That history has undergone two major recharterings.  The first had its catalyst in the Great Fires of 1910, then legislatively codified into an infrastructure with the Weeks Act.  It extended over 50 years, took as its charge fire’s removal, and established the U.S. Forest Service as a hegemon.  The second, what might be termed our great cultural revolution on fire, argued for fire’s restoration, and has promoted a pluralism of practices and agencies.  The first era established a fire commons based on a collective purpose to suppress fire.  The second strives to recreate a fire commons by expanding operations to landscape scales, creating consortia of institutions, and promoting an all-fires strategy; but it still struggles, having broken the old monolith apart, to reassemble the pieces into a new working whole.  We have learned to our dismay that it’s easier to take fire out than to put it back.  So, too, it’s easier to build the first time than to rebuild out of broken legacies.

There are many prisms by which to refract those years into bands of meaning.  The periodization above is an obvious one, but it lies wholly within the frame of the fire community; that is, it means little to anyone else.  Even so, its significance isn’t self-evident.  We might interpret those events as a chronicle of steady progress against changing circumstances, making course corrections from time to time, but a continuing story of amelioration and firmness of purpose as technology, research, and experience improve.  Equally, we might view those same events as simply another refrain of what is necessarily an ironic narrative.  The deep structure is one in which, whatever our ambitions and investments, we will always fail, not simply fall short but actively engage in misdirection.  We might escape the flames.  We can’t escape irony.

If we want a more robust rendering, something beyond the fire community looking at itself, we must turn to the larger culture for insights and analogues.  What might we find?

We might note that the fire revolution coincides with the civil rights movement.  Sit-in protests and Freedom Riders match up with early efforts to create a civil society for fire with the Tall Timbers fire ecology conferences and prescribed burning by the Nature Conservancy; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aligns with the Wilderness Act; and the FLAME Act with the election of the country’s first African-American president.  It makes a tidy narrative arc, as the countryside’s population of fires begins to emulate the pluralism of the country’s human population.

Or we might consider demographics directly.  The civil rights movement helped open the workforce to new groups.  But it maps exactly onto the maturation of the baby boom.  The first boomer reached 18 in 1964, and the first to enter Medicare did so in 2011, a sturdy narrative span from the Wilderness Act to the National Cohesive Strategy.  In 1965 a reform in immigration law opened the country to the largest influx of newcomers in its history.  The population of the country has more than doubled in my lifetime.  We shouldn’t be surprised to find the American fire community turned inside-out during this time, or that a sprawl of settlement has sparked problem fires.  The epoch of America’s fire revolution has ridden the crest of demographic upheaval.

Now it appears we may be poised to enter another cycle in our relationship with wildland fire.  What analogues from our sustaining society might help us understand this emerging future?  Heaven knows there are plenty to choose from.

If you think that our firefight from the Big Blowup to today has only created an ecological insurgency, there is the Arab Spring model.  The American fire scene was held in check for decades by ever more repressive regimes, but each cycle of protest and suppression only added to instability.  Armed dictatorships can’t keep the lid on indefinitely; eventually the scene boils over.  Some places have made the transition quickly and with relatively little havoc.  Others have slid into biotic civil war, with more savage outbreaks and harsher suppression.  No one has a clue what the final outcome will be.

If you think that it’s too late for guided reform, that climate change, the legacy of combustible-laden landscapes, and waves of invasives point to a biotic turnover, then you might opt for the Genesis Device model.  Recall from Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan that the device, once triggered, burns over whole planets remaking their structure “in favor of its own matrix.”  That sounds like the Los Conchas fire.  We won’t be able to do much except stand aside, point-protect exurbs, and learn to live with a reforged land.  We’ll rebuild fire regimes out of the new matrix.

