At age 80, Smokey Bear needs to become a ‘good fire’ promoter

Smokey Bear turns 80 today, but there’s little cause for celebration. America’s beloved forest guardian, with his iconic “Only you can prevent wildfires” slogan, has inadvertently set the stage for the very disasters he aimed to prevent.

By promoting a zero-tolerance approach to forest fires, Smokey’s well-intentioned campaign led to policies that have left our forests dangerously overgrown and primed for the mega-blazes now scorching the American West.

The irony is stark: Our best defense against catastrophic “bad” wildfires is, surprisingly, to light more “good” ones.

Prolonged heat domes, record-hot summers and increasingly common mega-fires have sparked a growing consensus among policymakers, forest managers and scientists. We need more prescribed burns — and fast — both to limit the intensity of wildfires and to help restore healthier and more resilient landscapes.

But agreement alone isn’t enough. To scale up our efforts, expanding burns across vast landscapes and utilizing them with the frequency our ecosystems demand, we need a cultural shift in how we view fire. Smokey Bear must lead the charge. It’s time for him to evolve from a symbol of fire suppression to a champion of “good fire” — controlled, low-intensity burns that reduce wildfire fuel, promote forest health and create natural firebreaks.

To chart this new course, we must first reckon with our past. American forest management policy for the last century has been grounded solely in fire suppression. After fires in 1910 destroyed 3 million acres in Montana, Idaho and Washington, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the approach that all fire is bad fire, and that all fire should be suppressed as quickly as possible. But the decision to let dead vegetation sit untouched for decades caused more and more of our forests to become tinderboxes.

Fire suppression created a triple-headed obstacle to change: a public wary of any type of fire; private forest owners constrained by liability concerns; and officials reluctant to approve burns, even under favorable conditions, due to potential community backlash.

Overcoming these hurdles requires more than policy tweaks — it demands a complete rewiring of our collective fire mindset. Smokey can lead the way by championing the return of good fire, to make both our forests and communities safer.

The crucial shift toward a culture of “good fire” must begin with private landowners, who own a staggering 60 percent of America’s woodlands. Our landscapes are a complex patchwork of public and private properties, often seamlessly bordering each other. Wildfires don’t respect these boundaries, and neither should our prevention strategies.

California recognized this in 2022, empowering private landowners with more control and less liability risk when managing prescribed burns. Oregon is following suit, cultivating certified “burn bosses” — skilled professionals who plan, oversee and take responsibility for safe and effective controlled burns across private properties. Meanwhile, organizations like Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges are providing hands-on training, building a nationwide network of fire management experts that can support private landowners.

More Western states should replicate these models. Fortunately, expanding the use of prescribed burns is a rare area of bipartisan agreement. In California, a bill streamlining agencies’ processes for conducting prescribed burns has garnered support across the political spectrum, demonstrating the consensus on the importance of good fire. In November, California voters will have the chance to double down on these investments in wildfire prevention with the Proposition 4 Climate Bond.

Yet private landowners alone can’t fuel this shift. We need to increase public understanding and debunk misconceptions about prescribed burns. The reality is that we’re always going to have fires, and data in Northern California over the last 10 years shows at least 50 percent of them were beneficial to the landscape.

The idea of fighting fire with fire might be hard to wrap your head around when the news is filled with images of smoke engulfing American cities and massive infernos ripping through towns. That’s why it’s key to help the public see fire as a natural, often beneficial force in our ecosystems. By updating Smokey’s message, we can amplify success stories of controlled burns and recognize landowners and elected officials who’ve shown leadership in standing up against fear and expanding acceptance of “good fire.”

As we celebrate Smokey’s birthday, it’s time for him to take the lead in ushering in a new era and a culture shift where the public, business leaders and policymakers understand that we can coexist with good fire instead of fleeing it, suppressing it or stoking fear about it. And we need to broadcast this message across every platform, from TikTok to town halls, making controlled burns as accepted as changing seasons.

The time has come to fight bad fire with good fire. By bringing Smokey into the 21st century, we can correct the unintended consequences of the past and create a more fire-resilient future for our forests and communities.

Laurie Wayburn is cofounder and president of the conservation nonprofit Pacific Forest Trust.