Helping on a prescribed fire as a volunteer firefighter sometime in September, I felt the anticipation that had been building in our team dissipate as we learned that we would not be able to proceed with the day’s planned ignitions. We gathered our tools and snacks and slouched back toward the briefing area. I imagined others who had been assigned to work on the burn cordoning off the day as a lost cause. Folks who were working for local companies and non-profits would only be able to bill for the couple of hours we spent standing around waiting for orders, and there would certainly be no overtime. The Lomatium, Whitebeam, Kincaid’s lupine, and other species the land managers hoped would benefit from habitat restoration because of the burn would have to wait, maybe until the next week, maybe until the next season, as would their goals to reduce the likelihood of a high severity fire on the preserve. Such was the reality of attempting a planned burn, or a prescribed burn, in the suburbs of the densely populated pockets of the Willamette Valley.
Fuel conditions were dry enough that rogue sparks could fly, and adding even small gusts of wind to the equation could make things dicey. Other elements also introduced additional risk into the plan: air and smoke. Beyond the unit lay a major road and an apartment complex. Smoking out the road would cause safety hazards for drivers, and blowing smoke straight into the apartment complex was a no-go, too. As a result, we needed to wait for a day with decent winds blowing from the north. But not too much wind, just the right amount.
The Willamette Valley before a prescribed burn. (Photo by author)
This smoke issue may sound like a boring, bureaucratic conundrum, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle in fire management in the United States, and one that has to do with risk, relationships, and power.
When a large wildfire ignites and burns over weeks and months, a tremendous amount of energy is liberated, and with that energy, comes smoke. Wildfire smoke toxicity is linked with multisystemic adverse health effects. Scientists are increasingly studying wildfire health impacts beyond respiratory and cardiovascular effects, including fertility issues (Rubin et al 2021) and dementia (Schuller and Montrose 2020). But what if we’ve been getting wildfire smoke wrong when we interpret it exclusively as a matter of exposure and a public health concern?
For example, wildfire smoke’s presence or absence often reveals the complexity of multispecies relationships. The Karuk tribe has made this clear by pointing to the important connection between smoke, salmon, and people. Smoke from fires can shade rivers from solar radiation, reducing ambient temperatures and providing a more livable environment for salmon. In turn, eating salmon can be protective against cardiovascular disease in humans, one of the issues that can be triggered or exacerbated due to exposure to wildfire smoke (Noorgard 2019; Clark et al 2024).
When we start to think about wildfire smoke and its governance more expansively, we also reveal something else is at play here: power. In this piece I present a case study of some of the regulatory frameworks governing wildfire smoke in the United States, and how these frameworks lead to tense negotiations over the power to use fire as a land management tool.
The Clean Air Act and Wildfire Smoke
The Clean Air Act, first passed by the U.S. Congress in 1963 and then expanded in 1970, establishes a set of core pollutants of concern and enshrines thresholds below which it is permissible to pollute. During my time researching wildfire management in the Pacific Northwest, I learned that federal and state fire managers, tribes, scientists, and air quality regulators are often embroiled in conflict over the Clean Air Act, involving who gets to use fire, when, where, and why.
Paradoxically, some fire managers feel that the current interpretation of the Clean Air Act, a core piece of public health legislation used to protect public health from pollution, is one of many roadblocks that actually prevent communities from preparing for the health impacts of fire and smoke.
In the U.S. West, where I live, large wildfire smoke events in the summer often create smoke levels that exceed the amount of air pollution that is permissible according to the Clean Air Act’s NAAQS. NAAQS stands for National Ambient Air Quality Standard, a threshold above which the government determines air pollution to be a problem. Oregonians, responding to worsening air quality, have started to call August and September Oregon’s smoke season. If these NAAQS exceedances had occurred due to the actions of an industrial pollution source (like a factory’s operations) federal law would demand that governments take action to reduce pollution impacts.
But because wildfires are classified as exceptional events under the Clean Air Act, large wildfire smoke events are instead excluded from state and federal governments’ regulatory log of air quality exceedances. The result of this regulatory paradox is that wildfire smoke exposure, while occurring with increasing regularity and causing profound health consequences, is officially not a problem according to the Clean Air Act. Intentionally lit fires, on the other hand, whether Native-led burns conducted for cultural reasons (cultural fire) or settler-led burns (often described as prescribed fire, like the planned burn I described in the first paragraph of this piece) lit for risk reduction or ecological restoration purposes, are subject to the Clean Air Act.[1]
In practice, this means that fire managers must very carefully choose acceptable time frames during which a planned burn will not create smoke that triggers an exceedance of the National Ambient Air Quality Standard. Fire managers have argued that this creates perverse incentives that make it unappealing and logistically challenging to use fire intentionally as a land management tool. There is also another power issue at play here–tribal sovereignty. The Karuk Tribe has outlined how current interpretations of the Clean Air Act infringe on tribal sovereignty when Native fire practitioners are required to go through state air quality permitting processes to request smoke permits within their ancestral territories (Clark et al 2021).
Published in 2021 and 2024, the Karuk Tribe’s Good Fire Reports 1 and 2 argue that what the authors call beneficial fire (including cultural burns and prescribed burns) should fall under the same exceptional events category as wildfires. This would label these intentional burns natural events, removing them from permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act (Clark et al 2021, 2024). The Good Fire Report 1 also suggests that air quality regulators could also do the reverse—they could consider that wildfires occurring due to fire exclusion practices are not actually exceptional events, but instead, are routine and can be related to anthropogenic activity. Doing this would invert the status quo of governance rhetoric that frames wildfire as a crisis—an extreme interruption to the normal flow of events—instead introducing wildfire as a frequent event that local communities might summon resources to prepare for.