If you believe that the dominant concern, the Disturbance in the Force that is deforming all the others, is the megafire, then consider the Prometheus Shrugged model.  We’ve created a fire plutocracy in which all the resources and influence go to the 1% – even the 0.1% – of the population of America’s fires.  We’ve lost our middle class, in this case, the domain of middle landscapes.  Our working fires are being shed, lost to global change and ideologies of laissez-faire.  We’re told we can’t resist globalization, and shouldn’t restrain the invisible hand of nature’s economy, however perverted the outcome seems.  The fire regimes that result are the ones ordained by right; it would be ruinous to transfer some of the wealth now concentrated among the 1% to the management of the rest.  Live with it.

If you think the experience of having easy, emergency funds distorted the market, that all that funny money since the early 1990s created a bull market for burning as it did for houses, then consider the Supbrime model.  We disguised the real risks and costs of fire management by bundling – securitizing – it through national agencies.  Then the fire bubble burst, big time, and demanded a bailout.  The FLAME Act is the TARP of the fire community.  Now we are left with landscapes too big to fail and too big to reform, only looking for new bucks to pass.  In the absence of real reform, we can expect another crash and another crisis over paying for it.

If you regard the near future as an impending fiasco because we will not be able to muster the political will to deal with it, that this past summer’s fiscal crisis will become permanent, and will do so imminently, then you might project the future through the Fiscal Cliff model.  We keep overspending our budget – there’s always a reason.  There’s a town with a palisade of Action TV minicams, an influential senator who wants to earmark part of the suppression effort, the fire industry keeps holding hostages.  But in this model a Campfire Party insists that enough is enough.  In the name of austerity we’ll stop paying for fire management because that way we’ll starve the fires to a pittance we can drown in a bathtub and fire control will magically be able to finance itself.  Call it supply-side fire economics.  The less we spend, the fewer problem fires we have.  That putative cliff isn’t real.  Rather than concede a dollar more, we’ll burn down the West.

If that seems extreme – if you think we won’t step over the edge, but we won’t have the resources to cope – then consider the Chapter 11 model.  It assumes that we will have to mix bailouts with bankruptcies.  We’ll do stress tests for fire regimes.  Some will make it, some won’t.  The good ones will right themselves on their own.  The lousy ones are insolvent – and here we dive into seriously mixed metaphors – and will remain underwater.  They will cost more to salvage than they appear to be worth under current political calculus.  Trying to save them will simply drag the rest of wildland fire management deeper into the pit.  Deleveraging will take decades: some landscapes just won’t be worth the effort.  They’ll declare bankruptcy and to go into receivership under new management.

And finally, my personal favorite, there is the Euro model.  What was supposed to be a common union is fracturing because it lacks a political order to match its monetary one.  There was only a general source of easily accessible funds that held all the fractious parts together.  Now, one bailout follows another, each declared a final solution until the next crisis.  The union is splitting into incommensurable regions.  The system seems headed for a breakup, whether by lopping off a failed country or two, or by the wholesale abandonment of the project.  Competing analyses point to different technical solutions.  One argues for austerity and another for stimulus; the first sees the problem as overspending and the second, as lack of growth.  The only salvation is a fundamental reconstitution of the political order so that the flow of funds and operations aligns with a general consensus about what should be done, how to do it, and how much to spend on those choices.

The Euro model has much to recommend for the American fire scene.  The funding fiasco has been unfolding for years, and no one agency is able to pay for the endless emergencies that continually exceed the latest and nominally last tranche.  The division of the country into regions for purposes of the National Cohesive Strategy is a map of civil war America.  Each region has its own fire culture – a suite of peculiar institutions – that seems unable to relocate beyond its borders.  Risk analysis will putatively guide decisions, although risk analysis is also what Wall Street assured us was behind its clever securitization schemes and hedging derivatives.  (We would have had more success by shucking the algorithms and modeling CEO behavior on baboon troops.)

