Fighting Fire With Fire: Why Pennsylvania Should Embrace Fire Use Over Full Suppression
- Michael Dunn
- Aug 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 9
For more than a hundred years, Pennsylvania has treated forest fire as an enemy to be stamped out on sight — and by that narrow measure, the strategy has worked. Wildfire acreage fell from over 340,000 acres a year in 1915 to roughly 4,500 acres by 2014, one of the most successful fire-suppression records of any state in the country. But a growing body of ecological research — and a longer view of Pennsylvania's own history — makes clear that total suppression has quietly created a different kind of problem: forests that are less resilient, less diverse, and, in many cases, more dangerous than the ones fire once maintained. It's time to treat fire not only as a threat to be extinguished, but as a tool to be used deliberately.
A Landscape That Was Never Fire-Free
Long before Smokey Bear, Pennsylvania's forests burned — regularly, and largely on purpose. Tree-ring and fire-scar research on old-growth red pine in north-central Pennsylvania has reconstructed a fire record stretching back to 1370, showing frequent fire (on average every 4 to 12 years, depending on location) for more than a century before sustained European contact in 1609. That same study found that the current era of fire exclusion, which began around 1915, represents the most fire-free stretch this landscape has experienced in five hundred years.
This wasn't accidental. Research on 18th-century fire scar records in central Pennsylvania found that fire frequency was strongly correlated with proximity to Native American trails and settlements — clear evidence that Indigenous communities used fire deliberately to shape the land, clear travel corridors, and maintain productive hunting grounds. Historical accounts describe early settlers in Lancaster County finding "large sections of land that had been burnt over by the Indians," and the prairies and openings once found in southwestern Pennsylvania are believed to be a direct legacy of that practice. In short: the closed-canopy, fire-starved forest many of us think of as Pennsylvania's "natural" condition is, ecologically speaking, a relatively recent and artificial state.
The Hidden Cost of a Century Without Fire
Removing fire from a fire-adapted landscape doesn't leave it unchanged — it sets off a slow-motion transformation that forest ecologists call mesophication. Absent periodic low-intensity burns, shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive species like red maple, sugar maple, and beech move into the understory, casting deep shade and dropping moist leaf litter that further dampens the fire environment. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: less fire favors moisture-loving trees, and more moisture-loving trees make fire even less likely.
The losers in this cycle are Pennsylvania's iconic oaks. Oaks are a pyrogenic genus — they are adapted to survive fire and depend on the open, sunlit conditions that periodic burning creates in order to regenerate. Without fire, oak seedlings are increasingly outcompeted by faster-growing, shade-tolerant species, and researchers have documented sharply reduced oak recruitment across the eastern United States dating directly to the 1930s–1950s, when broadcast burning was largely eliminated. This isn't a cosmetic issue — it threatens the long-term composition of forests that support everything from acorn-dependent wildlife to the region's most valuable hardwood timber. Notably, research has also linked fire exclusion to increased vulnerability to disease: fire-excluded oak stands in Minnesota saw a 765 percent increase in mortality from oak wilt compared to frequently burned stands.
The Suppression Paradox: Putting Out Today's Fire Guarantees a Worse One Tomorrow
Beyond its ecological toll, full suppression carries a safety cost that is often underappreciated. Every fire we extinguish before it can run its natural course leaves behind fuel that would otherwise have been consumed — dead wood, leaf litter, dense understory growth. Over decades, that unburned fuel accumulates, and when a fire eventually does escape control (during a drought, a wind event, or simple bad luck), it burns hotter, spreads faster, and is far harder to contain.
This dynamic, known as the "fire suppression paradox," has been documented at a landscape level: a 2024 modeling study in Nature Communications found that aggressively suppressing all wildfires necessarily means that the fires that do get away will burn more severely and unpredictably than they would under a landscape with periodic, managed fire — with impacts that can exceed those of fuel accumulation or climate change alone over a human lifetime. The U.S. Forest Service has reached similar conclusions closer to home, noting that decades of effective suppression in the eastern United States have led to "excessive amounts of forest fuel accumulations" that increase the risk of uncontrollable fire and complicate firefighter safety. In other words: total suppression doesn't eliminate fire risk. It defers it, and compounds it.