Economist Alan Krupnick and his coauthors make a similar argument in a 2025 article on wildfire smoke and the Clean Air Act, suggesting that this legislation could be mobilized to nudge states into enacting wildfire hazard mitigation plans (although Krupnick and coauthors ignore tribal governance in their piece, instead focusing on the relationships between the U.S. federal system and the states).
Other legal scholars have also gotten on board with the issues raised by the Karuk Tribe and other fire managers. Jonathan Skinner Thompson argues that cultural fire use should instead be interpreted as natural or exceptional events that can be excluded from the Clean Air Act, recognizing the long and intertwined relationships between people and fire (2023). In practice, this would mean that tribal members using fire would not need to apply for permits and await acceptable air quality days to conduct their burns.
What are the stakes of thinking about attempts to control wildfire smoke as an exercise of power? Through deciding who can make smoke and why, governments exercise power over territory and shape the present and the future. As Cynthia Twyler Fowler (2023) has pointed out, developing knowledge and use around fire gives the users of that knowledge (pyro)power: the power to shape, remove, and nurture life. As we decided whether to burn on the September day I described above, we were considering how and whether to kill members of some species with the drip torch to revitalize others. We were also negotiating about smoke: who could make it, how much, and in what circumstances. The U.S. Clean Air Act is an important tool that, if interpreted a different way, could significantly shift responsibility and action in wildfire management.
Willamette Valley Prescribed Fire, Take Two
The Willamette Valley during the prescribed burn. (Photo by author.)
In late October, I returned to the same Willamette Valley unit to try burning again. This time the wind was in our favor, and the higher humidity and lower temperatures meant that the fuel moisture might just give us a window in which we could pull off a prescribed fire. We lit the test fire (a practice involving igniting a small patch of fuel to assess fire behavior before starting to burn more broadly) at 13:15 (1:15 p.m.) and my nose engaged the sweet, bitter smell of oxidizing vegetation. Larger pieces of ash floated and shimmered in the air, and the flames started to spread in the roses. I sensed a bit of a headache developing in tandem with the rising smoke. We got the go ahead to proceed, so I zigzagged through the brush with my drip torch, creating fleeting strips of orange and red through the yellow field. My heart thumped faster from the heat and the adrenaline of working with the fire, and the breeze from the north began to feel like a gift. By 15:36 my torch was cool, and I found myself snacking on my packed lunch by the edge of the unit, watching smoke retreat as humidity rose and the sun’s heat weakened. The unit’s soil mixed with ash smelled like broccoli with a hint of dust, and commingled, they left a bitter aftereffect in my airways, like charred coffee. I shivered as the breeze began to feel damp. I noticed myself feeling much calmer than I had been that morning, listening to the low hum of insects and traffic, thinking about how lucky we had been that both the regulatory and relational parts of wildfire smoke came together that day in a way that allowed fire managers do what they wanted: to put fire on the ground.
Notes
[1] Cultural fire is conducted by Indigenous burners, tribes or families and is related to cultural objectives; prescribed fire is often informed by a prescription window based on modeling and has a resource management goal, such as fire risk reduction (Clark et al 2021, 2024).
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Paige Edmiston.
References
Clark, Sara A., Andrew Miller, Don L Hankins, and for the Karuk Tribe. 2021. “Good Fire: Current Barriers to the Expansion of Cultural Burning and Prescribed Fire in California and Recommended Solutions.” https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/karuk-prescribed-fire-rpt_2022_v2-1.pdf.
Clark, Sara, Bill Tripp, Don Hankins, Colleen Rossier, Abigail Varney, Isobel Nairn, and for the Karuk Tribe. 2024. “Good Fire II: Current Barriers to the Expansion of Cultural Burning and Prescribed Fire Use in the United States and Recommended Solutions.” Karuk Tribe. https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/good-fire-ii-march-2024.pdf.
Fowler, Cynthia Twyford. 2023. “Pyrosociality: The Power of Fire in Transforming the Blue Ridge Mountain Ecoregion.” Environment and Society 14 (1): 84–103. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2023.140106.
Krupnick, Alan, Nathan Richardson, Matthew Wibbenmeyer, and Yuqi Zhu. 2025. “Wildfire Smoke, the Clean Air Act, and the Exceptional Events Rule: Implications and Policy Alternatives.” Environmental Science & Technology 59 (6): 2917–27. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c08946.
Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2019. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action. Nature, Society, and Culture. New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers University Press.
Rubin, Elizabeth S., Pamela B. Parker, Bharti Garg, Diana Wu, Jamie Peregrine, David Lee, Paula Amato, et al. 2021. “Wildfire Smoke Exposure Is Associated with Decreased Total Motile Sperm Count.” Fertility and Sterility 116 (3): e89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2021.07.248.
Schuller, Adam, and Luke Montrose. 2020. “Influence of Woodsmoke Exposure on Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Alzheimer’s Disease: Existing Literature and Gaps in Our Understanding.” Epigenetics Insights 13 (January):2516865720954873. https://doi.org/10.1177/2516865720954873.
Skinner-Thompson, Jonathan. 2023. “Tribal Air.” Arizona State Law Journal 55. https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1625.
