on record. In January 2020, firefighters from around the world worked to slow the wildfires that ravaged Australia, as NASA announced its findings that the previous decade was the hottest on record — a sign that wildfires won’t let up soon.
Controlled burn at Cedar Mountain Bog, NC. Photo by Lamb; courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
Warwick wants to help.
He moved to Asheville, North Carolina, in 2013 to work for The Nature Conservancy and started a burn crew of part-time, seasonal firefighters. They burn on the Conservancy’s land, but they also travel throughout the region to help resource-strapped forest managers tackle controlled burn projects.
He learned the controlled burning technique in his first job as a wildlife biologist 16 years ago in the Florida Panhandle, where modern controlled-burn practices were pioneered. His job managing forests is an unexpected turn in his career. He originally wanted to work with animals, which he did for a while. He even made global headlines in 2008 for jumping into the Gulf of Mexico to rescue a tranquilized bear from drowning in Florida. As he watched housing developments encroach on their habitat, he was frustrated with euthanizing bears that got too close to homes. He decided to help animals in a new way.
“There’s no shortage of highly qualified, passionate individuals that want to be wildlife biologists and put their hands on critters,” he said, “but the most important thing that we can do for wildlife is protect their habitat.”
Now in western North Carolina, he’s faced with similar challenges. Asheville and neighboring communities are often featured on lists of top 10 places to live or retire. New homes perched on mountainsides fragment wildlife habitat and cause more conflict with humans than ever.
Residents in Asheville’s Buncombe County report more bear problems than any other North Carolina county, even though there are more bears in eastern North Carolina than the mountains. Trash cans and bird feeders are like fast food for the bears — providing an easy, calorie-dense meal. Rather than forage for berries all day, they can get the same number of calories in someone’s front yard in minutes. For a while, Warwick said, people find it cute, and he can’t blame them because bears are fun to watch. But then the bears get too close, and they’re reported as a nuisance and usually shot because relocating a bear is often impossible. They’ll just come back.
In addition to clashes with wildlife caused by shrinking habitat, uncontrollable fire is a threat for the growing human population. Scientists predict climate change will alter weather patterns causing more floods and droughts, and, in turn, more wildfires. Homeowners with properties scattered in highly flammable, rural environments have the most risk because fire climbs mountains fast, and many mountain homes have only one escape route. When it’s blocked, it’s a dangerous situation for residents and firefighters who could get trapped in the blaze. Fourteen people died in Gatlinburg’s November 2016 fire — many from burns, smoke inhalation, heart attacks or car accidents while fleeing. My chest tightened as I thought of them as we climbed the narrow mountain road. The path was wide enough for one vehicle with a wall of earth on one side and a steep drop on the other. It was obvious how difficult it would be to escape when surrounded by a spreading fire.
By helping forest managers do more controlled burns, Warwick’s crew can help reduce the likelihood and severity of wildfires, enhance biodiversity, and increase the amount of usable habitat for species as big as the black bear and as small as the bog turtle, the smallest turtle in North America found only in the Southern Blue Ridge.
“At The Nature Conservancy, we realize we’re not going to save the world by just managing our 5,000 acres here and 4,000 acres there,” Warwick said. “In western North Carolina alone, there’s a million acres of public land that’s not getting fire like it should.”
By bringing fire back, everyone wins.
Photo by Adam Warwick, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
While it’s unfamiliar to many people who aren’t in forestry, controlled fire isn’t a new approach.
Mother Nature has always used fire. A lightning strike will ignite the forest, weeding out plants not fit for the ecosystem and clearing the forest floor, so light can warm the soil and sprout new, diverse life.
Trees, including several species of pine and oak, evolved to depend on fire. These fire-adapted trees have thick bark, an extensive system of roots that grow deep beneath the fire, and branches that grow near the treetops so fire is less likely to climb. Pine tree trunks are usually bare closer to the forest floor — it’s harder to catch fire when flames can’t reach the branches and spread from tree to tree. Some species, like the Table Mountain pine, even depend on fire to pop open resin-sealed pinecones and disperse their seeds.
Along with inspiring new growth, controlled fires prevent wildfires from spreading out of control. Dead leaves and brush, often called leaf litter, are fuel for wildfires to burn hotter and faster. If they’re regularly burned, there’s less fuel available when a wildfire rolls through the forest.
“Fire is as natural as water and air,” Warwick said.
