There is no better guide to fire in the
West than Stephen Pyne, who spent 15 years fighting fires on the
North Rim of the Grand Canyon and has written 16 books on fire. The
32 essays in his most recent book, Smokechasing,
are a mixed, uncoordinated group, but so brilliant and thoughtful
that they kept me indoors on a sunny, windless spring day I had
planned to spend on my favorite chore: burning ditch-side
weeds.
Pyne asks, for example, why Biosphere 2, the
glassed-in mini-world in Oracle, Ariz., excludes fire. The
immediate answer is that a decent-sized fire would consume the
dome’s air. But beyond scale lies ideology. Pyne writes that
Biosphere 2 is “the very image of an urban people’s
vision of a benevolent nature and sustainable habitat.”
In comparison, there is the messy earth. Pyne believes
that fire “exists because the real world is not a machine,
engineered to exact specifications. It is … a fermenting,
crawling concoction that allows fire and not infrequently demands
it — to unclog and spark its peculiar and often unpredictable
biochemistry.”
Biosphere 2 may do fine without
fire, but Pyne thinks we exclude human-set fire from the landscape
at our peril. He even links the decline of species to the decline
of fire: “By the 1990s, U.S. public lands were immersed in a
crisis of ‘forest health’ that was provoked in good
measure by a fire famine.” If we could keep man-set fire on
the land, he says, other species would take care of
themselves.
But if you’re looking for a policy
solution, Pyne does not oblige. He rejects the Smokey Bear story of
putting all wildfires out, but he also rejects the pursuit of
“natural” landscapes shaped by “natural”
fires, since that condition disappeared a long time ago.
Humanity’s fire-wielding hand has been on the land an
estimated 1.7 million years, and Pyne wants to see that continue.
Smokechasing
By Stephen J.
Pyne
270 pages, hardcover $37.50; softcover $19.95.
University of Arizona Press, 2003.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