The austerity strategy seeks to force the agencies to live within a smaller budget.  That’s what happened with the Forest Service last summer, and threatens to make it the Greece of the American fire community.  The stimulus strategy calls for serious investments in the form of enhanced funding and freedom of action.  In this conception the deficit matters less than diminishing unemployment (translate: reducing fuels) and boosting productivity; but where that money will come from and how it will be used are unclear.  While the old pattern of emergency financing tended to decouple fire from management, so do the new ones.  They lump good and bad landscapes, resilient and non-resilient exurbs, ants and grasshoppers under a common rubric and funding source.  The only serious reform, as with the EU, lies in redesigning the political order.  It requires a new fire constitution.

The reason is that the primary driver of the American fire scene is not amenable to technical fixes and funding.  It’s about how Americans live on their land.  It’s about values.  This is where the National Cohesive Strategy, which could act for the American fire community as a new treaty might for the EU, should help.  Unfortunately the Cohesive Strategy puts science at its core when the reality is politics.  The fire scene is not about positive knowledge; it’s about choices, and values chosen get sorted out by politics.  We’re talking about the public estate and public safety.  If those aren’t matters for democratic politics, what is?  The decisive issue is not whether our science is good enough, but whether our politics is.

Not least the American fire community’s Euro moment resembles the unraveling across the Atlantic, too, in that there is no Plan B.  Either we fragment and end up with a mosaic of settings, some well protected in fire-gated communities, others exposed; or we find common cause and agree on a process by which we rebalance roles, rights, and responsibilities.  We renegotiate the political order behind American fire.  Or we continue as we have been, unable to do more than chase ever-worsening fires with ever-dwindling options.

A whimsical reconnaissance, I grant you.  But it says that what happens in fire is necessarily connected with what happens in the sustaining society, and this is true even in wildlands because wildlands exist by cultural choice.  It rejects the assertion that we are headed into a no-analogue future, because there are always analogues.  The problem is that there are too many to choose from, and we won’t know which applies until too late.  The only prophecy that will work is one that is believed and, by acting on it, becomes self-fulfilling.

William Faulkner once famously observed that the past isn’t over, it’s not even past.  We might say the same about our fire future.  It isn’t to come, it’s already with us.  We just won’t know what it is until it’s happened.

 Steve Pyne  /  December 2012

]]> http://firehistory.asu.edu/back-to-the-future-analogues-for-the-history-to-come/feed/ 0 http://firehistory.asu.edu/words-on-fire-from-a-scholar-on-fire/ http://firehistory.asu.edu/words-on-fire-from-a-scholar-on-fire/#comments Sun, 04 Nov 2012 16:25:53 +0000 admin http://firehistory.asu.edu/?p=2376 Continue reading →]]> Words matter.  They matter in themselves, because their use reflects choice and imparts information.  They matter because they contain analogies and metaphors, and because they carry narratives, which is to say, they express collectively, if chosen widely and arranged well, ideas and sentiments.  They are how we communicate.  They are how we most basically convey meaning.

They don’t have to express a real world: they can conjure up an imagined one.  They don’t have to refer to a true world: they can be used as well to lie or deceive.  Chosen poorly they may, even with good intentions, say incorrect things or communicate inappropriate connotations.  Words can illuminate, words can obscure.  But words are what we have.  Numbers acquire significance when combined with figures of speech.  Images are visual noise – swarms of embers – until they can kindle captions.

There is a sentiment in the American fire community that our words are out of sync with our needs.  For 50 years we have coaxed a revolution into being – redefined fire and its consequences, reformed policy and practice, restored fire where it had been unwisely removed.  But American society generally does not seem to understand what all that means or what is required to do the task properly.  Our words have failed our drip torches and pulaskis.  We have prescriptions for fire on the land.  We don’t have any for fire in our texts.  If the fire revolution is to succeed, it will require a revolution in our language.