Cades Cove controlled burn in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Photo by Bielenberg; courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
For more than 10,000 years, Native Americans used fire to herd cattle, drive out enemies, farm their land and reinvigorate the forest. According to a 2007 article by Cynthia Fowler and Evelyn Konopik in the journal Human Ecology Review, explorers including Hernando de Soto and William Bartram wrote reports with mentions of how the Cherokee used fire to manage their land in western North Carolina between the 1500s and 1700s. De Soto traveled between what’s now Columbia, S.C., and Tryon, N.C., in the early 1540s. He wrote about the plentiful oak forests and “green, delightful” valleys and replenished his team’s maize supply near a Cherokee town below Fontana Dam.
Fowler and Konopik note that by the time Bartram came through western North Carolina in 1776, European diseases, conflict, and forced removal had killed 90 percent of the Southeast’s Native American population, leaving many Cherokee towns in the Cherokee and Nantahala mountains abandoned and overgrown. At first, European settlers used fire in similar ways, but their methods changed over time.
By the late 1800s, it was completely different. New railroads, settlements, and commercial timber trade coupled with high-intensity fires versus the Native Americans’ low-intensity method resulted in a series of widespread fires and a changing ecosystem. Between 1880 and 1895, lumber output in North Carolina alone tripled. As the forests were cleared, the remnants (if not proactively burned) would dry and catch fire when passing trains tossed sparks on the lumber.
These catastrophic fires changed forest management practices. Instead of letting fire run its course, forest managers scrambled to extinguish fires to save communities and high-value timber. The Great Fire of 1910 burned more than 3 million acres in Montana and Idaho. It was so large that at least 85 people died, and smoke traveled as far as New England.
It cemented fire as the enemy for many Americans and inspired decades of fire suppression.
At its most strict stance in 1935, the U.S. Forest Service mandated that any wildfire spotted must be extinguished by 10 a.m. the following morning. The suppression techniques worked — there were fewer wildfires. However, forest managers didn’t realize the strain they would put on future generations.
The forests have become too dense for important species like white oaks to grow — meaning less acorns for bears to eat and the rapid decline of what was once a common hardwood used for furniture and buildings. Maybe more importantly, decaying trees, invasive species, and layers of leaf litter slowly stacked up fuel for future fires across the nation.
This went on until a small group of foresters began advocating for the return of fire as a tool. The first controlled burn on federal land after this period of suppression was in 1943 in Florida’s Osceola National Forest. Over the following decades, fire would slowly make a comeback nationwide.
However, there were — and continue to be — so many fires popping up from the layers of forest-floor fuel that forest managers must spend their budgets on reactive measures rather than proactive maintenance. Today, nearly 90 percent of wildfires are caused by people. It could be accidental from car accidents, camp fires, fireworks or cigarettes, but arson is a culprit as well. It is one of the top five ways people cause wildfires. Arsonists started most of the dozens of wildfires that spread across the Southeast in November 2016, including the Gatlinburg fire — the month’s largest and most deadly.
Arsonists start fires for serious reasons like covering a crime or financial gain, but sometimes they set them for the thrill. Combined with droughts and forests with plenty of leaves and dead trees for fuel, their fire quickly becomes uncontrollable.
The U.S. Forest Service spends most of its budget controlling wildfires to protect homes and prevent tragedies like the ones becoming more common on the west coast. According to the U.S. Forest Service, fire suppression funding went from 15 percent of its budget to 55 percent in recent years by borrowing from funds intended for preventative management techniques like controlled burns.
By 2021, they expect two-thirds of the budget to go to fire suppression. With so many resources dedicated to emergency response, there’s very little left for forest management.
It’s like waiting until you have a heart attack to change your lifestyle instead of eating healthy and exercising from the start.
“That’s wrong, and that’s no way to manage the Forest Service,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in a 2017 release.
Since his appointment in 2017, Perdue has advocated for a solution. A year later, Congress approved the fire funding fix, a new funding structure that takes effect this year through 2027 and provides $2.25 billion to USDA and the Department of the Interior for wildfire prevention in high-risk areas. The budget authority will increase each year by $100 million, ending at $2.95 billion in new budget authority by 2027.
“Now,” Warwick said, “we’re trying to deal with what we’ve done.”
Photo by Adam Warwick, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
Warwick considers it a race to burn as much of the fire-dependent Southern Blue Ridge region as possible. Sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Forest Service, his crew burned nearly 11,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee in 2019. He works with the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and the North Carolina Forest Service to identify controlled burn projects.
