Idaho Republican Sen. Larry
Craig caused a stir Oct. 14 when he suggested that the 9th Ward,
home of many of New Orleans’ poor, should be restored as a
wetland.
No one would call Craig a tree-hugger. Craig has
built a career out of supporting dams and levee systems that have
reshaped the West. He once suggested carving a road across the
Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. When it comes to
deciding whether to control nature or accept its power, Craig has
nearly always picked control.
Democrats like Sen. Mary
Landrieu of Louisiana would like to portray Craig’s latest
view to indifference to the plight and needs of the poor. But I
think his shift is due to a new respect for the power of nature.
You could say that we are slow to learn. Hurricane
Katrina was just the latest natural disaster to reshape our
perception of what a hurricane can do and undo. It also has forced
us to reconsider the proper role of state and federal government in
our lives.
Fires in Yellowstone, a century apart, steered
a similar transformation of our view of the world. Wildfire was
burning on the hillside across from Mammoth Hot Springs in 1886,
when the park’s military superintendent issued his first
order. He sent troopers to fight the fire, beginning the federal
government’s commitment to wildland firefighting.
Ten years later, in 1896, the National Academy of Sciences Forest
Commission concluded that the federal government could hold on to
large tracts of federal land because the Army in Yellowstone proved
that eliminating fire was possible.
Thanks to the
Army’s success so many years ago, our national policy became
the protection of 600 million acres of public land from the natural
process of periodic burning.
Our primary means of
protection was stopping fires wherever they began, a policy
supported by both preservationist John Muir and wise-use advocate
Gifford Pinchot. Over the next 100 years the exclusion of fire from
millions of acres of forestland added brush and thousands of extra
trees to every acre. The result: Forests on public land are
unnaturally susceptible to huge blazes. At the same time, thousands
of homes have been built next door, making the inevitable fires
even more destructive.
By 1988, the debate over whether
to put out all fires or to allow some to burn had matured in the
science and management community. But all this was largely hidden
away from the American public. That year, Yellowstone began burning
again in a fire, which then-Idaho Rep. Larry Craig predicted in the
spring. It grew far larger than anyone expected, burning more than
a million acres.
Most Americans saw the fires on
television screens that summer just as we recently watched the
devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Wilma. The verdict
17 years ago for most Americans was that fire was “destroying”
their national shrine. Ecologists were mostly ignored when they
insisted that the fires were natural and would renew the forests.
What few recognized then, was that the Yellowstone fires
of 1988 were the first in a series of giant fires that signaled a
larger climatic change scientists were only beginning to
understand. It was part of the global warming that a majority of
the world’s climate scientists attribute to the increased
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human fossil fuel burning.
Sen. Craig, who had long been a critic of the theory of
global warming, was one of the earliest Western Republicans to
publicly suggest that those scientists might be right. In 2000, he
switched his position from questioning the science of global
warming to seeking an alternative strategy for addressing the
problem, one that might allow farmers and foresters to make money
by storing carbon.
The hurricanes of 2005 have again
brought to a head the debate over when humans should control nature
and when they should get out of the way. They also are prompting a
debate over the proper role of the federal government in those
decisions.
Sen. Craig’s controversial position of
returning coastal lowlands to nature shows how far some of us have
come since soldiers sought to control the fires of Yellowstone.
Lessons like this often come at a heavy cost. Ignoring them,
though, costs even more.
Rocky Barker is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is the environmental reporter
for the Idaho Statesman and the author of the
new book, Scorched Earth: How the Fires in Yellowstone
Changed America.
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