Fire by Design: How the Southeast is relearning to live with flames

Spreading the story of "good fire" is a passion of Reese Thompson, a sixth-generation Georgia landowner who produced timber for nearly five decades. He's a staunch advocate for longleaf pine restoration for many reasons, not the least of which are its drought, fire, insect and even hurricane-resistant properties. Longleaf pine is native to the Southeast, and countless species depend upon it to survive, including some 800 to 900 plant species that grow in its understory, as well as hundreds of birds, reptiles and mammals.

Healthy longleaf pine ecosystems require fire to thrive. Convincing landowners to intentionally set fire in their forests requires unlearning deeply ingrained ideas about fire pushed for decades by Smokey Bear, emphasizing suppression and prevention. Thompson's solution is named Burner Bob®, a Smokey Bear-like character of a bobwhite quail. Quail thrive in fire-managed forests, and Burner Bob is a cool dude with a hot message, "Prescribed Fires Prevent Wildfires." Burner Bob helps engage and educate communities about the use of controlled fire to keep the landscape healthy. Kids color Burner Bob books and get photos taken with a fluffy 8-foot costumed mascot who attends fire festivals and schools.

These efforts to increase awareness and engage communities in controlled burns are vital. The Southeast is the nation's wood basket, generating more than half of all U.S. timber harvests and more than $250 billion in annual economic impact. That wood, and those dollars, come mainly from private lands. In fact, about 86 percent of southern forestland is privately owned, much of it in family hands. That ownership pattern is as much a vulnerability as it is a strength: if we want resilient forests, safer communities and sustainable wood supply, we must meet private landowners where they are, with training, trust and tools that make good fire doable.

A Landscape Built to Burn

The longleaf pine range once covered more than 90 million acres stretching from Virginia to East Texas. After a long decline due to fire suppression, land use changes and other factors, this landscape is on the way to recovery, thanks to many partners and collaborators, including state agencies, conservation nonprofits, private companies like International Paper, as well as numerous private landowners who are committed to practicing good forest management through frequent, low-intensity fire.

In healthy longleaf systems, flames creep through every 2 to 5 years, recycling nutrients, reducing other competing vegetation and allowing more sunlight to reach the forest floor which promotes the grasses and forbs that stitch the food web together. This rhythm sustains specialists like the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise, Bachman's sparrow and eastern indigo snake, species that falter when fire disappears and brush chokes the ground layer. The gopher tortoise is a keystone species that creates burrows that about 360 other species depend upon for shelter and survival. It's critical to a thriving ecosystem. Thanks to sustained restoration, longleaf acreage has climbed from a low of less than 3 million acres to roughly 5.2 million acres today.

Frequent controlled burning isn't just about wildlife; it's risk management for a regional economy built on forests. The South supplies most of the nation's timber. Keeping fuels low and stands healthy reduces the chance that a single lightning strike, or an ember blown across a road, will become a costly, landscape-scale disaster. In practical terms, private landowners are the linchpin: when they have access to training, liability clarity, cost-share and a trusted local network, they burn more, and everything from songbirds to sawmills benefits.

Creating a Regional Playbook to Bring Fire Back with Fewer Barriers

The Forestland Stewards Partnership, a longtime collaboration between NFWF and International Paper, provides funding support to partners working across the Southeast, implementing practical, people-focused fire culture.

Some of these efforts include:

• "Learn-to-Burn" workshops and state certification pathways that build landowner confidence and give burners the credentials they need to plan and execute safe, effective burns.
• Prescribed Burn Associations that share gear, labor and lessons learned-normalizing good fire at the community scale.
• Web-based burn-planning tools, maps and cost-share that take the guesswork out of weather windows, smoke management and unit prep.
• Funding to hire qualified burners, so private landowners, including those with smaller acreages, can still get the ecological benefits without shouldering all the work.

On a warm spring morning in Georgia, a dozen neighbors in yellow Nomex meet for a burn. The certified burner walks the firebreak with the landowner, confirming the plan: northwest wind, start from the plowed road, dot-ignite the rough corners to keep heat low, then finish with a patchy head fire. In two hours, flames thread through wiregrass and duff, pine trunks smoke-kissed to the knee, a chorus of sparrows trailing the drifting haze. In a few weeks, the understory will flush with grasses and other herbaceous plants, and over the next year the pines will put on growth. Give it two, and hopefully the familiar call of the northern bobwhite will return.

Scale that scene across counties and states, and you get a region writing a different fire future, leaning on preparation rather than luck, and on community rather than crisis.

The approach is working. In 2024 alone, partners across the longleaf range implemented controlled burns on more than 2.2 million acres, part of a 15-year surge in planned fire that's restoring structure and resilience to the region.