MONTAGUE — During a program titled “Forest Fires in Massachusetts: Myths and Reality,” a panel of environmental experts will explore questions about the practice of prescribed burning on state land and take attendees on a walking tour of the Montague Plains Wildlife Management Area on Saturday, Sept. 12.
The panel discussion, hosted by the nonprofit RESTORE: The North Woods and its Save Massachusetts Forests campaign, will start at 11 a.m. and continue until 1 p.m. at The National Spiritual Alliance at 2 Montague Ave. in Lake Pleasant, while the Montague Plains walk will be held from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Guests are asked to park along Old Northfield and Lake Pleasant roads.
Janet Sinclair, who is involved with organizing the program, said the panel discussion will offer a different perspective on the use of prescribed burning across Massachusetts, including in the Montague Plains, a 1,575-acre state-owned property that features the state’s largest inland occurrence of pitch pine. Sinclair said state agencies support these prescribed burns, but “people don’t get to hear the downsides of it unless we speak up.”
According to MassWildlife, a prescribed burn is a fire that is intentionally set by professionals for land management purposes and to help maintain healthy habitats for the benefit of wildlife, plants and humans.
The panelists include David Foster, director emeritus of the Harvard Forest; Michael Kellett, co-founder and executive director of RESTORE: The North Woods; Bill Stubblefield, an environmental activist who holds a doctorate in evolutionary biology from Harvard University; and George Wuerthner, ecologist, photographer and executive director of Public Lands Media. Joe Graveline will deliver a land acknowledgement to start the program.
The panelists will discuss the goal of prescribed burning, where it’s happening, whether it helps prevent forest fires and the risk of wildfires in the state, among other topics.
Foster explained there are two big context points for Saturday’s discussion, including the larger concern people have for wildfires in New England while news of these blazes makes headlines in western parts of the United States, along with the notion that in the Connecticut River Valley, Indigenous people would use fire to shape the landscape. Foster mentioned there is some suggestion that Native Americans used fire in “very local places,” but that it was infrequently used for agricultural land management, and major fires would have been a result of European colonization and attempting to clear large areas of land.
These topics tie into the larger discussion of prescribed burning, as Foster said state agencies like MassWildlife use prescribed burning in landscapes like the Montague Plains for habitat protection and fire hazard mitigation, ascribing the practice to Native tribes. Yet, Foster argues his research of the Montague Plains in the 1990s points to fire not being involved in forming the property as it exists today, and that his recommendation is that the best management tactic would be to leave the land alone.
“If you’re interested in reducing the hazard of fire, then you look to control human behavior, you look to inform people who are using the area,” Foster added. “You look to allow the vegetation to grow up naturally and become this more mature forest that is less prone to fire, rather than going in and cutting the forest.”
While this is a topic that Foster said he’ll delve into himself, he noted the other panelists may come at best practices for forest management in their own way, all with the same goal of conservation of important landscapes.
Both the panel discussion and the walk are free to attend and open to the public, and a Zoom option is available for the panel discussion. In-person registration is not required, but can be done by emailing Sinclair at jasinclair@verizon.net, and Zoom registration is available on Save Massachusetts Forests’ website at savemassforests.com.