Igniting the humanities

This is a task for which the humanities should be well suited.  History, philosophy, literature, religious studies – all are based on texts.  Their evidence comes from words, and with words humanities scholars express their understanding.  If our words are failing us, it says our humanities scholars are failing to keep step.  Their texts lack context.

Certainly the humanities have not contributed as much as the sciences.  There is no global survey of cultural fire history to match the master paleofire compendium, no effort to read and correlate texts as there is for tree rings.  Surely, too, the humanities have not helped themselves – have indulged in self-inflicted injuries both petulant and idiotic.  They have elected to problematize rather than problem-solve.  They have too often substituted irony for ideas.  Their earnestness segues into solemnity.

Still, the failure to find the right words may not be wholly the fault of       distracted humanists, who seem to be texting to one another instead of driving the arguments – present company excluded.  The fact is, society has not invested much in the enterprise.  There is no Joint Fire Humanities Project.  Natural resource schools are not rushing to hire philosophers, linguists, and historians, much less theologians, to support research programs.  It is often noted that what society values, it counts – and funds.  The humanities don’t count and aren’t funded.

Yet words can also falter because they have no good referent.  The usual assumption in the fire community is that we know what to do, and have based those conclusions on scientific evidence, but struggle to communicate that correct understanding to the public.  The right words, slogans, anecdotes, stories, or ad campaign will fix the problem.  This belief assumes that we have the facts on the ground right and only lack a wordsmith to do the necessary outreach.  The failure of words to communicate, however, may follow because there is nothing substantial to say, or because practitioners and apologists want not working words but publicity, or expect cheerleading rather than scholarship, or because sometimes failure is just failure and that’s a word those in power don’t want to hear.  Failures in the field cannot for long be disguised by a clever camouflage of leafy verbiage.  Scholars may say little because there is little to say.

Fire politics and the English language

When the fire community wants environmental philosophy, it typically appeals to Aldo Leopold.  For the equivalent in words, it might turn to George Orwell, whose classic essay “Politics and the English Language” is almost an exact contemporary of Leopold’s essay on the land ethic.  Substitute fire policy for postwar politics, and even a casual reading suggests that a good part of the fire community’s communication problem may not be that it lacks the proper words, but that it has frequently chosen poor words because it doesn’t know what it wants to say or doesn’t want to say it clearly.  Instead its words appear to inflate its ideas, hide its acts, and confuse observers.

“The mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing,” Orwell observed.  “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”  That sounds a lot like the typical prose of fire science and fire politics; certainly it is the language of grant proposals.  No wonder they lay so many eggs.

Orwell identified practices (or “tricks,” as he termed them) by which “the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged,” among them dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, and pretentious diction segueing into an inflated style.  Think of the use of “fire event” in place of “fire.”  Think of “fire surrogates” as a euphemism for logging, or “mechanical treatments” abstracting away from chipping and cutting.  Read any proposal submitted to a funding agency and you will likely find a string of current hot-button phrases, or as Orwell put it, “gum[med] together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.”  Instead of “picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer,” we have the reverse.  It’s not that our words can’t say what we want, but that we seem afraid to use them to say clearly what we really do want.

Our core fire words are solidly Anglo-Saxon.  Fire, smoke, kindle, blaze, ash, soot, ember, spark, burn – all are deeply rooted not only in elemental English but in Indo-European sources.  They were all available to Chaucer.  The Renaissance added such useful words as conflagration, inflame, incendiary, and ignite, all evolved out of Latin and now available to Shakespeare.  The scientific revolution contributed such terms as pyrolyze, oxidize, and radiate.  More recently firefighting has proved a vigorous font of invented terms, bubbling up from the vernacular – smokechasing, hotspotting, coldtrailing, loose-herding, let-burning, backfiring.  Note that all are compounds of old words and all are gerunds; they speak to acts, not ideas.  Today’s neologisms tend to come from managerial theory and science, and most are abstract, Latinate, and uninformative.  They speak to ideas, not acts.  If they don’t contribute to inaction, they certainly convey a sense of little done.  Firefighting remains full of gerunds that turn nouns into verbs; fire management seems to turn verbs into nouns.

