Dear HCN,
Steve Pyne’s fine
article on Ed Pulaski, and the Forest Service’s corporate culture
about forest fires, is a great read (HCN, 4/23/01: The Big Blowup).
But Steve, like so many others, fails to see the main point about
humans vs. fires. Fires happen. It’s not our fault.
The idea that finding “a Pulaski” of “fire
management” policy will lead to the right balance between “fire
lighting over firefighting” is misguided anthropocentric fantasy.
The forests in the future will burn on much
their own terms, as they always have in the past. The era of
suppression-first was sincere and heroic, but in the scale of time
and space of the national forests it was short-lived and never
comprehensive. Suppression-first tactics on national forests were
only significant from about 1950 to 1980, and they were not totally
effective even then.
The fires of 1988 were
caused more by the suppression of Native Americans and their
pre-Columbian fire policies, than by Forest Service firefighting.
There will be fires of 2110, too, and thereafter, so long as the
biology of conifers and photosynthesis conspire. They will not be
“caused” by humans igniting them (Smokey to the contrary
notwithstanding) any more than they will be “caused” by “unnatural
suppression” of minuscule fragments of the total fuel load.
We cannot “manage” the fire ecology of the
Northern Rockies – which is sometimes very big, very dangerous and
very scary – without obliterating the ecosystem to which it is
integral. This seems to be very hard for human beings – and
particularly journalists – to accept, but the forest doesn’t mind
our anthropocentrism.
For a great history of
the heroic days, when extinguishing forest fires was an
unquestioned and exciting adventure, read Two-Man
Stick by Bud Filler (Burning Mountain Press, Boise,
Idaho, 1999).
Philip M.
Hocker
Alexandria, Virginia
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Fiery anthropocentrism.
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