Pennsylvania Already Has the Legal Framework — It Just Needs Wider Use
The encouraging news is that Pennsylvania doesn't need to build a fire-use program from scratch. The Prescribed Burning Practices Act (Act 17 of 2009) already establishes a clear, professional pathway for conducting planned burns: a written burn plan reviewed and approved by a certified prescribed burn manager, mandatory notification to DCNR and the Department of Environmental Protection, and defined liability protections for cooperating landowners. The state's Prescribed Fire Standards further integrate this work with the existing Forest Fire Warden network, naming District Forest Fire Wardens as qualified examples of the "Agency Administrator" role that holds final approval authority over a burn plan. The infrastructure, the legal authority, and the trained personnel already exist. What's needed now is broader adoption — more landowners, municipalities, and land trusts willing to put that framework to work, rather than defaulting to a "no fire, ever" posture on their properties.
What Responsible Fire Use Looks Like
Advocating for fire use doesn't mean lighting matches indiscriminately. The research is clear that fire works best as one tool among several, not a silver bullet: studies on oak regeneration consistently find that fire alone is often insufficient where decades of suppression have already allowed competing species to gain a foothold, and that the best outcomes come from combining prescribed fire with thinning or other canopy-opening treatments. Responsible fire use means:
Site-specific burn plans developed by qualified, credentialed burn managers
Coordination with DCNR, DEP, and local Forest Fire Wardens as required by law
Pairing fire with mechanical thinning where mesophication has already progressed significantly
Repeated, periodic burns rather than one-time treatments, since a single fire rarely reverses decades of fire exclusion
Careful attention to weather, fuel moisture, and smoke management to protect public safety and air quality
A Call to Rethink "Protection"
For a century, protecting Pennsylvania's forests has meant keeping fire out. The next century of forest stewardship should recognize that, for many of these landscapes, protection means putting the right fire back in — under professional supervision, with a plan, and with an eye toward restoring the resilient, oak-dominated, fire-adapted forests that defined this landscape for thousands of years before full suppression became policy.
At Brandywine Forest, this is more than a research interest — it's central to how we advise clients on long-term forest health. Prescribed burn program development, informed by both the ecological science and Pennsylvania's regulatory framework, is one of the services our principal consultant, Michael B. Dunn, RCA | BCMA, offers to municipalities, landowners, and conservation organizations across the region. Reintroducing fire responsibly isn't a departure from good forest stewardship — for much of Pennsylvania, it's a return to it.
Sources:
Forest Fire Warden News, Spring 2015 (DCNR eLibrary) — https://elibrary.dcnr.pa.gov/PDFProvider.ashx?action=PDFStream&docID=1742618&chksum=&revision=0&docName=eWardenNews_Spring2015&nativeExt=pdf&PromptToSave=False&Size=347902&ViewerMode=2&overlay=0
Marschall et al., "Pre-Columbian red pine fire regimes of north-central Pennsylvania," Fire Ecology, 2022 — https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/64570
"Native American geography shaped historical fire frequency in forests of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania" (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10616284/
References on the American Indian Use of Fire (Intertribal Timber Council) — https://www.itcnet.org/file_download/5d76d377-8025-4780-8511-4dc8d0596e45
Nowacki & Abrams, "The Demise of Fire and Mesophication of Forests in the Eastern United States" — https://oakfirescience.com/the-demise-of-fire-and-mesophication-of-forests-in-the-eastern-united-states/
"Mesophication of Oak Landscapes," BioScience, 2021 — https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/71/5/531/6117972
Legge et al., Forest Ecology and Management — https://sydneyglassman.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/leggeetalfem2025.pdf
"Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe," Nature Communications, 2024 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46702-0
USDA Forest Service, Thirteenth Biennial Southern Silvicultural Research Conference — https://research.fs.usda.gov/download/treesearch/23450.pdf
Pennsylvania Prescribed Burning Practices Act, Act 17 of 2009 (PA Prescribed Fire Council) — https://paprescribedfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/RXPracticesAct-081822.pdf
Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Standards, 2024 (PA Prescribed Fire Council) — https://paprescribedfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PennsylvaniaRXFireStandards-012324.pdf
Hutchinson et al., "Sustaining eastern oak forests," USDA Forest Service, 2024 — https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2024/nrs_2024_hutchinson_001.pdf
"Using Fire to Manage for Oak Regeneration in Eastern and Central Forests" — https://eadn-wc02-7111601.nxedge.io/wp-content/uploads/2022-2.pdf
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