Of course we need new words to express new circumstances.  The concept of a home ignition zone is a good example.  If we wanted to make that term even more memorable, we might pair it with a home eco-resilience zone, a broader buffer landscape that would be both fire retarding and bio-friendly.  We would then have HIZ and HERZ.  Firewise could rebrand itself as an ark.

sOut of the fire: analogies and allusions

Fire has long served as a source of metaphor.  Similes, symbols, and allusions seem to flame out of it, lofted up in its spreading plume as widely as sparks.        Almost anything that speaks to vigorous action or passion can appeal to fire.  “To burn” or to be “burned out” describes character.  “To spread like wildfire” is so common an expression it has almost moved beyond cliché to something akin to a Homeric epithet.

But while fire is a routine source of metaphor, it rarely receives metaphor.  Something or other is like fire.  Fire isn’t like anything else.  An insurrection spreads like wildfire; wildfire doesn’t spread like an insurrection.  An unsafe mixture may be described as combustible; combustion isn’t akin to anything but itself.  This is a curious outcome because fire is not a substance, a Kantian thing-in-itself, but a reaction that synthesizes its surroundings.  It would seem an ideal subject to integrate imagery and metaphor and to roar through the linguistic canopy of English-language allusions.  Instead it remains stubbornly self-referential.  This circumstance makes it difficult to situate fire within other cultural referents.

Fire, perhaps, but not fire’s management.  There is no reason why we can’t apply metaphors to how we relate to fire, which is also a way of bonding fire management to its sustaining society.  Contemporary American culture overflows with candidates.  We might invoke an ER model in which society is willing to spend unlimited sums on emergency medicine but little on prevention.  Or we might allude to a Prometheus Shrugged model in which megafires, the 1% (or 0.1%) of the population of fires sponges up all the money at the expense of the rest.  Or a Fiscal Cliff model in which we are unwilling to reach consensus regarding the nation’s fire mission, won’t pay to support it, and let the backcountry burn.  Or a Chapter 11 model that admits we can’t rescue all the landscapes and will let some slide into default and perhaps receivership.  One can easily imagine Arab Spring, Genesis Device, and Euro Moment models.  Fire may be fire, as the mantra goes; but fire’s management can resemble lots of other undertakings.

Arcing words: narrative

What makes such allusions work is that they act like hypertext and link the word or phrase with other sites of meaning.  Behind them all, however, sits narrative.  Great metaphors or symbols tap into stories.  When the fire community worries about words, it usually means it frets over the narratives within which those words reside and from which they acquire meaning through a kind of semantic osmosis.  It’s axiomatic in literary theory that you write to genres, and it’s apparent that fire genres have not multiplied at the same pace as fire practices.

The most common trope is fire as a mover of plot.  There is nothing special about fire as fire: it exists to propel and organize the action.  It could as well be a storm or a car chase.  George Steward established the modern model with his 1948 novel Fire, but that followed the formula he had devised for Storm.  Journalism has two primary templates for fire.  One is the disaster story, full of people fleeing or defying, homes reduced to chimneys and scenery to moonscapes.  This is a capacious formula; it can equally suit floods, hurricanes, or wars.  The other is the firefight as battlefield.  This is the founding template for wildland fire, dating back to the Big Blowup, and it tends to rise and fall with enthusiasm for military adventurism.  In both templates fire is a threat and an enemy.  There are ample occasions in which this holds true.  Wildfire does incinerate neighborhoods.  It can kill.  It must be resisted through operations that bear many logistical similarities to military maneuvers.

Of course there are plenty of situations in which those narratives fail.  Neither holds much value for fire in wildlands.  The land isn’t killed, or the biota destroyed.  Rather, catalytic fire may be an essential means of renewal.  People may respond best by doing nothing, which is not the stuff of a rattling good yarn.  It’s like making a movie about thinking: without physical action, the medium is wrong for the message.