Each year he hires about 20 part-time, paid firefighters. They take three to four days of online classes, pass a fitness test and attend a supervised burn. Warwick wants to overcome barriers that might keep people from this line of work — it’s not as arduous as some might think, he said. Of the eight crew members I met last March, two were women. One was a stay-at-home mom who found something she loved in controlled burns, and another, who started with the crew, gained enough experience to join a hotshot crew later that summer in Wyoming, where she was on standby to respond to the most dangerous wildfires.
“We’re trying to figure out how to train more firefighters who want to manage wildfires for ecological benefit,” Warwick said. “We want to teach people how to live with fire rather than battle against it because it’s always going to be here.”
For the North Carolina Forest Service, every firefighter that’s working a controlled burn is one that’s not available for pop-up fires that need to be extinguished or monitored. Because of Warwick’s crew, forest managers can burn areas that would’ve been impossible otherwise.
In North Carolina Forest Service District 9, which includes private lands bordering the Nantahala National Forest, district ranger Tim Howell said he receives more than 150 wildfire calls per year — and his district is one of the state’s smallest.
Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
I hike along as Warwick helps Howell’s crew burn 190 acres of privately-owned mountainous land. Without Warwick, Howell said, the burn wouldn’t have been possible. Though District 9 is small, it’s rugged. It’s a hodgepodge of government and private lands. It’s physically challenging to hike the steep terrain, and it’s logistically challenging to work with so many landowners to get burn permits. People who live nearby often complain about the burns because they don’t understand what’s happening or the smoke bothers them. There’s still resistance, but recently, Warwick said, people have been more receptive to controlled burns because they experienced the 2016 fires and have seen worse fires elsewhere since.
For that burn, the goal was to reduce 80 percent of the leaf litter, decaying trees, and maze-like thickets of shrub to eliminate fire fuel and encourage new growth.
Here’s how it works.
Months before the burn, the burn boss – in this case, Howell – maps the topography and decides where their fire lines will be. Fire lines set the fire’s boundaries. They can be hiking trails, streams, or roads – pretty much any break in the ground covering will do. If the lines don’t already exist, the crew will make them with a leaf blower, hand tool or small dozer. The land here is mostly forest, so there aren’t many homes or buildings nearby. There were two houses near the 190 acres we burned that day, and Howell made sure the crew and homeowners were aware of the boundaries set in the plan.
Mountain burns always start at the top of the mountain because fire burns too fast from the bottom up. For the burn near the Nantahala, they drive to the highest point possible, and at about 11 a.m., they hike with their gear another half mile up a steep incline. Before we started hiking, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the crew. But when we paused at the end of that first incline, I was relieved to hear everyone was breathing as hard as I was.
By starting at the top and working their way down, they can control the speed and direction of the fire. It’s a technique called “backing,” and it’s like coloring. They trace the edge of the fire line with fire, which creates a thick black layer on the ground that acts as a barrier. Once that layer is established, they move down the mountain and ignite a parallel line. The fire naturally pulls up the mountain, but it can’t burn where the black line has already been established. Instead, the lines of fire pull together moving toward the center to shade the rest of the tract black until the fire gradually dies.
They use a drip torch, an oil can-like container filled with diesel and gasoline. When it’s tipped over, a stream of fire falls from the opening as a watering can would pour over a garden. While they pour, the crew monitors wind direction, temperature, humidity, and a host of other factors to predict how the fire will behave and prevent embers from jumping outside the burn area.
Photo by Adam Warwick, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
For the next five hours, we hike through an eye-watering, throat-burning cloud of smoke and fight a jungle of dense vegetation. Warwick carries a face mask to help with the burning, which he lent to me when the smoke was more overwhelming than I expected. I struggle to watch the crew work through the smoke as my eyes sting and fill with tears. Even with 15 years of experience, Warwick says, it doesn’t get easier.
He shows up anyway. With a million acres of land that’s dying to burn, Warwick is committed, but he wonders every day if his crew will make a dent in the layers of debris that fire suppression has stockpiled.
“I don’t know how we can burn our way out of the problem we’ve created,” he said, “but if we want to move the needle, we need to get out there and burn.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mentioned Sonny Perdue as being elected when he was, in fact, appointed in 2017. His name had also been misspelled on second reference.
Jessica Wells is a freelance writer in North Carolina interested in telling stories about nature and the problem solvers who protect it.
