Wildfires are healthy for the environment — until they’re not

For many of us, the sight of wildfires and evacuations in Scotland in early April feels somewhat apocalyptic. Did this use to happen? Is this a result of something we did?

The answer is yes and no. Actually, wildfires are a natural and healthy part of the lifecycle of land. Fires have an important role to play in clearing land of dead foliage and preparing soil for new life. In fact one of the modern failures in land management is our unwillingness to tolerate small fires.

In the modern world we tend to see any wildfire as a threat and rapidly put them out. But all this does is allow the natural fuel produced through seasonal growth to mount up which means that if and when there is a wildfire, it is much bigger and more destructive. Many indigenous communities around the world have used controlled forest burning as an important part of their custodianship of land.

As with so much in the realm of climate change and changing environments, it is very difficult to know exactly what factors cause what outcomes. Weather, soil, our biodiversity, patterns of human usage – these are complex systems and it is often hard to pinpoint exact causality.

However, equally as with all climate change events, we know the kinds of actions and conditions which are likely to make events like wildfires more likely and those which will make them less likely. Part of Scotland's land strategy should be to trying and minimise the former and maximise the latter.

A lot of this is about how soil is treated and how land is populated. Richer, fuller, healthier topsoil is deeper, more diverse, more fertile and contains more organic matter. When you grow deep-rooted plants on land, the roots break up and condition the soil, making it looser. This does two things; when there is a lot of surface water it is much better at absorbing it, preventing floods, and when there are droughts it us much better at holding water for longer, preventing the soil drying out.

When you don't have deep-rooted plants or what grows on soil is cropped very short by grazing (as a rule of thumb, however much of a plant is rising above ground, it's root system grows downwards by a similar amount), you have nothing to break up the soil. Weather, settlement, animals or humans walking, all of this causes the soil to compact more and more.

That causes water to run off the top of soil rather than be absorbed by it, which in turn means it is less able to hold and retain moisture during dry spells. Diversity of foliage helps too, because different kinds of plants respond to and behave in soil in different ways and complement each other in conditioning land. We tend to plant large blocks of monocrops.

So it is that in Scotland our response to rewilding and land management is giant, isolated 'corporate forests' planted to harvest subsidies, not because they're in the right place or contributing in the right way. Integrating more diverse planting into all our wild landscapes is key. Simple moves like restoring hedgerows or putting small patches of trees in unused corners of fields everywhere can do more to manage our land effectively than a corporate forest in the highlands.

We also need to protect and restore soil through better agricultural practices such as agroecology. The deeper the topsoil, the more moisture the soil can hold. We also need to accept the natural redundancy that comes with land in a natural ecosystem – floodplains may be unreliable places to grow crops but engineering them out is a disaster which simply 'dehydrates land' in one area and passes the water that would have been absorbed downstream into urban flooding.

Wildfires are a healthy part of the lifecycle of land and vegetation. Wildfires are not in themselves something to be worried about if what you are looking for is a healthy natural environment. But that does not mean that the nature of wildfires – their timing, their size, their location – cannot be cause for concern.

The better we manage land, the less likely we will face major environmental crises like flooding and wildfires. In fact, when we manage our land better we get a very wide array of benefits. It is something Scotland needs to take very much more seriously.

You can find out more about Common Weal's approach to land management in Sorted.