Dear HCN,
As a fan of fire (and
past pulaski-wielding partisan of that subgenus “flamebo
heroicus’), I read the article about early fires in the West by
Mark Matthews with great interest (HCN, 5/25/98). The various signs
and symptoms he surveyed were familiar: “I’ve never seen things
burn this well, this early in the year.” ; “…lots of grass’; and
the classic line – -moisture content … is way down.”
But his crowning achievement was his traditional
description of the effects of fire: “… eventually consuming 200
acres …,” “… burned 5.9 million acres …” , and the colorful:
“6.6 million acres scorched.” Holy McLleod Smokey
Bear!
My lookout eyes detect a rapidly building
column of overheated rhetoric appearing on the surface of this
reconstituted forest product. As best as I can tell, not even the
most “catastrophic” fire (whatever that means) has consumed as much
as a single acre anywhere on the planet. There is no Lake Woebegon
where cartographers consign “acres lost to fire.”
Our current version of “playing with fire” is
watching it consume our scattered trophy homes after breaching the
wimpy fireline “levees’ we annually throw up. Then we soothe our
blistered fingers in a poultice of taxpayer dollars which enables
us to rebuild and expand into even more remote corners of the fire
landscape.
Please! Let this be the year that High
Country News does well-researched articles about the realities of
fire as a change agent in ecosystems. Sound the call for the
Writers on the Range essays to challenge every inflammatory
headline with all four doors of a rhetoric-retardant drop. Don’t
let the purported federal budget surplus be consumed by the
Overlord of Yesterday (Smokey Bear, Western Broker for Millennia 21
Real Estate).
Forrest (Woody)
Hesselbarth
San Diego,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Holy hyperbole!.
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