Dr. Jack Cohen delivered a keynote presentation at the 2026 Colorado Wildland Fire Conference in Fort Collins entitled “Community Wildfire Risk and Fire Resilient Landscapes.” Just prior to his keynote, we had the opportunity to have a conversation about his work as a fire scientist.
Cohen’s contributions to wildfire science as a Forest Service researcher have fundamentally reshaped our best understanding of wildfire risk to homes, lives, and infrastructure. His work has been instrumental in producing the National Fire Danger Rating System and Firewise USA community standards.
Cohen’s research has demonstrated that home ignitability, rather than distant forest fire behavior, is the decisive factor in community losses. His arguments for prioritizing wildfire-resistant communities have reframed the wildfire problem from one that aims to suppress natural landscape processes to one that promotes community-scale resilience and ignition-resistant building design.
Our conversation started with a couple of disclaimers.
Dr. Cohen: “I don’t work for an agency anymore. I’ve been retired for almost 10 years, and I don’t do policy. I’m a scientist.”
FSEEE: We’d prefer more scientists and fewer bad policies.
Dr. Cohen: Well, I’ve got a side story on that. I was interviewed as part of a 60 Minutes segment back in 2015. The Washington Office was very uncomfortable with the whole thing, and Steve Inskeep [of NPR] was the interviewer who contributed to their discomfort. I was familiar with Steve’s style and thoroughly enjoyed his rather edgy approach and his sardonic humor.
Anyway, the Washington Office wanted a representative to come and be with me during the interview, and they sent me a long list of talking points that were all policy. I rejected it and wrote back very briefly, “I don’t do policy, whether it’s pro or con.”
FSEEE: For Forest News, we look for peer-reviewed science and people who have been doing the work on the ground, people who know what they’re talking about. And it’s amazing how wrong some policies can be and yet still be promoted.
Dr. Cohen: I don’t want to get too dramatic, but there seems to be extreme pressure for Forest Service fire management to maintain, at all cost, a wildfire control approach to all wildfire issues. But what I found from my research and analysis regarding wildland-urban (WU) fire destruction — using computational modeling, laboratory and full-scale field experiments, as well as WU fire disaster examinations — was that the effective problem definition and approach wasn’t wildfire control.
I’ve been saying the same thing for almost 40 years, when I describe the physics of what determines a home ignition and where that happens. What I found countered the general perception that largely still exists as evidenced by current agency operational rationale — implying that wildland fire risk issues are primarily a wildfire control problem.
The Forest Service budget proportion for fire suppression/protection has dramatically increased over the last 40 years, more than 300%, to over half the Forest Service budget. The reaction to recent WU fire disasters with increased emphasis on wildfire control using fuel treatments and increased suppression capacity for community wildfire protection is self-evident.
Steve Pyne wrote in his book, Between Two Fires, about maintaining agency funding that had disappeared during the Reagan administration with a resulting major reduction-in-force. Following those funding cuts, the Forest Service established the National Wildland Urban Interface Initiative in 1987 as a federal-state program. This established the Forest Service in the role of protecting communities from wildfire and provided the rationale for enhancing fire suppression.
I had a personal experience in the early 1990s consistent with this narrative. I gave a briefing of my WU fire research results to a Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management executive in the Washington Office. When I showed him how community wildfire destruction could be prevented without wildfire control, he stopped me, and there was a long pause. He then sternly asked me, “Do you know how we get our funding?”
Effective restoration of fire-adapted landscapes and preventing WU fire disasters requires recognition that they are two things and are totally different and separable problems. The idea that somehow or another we have to do wildland fire treatment, essentially fuel treatment, to save communities is incorrect. Wildland fuel treatment is not reliably effective during extreme wildfire conditions, and ironically, ecological fire restoration will require ignition-resistant communities.
We’re going to need ignition-resistant communities to do 300 million acres of fire restoration on public lands that cannot be done with 100-acre prescribed burns at a time. It cannot be done if explicit wildfire or prescribed-fire control is required. The scale of restoration is too great. And now, over three decades later, I’m giving a keynote tomorrow about how wildland fire is two different problems, two different, separable problems — one being landscape fire resilience, and the other being fire-resilient communities.
A slide from Dr. Cohen’s presentation at the Colorado Wildland Fire Conference.
FSEEE: How long were you at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab?
Dr. Cohen: I did research and development at the Missoula Lab for about 24 years; however, I did research at all three Forest Service fire labs. I started as a research scientist at the Missoula Lab in 1976. In 1979, I transferred to the Riverside Fire Lab in Southern California. After 10 years, I transferred to the Southern Forest Fire Lab in Macon, Georgia, (now defunct) and then back to the Missoula Lab in ’96, where I retired in 2016.
During that 40-year period as a research physical scientist, I focused on fire modeling for developing the 1978 National Fire Danger Rating System. I then transitioned to fire-behavior modeling with applications to operational fire analysis. While researching live-fuel fire spread at the Riverside Lab, I was also an operational fire-behavior analyst and a prescribed fire supervisor in Southern California. That got me involved in how homes ignite and communities burn during extreme wildfires.
Wildland-urban fire research and analysis was my primary focus for about 15 years. The last 10 years of my research until retirement focused on the fundamental heat transfer processes of wildland fire spread in fine fuels.
