The Burned-Over District

New England’s recent outbreak of fires has seemed to some observers as both a novelty and a harbinger of a climate-deranged world to come. More aptly, the flames harken back to a fire-rich if forgotten past. In New England fire does not display the singular presence it has in Florida or California; it is one ecological character among many. But as an ineradicable companion to people, it is always there, and from time to time, like a dormant fault, it ruptures.

Part of that chronicle is recorded in the land’s ecology. Big fires build on the same conditions that support small fires — suitable weather, sufficient fuel, and timely ignition. Routine fire has been typical of the coastal plains and anywhere else that boasted pitch pine, perhaps the most robustly fire-adapted tree in North America. Not every landscape welcomed flame, but even hardwoods, especially oaks, long assumed to be harmed by fire, are now understood to value the right kind of fire. The region had many kinds of fires and varied adaptations to them. Taking fire out has proved as consequential as putting it in.

The story is also retained in written accounts. From the earliest contacts, explorers and settlers reported fires, almost all which were set deliberately by Indigenous Americans to improve the habitability of the land. In coastal Massachusetts, William Wood wrote in his 1634 book New England’s Prospect that it was the “custome of the Indians to burn the wood in November, when the grasse is withered, and leaves are dryed,” which left those places they frequented with “scarce a brush or bramble, or any cumbersome underwood to bee seene.” Three years later English colonist Thomas Morton observed that “the Savages are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come; and to burne it, twize a year, vixe at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.” In 1656, the Dutch colonist Adriaen van der Donck witnessed the same in New Netherlands. A half century later, Peter Kalm, one of Linnaeus’ Apostles, noted “the numerous fires which happen every year in the woods” of New York when the Indigenes conducted their hunts. Timothy Dwight IV, president of Yale College, recorded that the natives “annually, and sometimes oftener, burned such parts of the North American forests as they found sufficiently dry.” All these witnesses recounted how a cessation of burning led the land to quickly fill in with scrub and “thick” woods. Without appropriate burning, the land would be far less habitable.

What surprised Europeans was not the burning — Europe had deep traditions of burning embedded in its own agriculture and pastoralism — but the extent of fire for hunting. Fire and smoke could drive prey like deer, but the richer usage was to promote browse, open understories for easier movement, and in general draw animals to hunting grounds which, renewed by burning, could be used year after year.

As with other fire practices, exchanges and hybrids resulted between natives and newcomers. Passing the torch was complicated, however, by different economies and land use, which meant even customary fires could burn outside social norms or ecological bounds. (Settler over-enthusiasm for fire hunting led to some of the earliest fire regulations.) Where landclearing was extensive, and slash abundant, traditional practices could occasionally mutate into monstrous outbreaks. 

In the colonies, as in Europe, the conflict over fire usage was primarily between authorities and those who actually lived on the land. Elites condemned burning as primitive and dangerous whether in Finland, the Pyrenees, or New England. But controlled burning was mandatory both for converting the land and for subsequently maintaining it in usable forms. The fires persisted, adapting to its changing circumstances. The map of forest fires produced for the 1880 Census highlights their endurance — sometimes as wildfire, but mostly as customary agricultural practice. The Northeastern areas that burned earlier this autumn were burning four centuries earlier.

New England’s fire has a regional accent. The Northeast did not host fires as pervasive as those in the Southeast, or suffer big burns on the scale of those that romped across the Northern Rockies, or endure barrages of fire-kindling dry lightning as in the Southwest. Its fires were almost wholly man-made; they tended, unless people had upended landscapes, to be patchy; they churned as one disturbance among many. But smoke and fire were as much a part of New England’s seasonal landscape as spring’s pollen and autumn’s colored foliage. Occasionally, as dryness, fuel, and wind fluffed up, fires swelled to match them. Conflagrations could result from many combinations of the critical ingredients — a stubborn drought, an unusual massing of fuels, a saturation of fire starts. 

Climate matters too, of course. What shapes fire regimes is the rhythm of wetting and drying; in the temperate environment of the Northeast, with its relatively consistent precipitation month after month, fire must rely on dry spells — climatic cracks — in the spring and fall, aligning before green-up and after dormancy. Historically, a few extra weeks or a couple of uncommon months of drought could be enough to ramp up routine burns into conflagrations. The largest forest fire recorded in North America burned over four million acres in New Brunswick (with perhaps another million in Maine) in 1825 — well within the bounds of the Little Ice Age. The regional outbreaks in 1903 and 1908 were still within a post-glacial shadow.

What propelled big fires was fuel and ignition. Fires gorged on slash, the hugely combustible residue of branches and tops left from landclearing and logging. Ignition was no less abundant since it was integral to so many working landscapes. The slash was burned deliberately to convert it to fields (James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel The Pioneers climaxes with a wildfire blasting out of slovenly burned slash). Or it simply met sparks from a society that used fire to cook, heat, light, hunt, camp, prune blueberries, and herd livestock, and that littered fire wherever it went. Lots of fire met lots of fuel, awaiting only an unusually dry spring or autumn before a frontal passage blew flames as far as they could run. From time to time the fires caused Dark Days in the form of immense smoke palls to descend on the region.

As land use changed, so did fire regimes. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had set into motion an era of land abandonment as farmers left the rocky crust of New England for better soil to the west. The land left behind turned feral; old-field pines sprouted in place of corn. Then, in the latter 19th century, railroads rewrote the landscape. Industrial logging swept the pineries and pushed into the mountains. Slash and spark rode the rails. Big burns followed.