Because they burn on landscapes valued by people, such fires are not culturally neutral.  Science might call them events, with no more moral significance than rising and falling tides.  But if they affect people, or things people value, then they become good or bad, or both.  While fire itself is not a moral agent, it forces people to become agents by compelling them to act, or it reflects decisions people have made about it or about how they live on the land.  It becomes a shaper of choices.  That means it resides in a moral geography.  To pretend otherwise is to misread the significance of fire – why we care about it – and to misallocate the kind of language appropriate to the character of that significance.

The major addition to fire literature over the past 50 years is the genre of fire meditation and memoir of which Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is not only an exemplar but perhaps sui generis.  It’s a monadnock of a book.  Imitators abound, but none have come close to capturing the bathos and voice of the original.  Even the accounts of fire tragedies written by Maclean’s son, John, align more with journalism than with Literature.  They are muted echoes returned from a very prominent cliff.

Maclean’s posthumous text seems destined to serve as the fire clan’s most deeply held story of itself; and like all creation stories, it’s a tragedy.  This seems odd since the fundamental narrative of the American fire community, the one most widely experienced, is a coming-of-age story, and hence a comedy in the literary sense.  Even so, more such books come out each year, and as the cost of entry for publishing approaches zero, we can expect the surge to continue.  Maclean’s text, however, is the only one that has achieved purchase outside the fire community itself.  We all have a coming-of-age story.  The problem is that no one else cares.  In the misplaced supply-side economics of publishing today, there are many writers and few readers.  Young Men and Fire is dominant because it has become the collective coming-of-age story for the American fire community.

For all the flurry of fire words that have swirled through the culture, however, we don’t have a compelling narrative for modern fire management.  We have nothing for fire’s restoration equivalent to the saga of fire’s suppression.  No Big Burnout to complement the Big Blowup.  No Young Men and Prescriptions to exalt fire’s atoning flames.  Compared to dramatic set-pieces of fires fought, stories of fire restored seem quiet and lame, the story that didn’t happen.  Comedy may engage us, but tragedy is what grabs us by the lapels.  A firefight arises out of conflict, a test of character.  The point of prescribed fire is to erase that tension, and so makes for good practice but crummy narrative.

In some ways the problem resembles the task John Milton (and others) faced in seeking to write a Christian epic.  The founding works by Homer and Vergil are wars, about fighting and, as William James observed of the Iliad, about killing, and more killing.  Christianity proposed an alternative vision in which, at least as a hope, the peacemakers would be blessed and the meek would inherit the earth.  Renaissance humanists wanted epics for their own times – the Renaissance after all was a rebirth of learning based on recovering and updating the texts and genres of antiquity.  But what kind of hero could substitute?  What kind of conflict and narrative arc might result?  In Paradise Lost Satan steals the show – the villain is by far the most compelling character.  And while it’s true that we judge a hero by the power of his antagonist, the issue is how to have a hero who operates by a different code.  Similarly the big fire and the lethal firefight hijack the literature of fire.  Probably we can’t write an alternative within the existing genre, but to change genres may mean we compare blowups to spot fires.  The bad fires threaten lives and property; the good ones make the world a better place, but on terms most citizens don’t see.  We may wish that the meek fires will inherit the landscape but the wild ones make the news.

So while we have endless stories – they overflow lessons-learned sites like the Mississippi overtopping its levees – they remain as anecdotes or tales, not narrative informed by a beginning, middle, and end, animated by conflict and character and organized by a theme.  They are the pocket change of literature, not its bullion.  Probably fire restoration will never match the depth of the tragic vision; even Shakespeare wrote more powerfully about King Lear than about Bottom the weaver.  But we need someone – a modern Milton – to try.