FSEEE: How did you get to be a wildland fire scientist?
My professional track started in Missoula as a research assistant and a technician associated with the Fire Lab starting in 1972. At that time, I was an undergraduate in a fire science program at University of Montana. I grew up in a rural/suburban part of the southern Tucson Valley, and in the Santa Rita Mountains. I grew up outside. I was fascinated with fire and was around fire a lot of the time.
I was curious and wanted to know how things happened, which is why I started to pursue a chemistry/physics major at the University of Arizona; however, the academics didn’t satisfy my need to know what happens. So, I transferred to the U of Montana for the fire science option in the forestry school. I never identified with the practice of forestry, so I focused on the physics and ecology of wildland fire.
I went to graduate school in the Bioclimatology Program at CSU here in Fort Collins. I was still interested in fire, but not necessarily wildfire spread modeling. I got involved in fire modeling because my graduate project was a climatological analysis of Colorado mountain wildfire occurrence. My graduate advisor put me in touch with scientists at the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station here in Fort Collins. These folks had already been involved in the development of the 1972 National Fire Danger Rating System. They were developing a computer version.
Thus, the newly developed Fire Danger Rating System computer model, based on the Rothermel fire spread model, became my primary tool for analyzing wildfire climatology. To use the model, I had to understand the model and that made me a fire modeler. Also, as a graduate student, I served as a member of the Pike-San Isabel Interregional Hotshot Crew.
Because I had worked with the fire meteorology project at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, upon graduation I had an opportunity for a position at the Missoula Fire Lab as a codeveloper of the 1978 National Fire Data Rating System revision. I actually had more experience with the entire code than the two other developers I was working with. So, that put me back in the Missoula Lab that had started my career as a research scientist.
FSEEE: You’ve certainly covered a lot of bases. Given what you’ve learned, where do we now stand, generally speaking, in our relationship with fire?
Dr. Cohen: If we look back historically, when First Peoples became established in North America, they became a natural selection factor on the landscape as the climate changed following Glacial Max. So, for the last 20,000 years, we’ve had people lighting fires, not fighting fires. And that changed the entire vegetation, the landscape, and thus the ecosystems. That’s all been undergoing a gradual elimination ever since Europeans arrived.
With climate warming and persistent drought, we’re revisiting the 1200 CE drought, the thousand-year drought that pretty much eliminated the Anasazi culture. Basically, they assimilated into the peoples that were living in the riparian zones where they could survive. So, they left the marginal lands because of the drought. Well, we’re kind of revisiting that era, and I think it’s likely exacerbated by climate change, climate warming, and the persistence of drought conditions.
Case in point, if you start masticating piñon-juniper trees in a persistent drought situation, you’re going to lose them. The sustainability of that forest type is going to be beyond the limits set by the climate. And the climate will begin to limit and change the habitat in what I would call an unenlightened disturbance activity.
This happened in Eastern Oregon, where they went out and clear-cut ponderosa pine and then tried to regenerate the stand with seedlings from a nursery. They finally gave up. The stand was established during a cool wet period, and that forest couldn’t re-establish without a cool wet period, which we’re not in anymore.
FSEEE: We keep reading reports about how wildfires are increasing, but they only cite data since the ‘80s, which ignores the fact that the cool wet period gave us unrealistic expectations — for how much water the Colorado River will supply, for for example, but also about fire and fire suppression. So, it’s been really fascinating to read where scientists are going back prior to the 1880s and documenting that we had a drier climate, much more like what we have now.
Dr. Cohen: Well, and so maybe more to the point, the best science available basically says there’s no connection between wildfire intensity and what determines home ignitions and communities destroyed. The best science basically says that high intensity wildfire is not a direct determinant of urban conflagration in communities.
So, fuel treatments are largely irrelevant, and certainly unreliable for preventing wildfire-initiated structure ignitions resulting in community destruction. Most structures are ignited by windblown firebrands that easily bypass fuel treatments. The dominant paradigm — preventing community exposure by controlling extreme wildfire — is a specious supposition.
If you look at it from the landscape level, and you’re suppressing fires that occur on the landscape, you find out that we’ve been highly effective. Before we started suppressing all fire, we had a sustained mosaic of fuel conditions that modulate fire behavior. Now, all of a sudden, our fire suppression eliminates that fuel modulation — the ecological mosaic of disturbance from fire, which means, not just fuel load, but also landscape continuity as well as species composition.
The first thing that changes is species composition. And then the continuity of that species composition changes to tree species with different fire regimes and, ultimately, to invasives. Of course, with the invasives, fire actually helps them spread because they tend to be annual grasses. So with fire suppression and fuel treatments, we’re either preventing a beneficial sequence of disturbance, or we’re increasing the fire occurrence through annual grass invasions.
The extreme is the situation we have in the Sonoran Desert, where annual invasives are taking out the saguaro cactus in a non-fire-adapted ecosystem. Now we’re talking about the annual grass invasion and the fuel continuity of that annual grass. So, we’ve got a species change and a continuity increase of invasives in a non-fire-adapted ecosystem that is dramatically changing the species composition.
FSEEE: Well, we’re about out of time. Thank you very much for an enlightening conversation.
Dr. Cohen: You bet. Great talking with you.
