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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast (Cont.)


	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

SUPPRESSION'S EXPLOSIVE LEGACY

For thousands of years, fire was a fixture from the Rockies to the Pacific, burning as many as 25 million acres annually. Undoubtedly, some long-ago fires were catastrophic. But most—whether started by lightning or by Native Americans opening forests to create open meadows for game—operated like huge weed whackers, burning away brush, scrub, and skinny trees. Nature's relatively mild, frequent fires prevented these "ladder fuels" from building up to the point where a fire could climb into the branches of taller trees and then ignite the treetops. When that happens, a crown fire breaks out, and the forest can burn with destructive intensity. Such fires were rare in the past; most ancient blazes barely reached waist level.

European settlers quickly changed things. During a visit to the Ecological Restoration Institute, a forestry think tank on the campus of Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, researcher Pete Fulé, 39, showed me a section cut from an Arizona pine that took root in 1692 and was logged in the late 1800s. At intervals, where rings in the tree's sapwood met the coarse bark, a trace of blackened wood revealed that a fire had roared past the tree but not killed it. The marks appear like clockwork, with a date glued next to each—1803, 1817, 1824, 1832, 1839. That is, until 1876.



	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

"You can see the fires end here," Fulé said as he pointed at the last mark. "That was the year sheep arrived."

Sheep and cattle, introduced by homesteaders, munched the grasses that fueled periodic fires. That disruption in the natural fire cycle was later amplified by a conscious decision to stamp out fires altogether, made by the then-fledgling Forest Service in the wake of 1910's Big Blowup, a catastrophic series of wind-driven infernos in Idaho and Montana that charred three million acres and killed 85 people. The Blowup was a fluke for that era, a rare confluence of drought, lightning, and hurricane-force winds. But it had historic impact, turning the Forest Service into the gung-ho firefighting outfit it is today. In 1913, Chief Forester Henry Graves declared that preventing fire would henceforth be the agency's "fundamental obligation."

For years, that was mostly talk, but in the 1930s the Forest Service started developing professional crews. (Today the agency still provides roughly 65 percent of wildland firefighters.) During the 1950s, Smokey Bear pitched in, convincing Americans that fires were always bad and usually their fault. (Not so. Lightning causes 60 percent of western fires, including almost all the big ones. The rest are caused by human actions like arson, prescribed burning, campfires run amok, and the careless flicking of cigarettes.) The potent mix of firefighting and propaganda worked. More than 26 million acres of forest burned between 1919 and 1929. During the entire 1970s, only three million acres burned.



	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

As suppression continued, fuels piled high. Firefighters saw danger signs as early as 1961, when a fire called Sleeping Child burned 27,900 acres in Montana, astonishing firefighters with its size and fury. But today Sleeping Child would be considered nothing more than a midsize blaze. Modern fires are capable of reaching astonishing size, destroying forests that evolved in conjunction with smaller fires.

Hence the bizarre trap we're in: Healthy forests need fires, but in our fuel-choked woods, fires are liable to burn too severely. So we suppress, creating conditions for worse fires down the road. Currently, some forest managers believe that up to 190 million acres of western forests—an area twice the size of Montana—could be at risk of severe wildfire.

The potential fallout is not just a matter of losing a few vacation homes. In some places, fire really can become a rolling environmental disaster. The Biscuit Fire, although not as damaging as popularly depicted, still wiped out chunks of forest that contained pockets of trees and plants left behind after the last ice age. The possibility of long-term wreckage is particularly acute in the great ponderosa pine forests that stretch from Canada to Mexico. These trees evolved to coexist with regular fires, but today's larger fires pose a mortal threat to them.

"We've overgrazed the ponderosa pine forest, cut down all the old growth, let the population of young trees erupt, then let it burn like hell," says William Wallace Covington, 56, founder of the Ecological Restoration Institute. "Short of a nuclear holocaust, there's no better way to destroy an ecosystem."

We put ourselves in this bind with too-effective firefighting, and now we have to find a way out. It won't be easy. As Arizona State University historian Stephen Pyne, a former wildland firefighter and the author of many books on fire, put it last year in an essay, "we can't cut our way out of the problem. We can't burn our way out. We can't simply suppress. And we can't walk away."

But maybe, Pyne wrote, we can cut a little, burn a little, suppress a little, and sometimes just back off from a fire that we can't hope to stop. The process will take decades, not years, but taken together, a lot of small steps could make a big difference.

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