Along with the Lake States, the Northeast became the nation’s best publicized firescape. The 1903 and 1908 seasons were closer to the centers of the nation’s elites and politics than were the 1902 fires in Washington and 1910’s Big Blowup in the Northern Rockies. A fire policy for public lands in the West was forged amid the havoc on private lands in the Northeast. Charles Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, oversaw the 1880 survey of forests (and fires) for the national census; chaired the New York commission to report on fire protection for Adirondack Park; and then repeated the task for the National Academy of Science commission to propose protection measures (including fire) for the national forest reserves in the West. Gifford Pinchot, future chief of the U.S. Forest Service, surveyed the scorched earth of New Jersey’s pine barrens in 1898 and likened the fight against fires to that against slavery. 

Then the scene quieted. No significant amount of new fuel replaced the slash of old; fire-prone scrub matured into more shade-tolerant forests; farmers yielded to exurbanites, and a gentrification of once-rural landscapes; fossil fuels replaced open flame; a dense road network (the asphalt equivalent of stone walls) and an aggressive fire protection system kept ignition from finding caches of combustibles. The last major outbreak occurred in 1947, partly powered by debris left from the great New England hurricane of 1938; aftershocks followed in 1957 and 1963. To postwar generations, landscape fire seemed alien, a creature of the past like bison in Pennsylvania. Free-ranging wildfires were something that happened in the drought-plagued, wild-forested lands of the far west. Fires vanished from New England’s vernacular landscapes, along with the fire culture of those who inhabited them.

Yet, as the fires of 2024 show, the basics remained. In truth, they never left: the latent flammability was always there. It didn’t require a derangement of planetary climate, just enough drought, fuel, and surplus ignition to overwhelm the protection system. The appropriate reference for comparison is not the sprawling firescapes of the West, but rather the region’s past. The postwar era was an anomaly, not a norm.

Now the Northeast’s fire triangle is reconstituting itself again, as its residents appeal to fossil biomass to do what fire had previously done. Burning fossil fuels replaces fire as a source of power; petrochemicals and plastics attempt to substitute for fire’s ecological effects. The conversion is unhinging not only climate, but also the ways people live on the land and relate to landscape fire. 

Global warming is widening the climatic cracks, enlarging the customary fire opportunities in spring and fall. So long as those occasions persist, it will not matter so much whether the region gets wetter or drier overall, as whether it acquires a different rhythm of wetting and drying. In the past, blowups depended on relatively small climatic windows but heaps of fuel and sparks. In the future, megafires will likely derive from larger climatic openings operating on smaller caches of combustibles and fewer flames seeding the land. 

Fuels are reorganizing, though slowly, as formerly rural landscapes convert to recreational sites, nature preserves, and unmanaged private holdings. In an unexpected way, the land is rewilding. There is more biomass ready to convert into available fuel, this time with global warming perhaps taking the place of the axe. Newcomers are living on the land, not off it. Yet a feral landscape will birth feral fires. 

Ignition, too, is reinventing itself. There are fewer sparks associated with traditional burning and more from machines, fewer from woodsworkers and more from recreationists. But it is not just the source of spark that matters, it’s also how many of the resulting fires have a social or ecological impact. That depends on fire suppression capabilities — like other aspects of modernity, when firefighting converted to fossil fuels, its engines made it powerful. Rural fire departments, typically staffed by volunteers, could shift from relying on firelines and burnouts to a more urban model of direct suppression.

The weightier question regarding ignition goes beyond controlling bad fires, and has to do with the need for good fires. The prevailing urban model — eliminating all fires — works in cities, but breaks down in the countryside, where the problem may not be too many fires but too few of the right kind. Without them, fuels build up and ecological integrity decays. What the future may require is what the past provided: regular burning, appropriate to each setting — a modern version of practices that have existed as long as people have inhabited the region. The future equivalent of today’s volunteer fire departments may be something like prescribed fire associations.

The Northeast has a marvelous exemplar in New Jersey’s pinelands, home of one of the most rooted fire cultures in the country. Here landscape burning was never fully lost, and in fact was formalized by legislation a century ago. Other organizations, notably the Nature Conservancy, have taken up the cause. Even the Pine Bush Preserve within the municipal limits of Albany is regularly burned. New England’s long-standing attachment to working landscapes can pivot from commodities to ecological services. In the past, fire and axe created conflagrations; in the future, a drip torch and strategic pruning may help counter the fire-leveraging effects of climate change.

Like the rest of the Earth, the Northeast faces a maturing Pyrocene. Its firescapes will change, most likely in ways that will favor more fire. That does not mean fire will dominate. The Northeast will not experience serial conflagrations of the sort that afflict California. Instead, flame will remain one of a mix of catalysts in a continuing ecological churn. The Northeast’s fire future will likely return to a facsimile of its past, though which of its several fire pasts prevails will depend on what people decide.

On May 19, 1780, customary wisps of smoke mutated into a sky-obliterating pall. “Candles were lighted in many houses; the birds were silent and disappeared; and the fowls retired to roost.” As Black Friday darkened, some members of the Connecticut legislature, believing the Apocalypse might be at hand, proposed to adjourn. Colonel Abraham Davenport objected. “The Day of Judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.”

As the Northeast debates how to respond to what many observers consider world-destroying crises symbolized, if not catalyzed, by fire, it might consider emulating Col. Davenport’s response: reject despair, do its duty, and request that appropriate candles, perhaps in the form of prescribed fires, be brought to assist its deliberations.