Tribal leader will add perspective to new national wildfire commission

Wildfires in recent years have had a devastating impact on the U.S., including within the Colville Indian Reservation, and a representative from the area will now serve on a federal commission tasked with addressing the issue of these fires. 

Recently appointed the Colville Confederated Tribes executive director and their former Natural Resources director, Cody Desautel is one of 47 people selected from 500 applicants nationwide appointed to the new federal Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission.

The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Interior and Homeland Security, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, announced the selections July 7. 

The commission will "play a key role in recommending ways that federal agencies can better prevent, mitigate, suppress, and manage wildland fires. It will also recommend policies and strategies on how to restore the lands affected by wildfire," according to the USDA website. 

"The commission brings together members from federal agencies, Tribes, state and local municipalities, and private entities from across the nation," a July 19 press release from the Washington State Department of Commerce states. 

"As the Forestry/Industry representative I will ensure those perspectives are shared, including how both [forestry and industry] can contribute to improving fire severity and post fire impacts," Desautel wrote in an email to The Star. "Also, as the president of the Intertribal Timber Council, I will present tribal perspectives on wildfire and forest management from across Indian country."

Desautel said wildfires have impacted many aspects of life on the reservation including impacts on the land, plant life, animal life, people, resources, and finances. "The recovery timeline for some of these areas is decades," he noted.

"Since 2015, almost 700,000 acres have burned on our 1.4 million acre reservation, a trend that seems to be worsening with climate change," he said. "The cumulative impact is a moving target with each fire year. While there is subsequent post fire restoration work, it is not keeping pace with the scale of disturbance we have experienced over the last decade."

"There are a number of goals the commission is charged with accomplishing,"

he said about Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. 

Those goals include "ensuring communities and public infrastructure are protected, wildfires are managed effectively and safely, fuels and forest health treatments are prioritized to create suppression opportunities and resilience on the landscape, managing prescribed fire and wildfire to mimic historic fire use and fire regimes, and identifying policy and funding limitations that hinder accomplishing these goals." 

Desautel grew up in Inchelium before earning a bachelor's degree in environmental science from Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, then a master's degree in Indian law from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. 

As president of the Intertribal Timber Council, Desautel provided testimony to the federal government's House Natural Resources Committee's Hearing on "Examining the History of Federal Lands and the Development of Tribal Co-Management" in March of this year. 

"The ITC has and will continue to support legislation from both parties that increase the roles and responsibilities of Indian tribes in the management of federal forests," he said in his testimony. "The value of co-management projects accrues to all Americans, not just tribal members." 

"Tribes are first stewards of the land, air, water, earth, and all things that walk, fly, swim, or grow roots," he said. "Tribal wisdom and practices are needed more than ever. Tribal participation in the management of public and all lands should be embraced to heal and protect the resources we share." 

Desautel also spoke in his testimony about tribal peoples as managing wildfires more effectively than other agencies. 

"Even with limited budgets," he said, "tribes have demonstrated more effectiveness in forest management than federal agencies. I believe we have a stronger balance between resource protection and producing economic outputs. Our forests are more resilient to fire, Tribes also respond to fires more effectively. The average size of a fire on BIA-managed lands is three times smaller than on Forest Service land. Suppression costs, on a per-acre basis, are five times lower on fires on BIA lands." 

He also went into great detail about the effects of wildfire on the reservation in a recent article titled "A burning issue" in Washington State University's "Washington State Magazine."

Desautel started fighting fires in 1995 with the U.S. Forest Service and later worked for the tribe while in college, he told the magazine. "Back then, a big fire was 10,000 acres. If it was more than 10,000 acres, we considered it a rough summer for us." 

That began to change in 2001, when the tribe lost about 100,000 acres to fire, he said. 

"Over the next 20 years, the biggest fires kept getting a little bigger and a little bigger. In 2015, we had a huge fire year that broke all the records here. We kinda hoped that was a once-in-a-generation event and that things would slow down, but that hasn't been the case."

Desautel said most fires can be caught within the first 24 hours due to the approach used by state and federal agencies, but that "the problem is when we don't catch a fire during initial attack, it's usually because we're in the worst conditions: the hottest weather, the lowest humidity, the highest winds. When we have these kinds of conditions, you have a disproportional amount of very destructive, high severity fire..." Desautel said that the commission will be meeting in person in September.

The WSU article can be found in full at https://magazine.wsu.edu/2022/04/24/a-burning-issue/. 

Desautel's full testimony before Congress can be found at https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Desautel,%20Cody%20-%20Testimony%20-%20NR%20FC%20Ovr%20Hrg%203.08.22.pdf.