If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your fire

Counting Forest Fires

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2023-01-23 07:00:06

If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your firefighters’ part if you had more fires this year than the last? Would the size and impact of a forest fire be a measure of their success? Would you look for the cause—such as a person lighting it, an environmental factor, etc—and act on it? Chances are that yes, that’s what you’d do. 

As time has gone by, we’ve learned interesting things about forest fires. Smokey Bear can tell us to be careful all he wants, but sometimes there’s nothing we can do about fires. Climate change creates conditions where fires are going to be more likely, intense, and uncontrollable. We constantly learn from indigenous approaches to fire management, and we now leverage prescribed burns instead of trying to prevent them all.

In short, there are limits to what individuals or teams on the ground can do, and while counting fires or their acreage can be useful to know the burden or impact they have, it isn’t a legitimate measure of success. Knowing whether your firefighters or whether your prevention campaigns are useful can’t rely on these high-level observations, because they’ll be drowned in the noise of a messy unpredictable world.

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