March 5, 2024
Flint Hills Fire Culture
What is a fire culture? How do people successfully live with wildland fire and incorporate it into their land management and community well-being?
Interviews with more than 50 ranchers and others living in the Flint Hills region of Kansas have been crafted into a new 26 minute video, Flint Hills Fire Culture: A Legacy of Caring for the Tallgrass Prairie, which will be broadcast by livestream on Kansas City and Wichita PBS on March 14. Following the broadcast, the video will be available on the Great Plains Fire Science Exchange website, https://gpfirescience.org.
The website will also include additional, shorter videos that cover key topics in more depth:
1) Burning Together: Ranchers on the strength of cooperative burning.
2) Burning impressions: Ranchers on perceptions of prescribed burns.
3) Burning Economics: Ranchers and the economic impact of prescribed burning.
4) Ecosystem Embers: Rancher and the impacts of burning on nature.
5) Fanning the Flames: Learning and teaching prescribed burning.
6) Burning Legacies: Ranchers and the historical roots of prescribed burns.
7) Burning by the book: Ranchers’ insights on prescribed fire regulations.
The site will also include 100 short video clips that capture key quotes from the interviews.
The harmony between the use of prescribed fire, grassland ecology and people predates European settlement. Prescribed fire was widely used by Great Plains tribal peoples for a multiplicity of purposes that enhanced elements of their physical, cultural and spiritual lives.
Extrapolating a definition of a fire culture includes consideration of burn objectives, procedure, desired results, historic context, ecological impact, economic value, regulation, community acceptance, risk and knowledge acquisition. A couple of proposed definitions of a fire culture will be posted to the Great Plains Fire Science Exchange website.
The Great Plains Fire Science Exchange is one of 15 exchanges that are part of the Joint Fire Science Program. The mission of the exchanges is to provide science-based information for making informed decisions about wildland fire (wildfire and prescribed burning). The Exchanges work across boundaries (political, agency, national and others) to maximize science delivery and ascertain fire science needs. A variety of methods and approaches are used to convey science and management in ways most useful to the wildland fire community.
The Great Plains Fire Science Exchange is housed at Kansas State University under KSRE and has two part-time staff, Carol Baldwin and Lori Bammerlin. The Great Plains Fire Science Exchange spans parts of 10 states, from Montana in the north to Texas in the south.