Pejorated fire

The struggle to find the right expression reminds us that languages live, that words are born, grow, and die.  Along the way they often shift meaning.  Some words improve, or rise from squalid origins to become noble signifiers.  Others begin exalted and decay into semantic punk, a process linguists call pejoration.  Sometimes it is not the word but its referent that proves unstable, and new words arise, struggle to hold the meaning of the subject, and then falter, pejorate, and yield to another term.

Over the past century new words (or old words reborn) have sprouted and withered to describe American fire.  This should surprise no one.  Few subjects are as shape-shifting as fire, and fire policies and practices in America over the past 50 years have been in constant turmoil; every new reform has spawned another lexicon, and not a small fraction of training has been committed to reeducating practitioners into the proper terminology.  No topic has experienced such instability more than policies intended to grant wildland fire more room to roam.

Users of ordinary language call such fires “let burns.”  The expression dates back at least to the 1920s as one shear of the scissors that challenged fire suppression (the other was light burning).  The term was banned from polite company when the practice was abolished by the 10 AM policy.  The expression persisted, though as a kind of worker’s slang, part of the subliterate vernacular common to smokechasers and fire guards.

Then, in 1968, it reappeared in an official fire report from Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park.  The park was reintroducing both kinds of formerly forbidden fire.  When it allowed two lightning fires in the backcountry to flame out on their own, they were reported as “let burns.”  It was an apt description of what happened on the ground but it was not one deemed suitable for a bureaucracy committed to applied science and public stewardship.

In 1971 Saguaro National Park proposed an alternative when it allowed 10 of 11 lightning-kindled blazes to run their course under the rubric of “natural prescribed fire.”  The term soon had its words transposed into “prescribed natural fire” and went national.  Those dual challengers to suppression, prescribed fire and natural fire, thus managed a linguistic merger, even if (to some fire officers) it appeared more like a hostile takeover or (to interested civilians) an oxymoron.

When the Forest Service abandoned the 10 AM policy in 1978, it accepted what was in effect a policy of fire by prescription.  Much as landscapes had split into special purposes, each with its own policy and regimes, so did the language used to express fire usage.  The three evolving fire practices – fighting, lighting, and watching – each needed redefinition, which meant new terms.  Suppression, which had once meant an unambiguous task, put the fire out, now embraced three options: confine, contain, and control.  The confined fire was, in practical terms, indistinguishable from a prescribed natural fire except confinement could apply to a fire of any origin while the PNF, as its name dictated, demanded a natural ignition source.  Importantly, the confined fire could tap into emergency suppression accounts, while the prescribed natural fire had to rely on budgeted funds for prescribed burning.  Conceptual logic favored prescription.  Money favored confinement.  The public, unsurprisingly, failed to distinguish between them.

The PNF became the tool of choice for wilderness.  It had successes, and some harrowing failures.  In particular, the 1979 Ouzel fire in Rocky Mountain National Park stands to what followed a decade later as the Savings & Loan scandal did to the subprime mortgage debacle.  In 1988 some 45% of Yellowstone burned, almost all under the nominal auspices of PNFs.  While the interagency reviews that followed affirmed the value of fire in natural landscapes, they also required public agencies to reboot their plans according to national standards.  Both the “confined fire” and the “prescribed natural fire” quietly blew away like yesterday’s smoke.

In its place arose the expression “wildland fire use.”  Ideally, the WFU could combine the best of both the PNF and the confined fire; it even acquired its own specialty crews, Fire Use Modules, to attend and monitor them.  It was sufficiently abstract and ambiguous that, by itself, the term was meaningless.  Still, old problems kept attaching themselves like burs.  There were field failures as fires bolted beyond their prescribed limits.  And there were linguistic breakdowns as the uninitiated continued to call them let burns, and fire crews often referred to them as “free burns” by adaptation of “free-burning fires,” a laboratory term to describe fires not confined within a combustion chamber.  The WFU began to pejorate.

