Weitzman students Daniel McGovern and Andrew Reichenbach recording conditions in a treated fire resilient forest after thinning and prescribed burning in the Tahoe National Forest, a project partner with the North Yuba Forest Partnership. (Photo Nicholas Pevzner)
Forest fires in the United States have gone from bad to worse in the last decade, burning an estimated 7.6 million acres of land in 2022 and foreshadowing visions of ever-larger blazes to come as global temperatures rise. Meanwhile, cities scorched by the urban heat-island effect are looking for ways to expand their tree canopies and keep existing urban forests in good health, with health benefits for residents and carbon benefits for the environment.
Working at the intersection of these issues is Nicholas Pevzner, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Weitzman School of Design.
This spring, Pevzner is leading a landscape architecture studio called The Fire Studio: Wildfire, Forests, Jobs, + Carbon, which is focused on forest management practices in the American west. He’s also finishing up research for an article in the Journal of Landscape Architecture about the past and future roles of designers in managing urban forests. And, working with a team of research assistants, he’s completing a greenhouse gas inventory of the Delaware River watershed, including the carbon contributions of forests, funded partly by a grant from the William Penn Foundation. The projects are all part of Pevzner’s broader interest in the reciprocal links between social and natural systems.
Nicholas Pevzner (front row center, in black) and students gather in front of the US Forest Service's new wood chippers, part of fuels management in the Plumas National Forest.
“Ecosystems are socio-ecological systems,” he says. “Humans are part of ecosystems, and you really need to look at them always interacting—the biophysical always interacting with the social and built components.”
Designers are “only beginning to grapple with the spatial and land use challenges of fire risk and fire dynamics,” Pevzner wrote in the syllabus for the Fire Studio, “But smart new approaches to managing fire risk could unlock new approaches to reducing this climate threat for vulnerable communities, while simultaneously increasing forest resilience, keeping more carbon on the landscape, and creating lots of jobs in struggling rural communities.” The studio follows on a previous course Pevzner led as part of the Green New Deal SuperStudio in 2021. This year’s studio, focused on the areas around Tahoe National Forest and Plumas National Forest in Northern California, explores the roles industry, the US Forest Service, and communities can play in managing forests for greater fire resilience and protecting communities for wildlife and people.
Treated fire resilient forest, after thinning and prescribed burning, in the Tahoe National Forest, a project partner with the North Yuba Forest Partnership. From left: Lon Henderson, US Forest Service; Weitzman students Ari Vamos, Vyusti Agarwalla, Jiajing Dai, Caz Gagne, and Oliver Atwood. (Photo Nicholas Pevzner)
Western forests are increasingly fire-prone not just because of climate change but also because of a century of fire-suppression practices, funding decisions by Congress, and changes in the timber industry, Pevzner says. The government has also blocked Indigenous groups from carrying out practices like cultural burns which they traditionally used to manage forest fires. Making forests safer—meaning less susceptible to big, destructive conflagrations—requires human intervention to remove excess fuel from mature forests. That means taking out young, small-diameter trees to protect the largest and oldest stands, which are better able to survive fires without adding to their severity. That material tends to be harder to sell, though, leaving many places with no viable market for removing and disposing of small-diameter fuels.
“It’s really challenging how you move out of the current status quo, which is that there’s not enough workers, sawmills or funding to reduce the biomass in those forests to the point where they can re-enter a healthy fire ecology,” Pevzner says.
Pile burn in progress on private land near the Plumas National Forest, organized by the Plumas Underburn Cooperative, which describes itself as "a group of landowners and community members helping each other to use prescribed fire as a management tool on private property". (Photo Nicholas Pevzner)
In his studio, students take a systems approach to the problem, studying the logistics and spatial needs of emergent engineered wood products, biomass, and biochar industries with the goal of understanding how a range of social, economic, and environmental functions could complement each other.
In February, the group visited forest restoration sites, sawmills and biomass utilization campuses in Northern California. They met with fire experts and forest managers to learn about “the labor and the physical transformation that these landscapes need to undergo to prepare for a healthy fire regime,” Pevzner says. For their final projects, they’re producing site analyses and designs that explore “multifunctional arrangements” for communities and industries that connect forest-management practices, carbon reduction, economic incentives and jobs. Examples could include colocation of complementary business types that could aid in the removal of small-diameter trees, or designing recreational trails that could help provide fuel breaks and access to hard-to-reach places for fire responders.
“The premise of the studio is that we could be doing much more to help rural communities adapt and help them get to that healthy relationship with fire,” Pevzner says.
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