ACES Naturalist Nights: Untrammeling the Wilderness - Restoring Natural Conditions Through the Return of Human-ignited Fire

ACES, Wilderness Workshop, and Roaring Fork Audubon co-host this year's 25th annual winter speaker series, bringing a great line-up of experts to explore topics of the natural world relevant to our community. 

Join us at the Library to learn from these amazing experts!

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About the Presentation

Untrammeling the Wilderness: Restoring Natural Conditions Through the Return of Human-ignited Fire.

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 Speakers

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.