Often “wildland fire use” was trailed by the phrase “for resource benefit.”  “Resource benefit fires” now sprouted like chamise sprigs from the lignotuber of the burned WFU.  Meanwhile, as policy reforms began to cascade, particularly following the 2000 National Fire Plan and the 2001 review of federal policy, so did the iterations of let-burn/PNF/WFU/RBF.  In speaking to outsiders, fire officers began stringing the terms together, like an incantation, or like students in an essay exam who include everything they can recall in the hopes that somehow, somewhere, they will say the right thing in their mind dump.  Fire managers knew, more or less, what they wanted.  They wanted more of the right kind of fire and less of the wrong kind.  They just didn’t know how to get it and what to call it.  Or maybe some of them did, and with Orwellian cunning elected to obscure the ambition with opaque language.

Buried in the 1995 federal wildland fire policy was the expression “appropriate management response.”  Whether the term was a happy mutant or a worm in the apple was unclear.  Its intention was to deflect fire officers from using suppression as a default setting, to expand the range for free-burns by not insisting that every wildfire be fought toe-to-toe.  In practice, the AMR sought to sever the connection between what a fire was called and how that fire might be handled.  But in expanding the constellation of choices it failed to say what, exactly, an appropriate response should be and how to evaluate success in meeting it.

Now it seems this attempt has also fallen among the stones.  What determines the proper response is the agency’s land management goals.  The preferred expression is “strategic management response.”  The operational explanation is that “fire is fire.”  The public – not just logical positivists – might be forgiven if they find the term undiagnostic.  A skeptic might recall the story of a park visitor during the early years of the fire revolution who confronted a sign that read “Environmental Burn in Progress,” and asked, “What fire is not an environmental burn?”

For over 40 years the wildland fire community has committed to restoring fire.  Each new policy, and every practice destined for the field, has demanded a name.  Without such words the community would have no language to describe what they are doing.  Without them the fire community could not talk to themselves, much less to the public.  Some practices work, some don’t.  Some fires are good, some aren’t.  Some words succeed, some can’t.

The desire to grant more room for wildland fires to burn lies at one of the three apexes of modern fire management in the U.S. (the other two being suppression and prescribed burning).  For some members of the fire community the word is the problem since naming a fire determines how it must be managed.  The only way to keep open all options is to avoid names altogether.  Language should be as free-ranging as free-burning fire.  Rather, “fire is fire.”  The continual crisis is an artificial construct of our efforts to distinguish among kinds of fires when no such distinctions exist in nature.

The history of the term reflects this sentiment, as each degenerates and its successor appears more abstract and bureaucratic, less rooted in the field.  The expressions show nothing of the gerund-rich loam that grew words like hotspotting or smokechasing.  Their ambiguity is intended to free fire officers to consider many options; but that ambiguity makes it tricky to explain to others what they are doing and why.  It is unclear whether their inventors are afraid that the public won’t understand what they intend, or if they fear the public will understand and won’t approve.  The terms themselves say nothing.  Instead, the burden of interpretation is once again transferred, this time to land management.

But the saying that “fire is fire” only works if “land is land.”  In reality, landscapes are bounded, which means their fires must be too, and such boundaries will reside in the words that attach to them.  The public (and courts and other agencies of accountability) will demand terms to distinguish good fires from bad, just as they seek to segregate suitable behavior from unsuitable.  Until the public decides what it wants its public lands to be and how it chooses to manage them, the uncertainties will endure.  If fire management sheds that load, it will go elsewhere, and if it retains it, the burden will shift internally, in which case the language of fire will pejorate.

Rather than say all fires are the same, which is absurd, why not adopt an all-fires strategy in which fire in all its variants is accepted?  We could promote an all-fires model much as we have an all-lands policy for timber and an all-hazards model for emergency services.  An all-fires approach would at least keep fire at the core, all fires, with all their rising and falling, squeaky and sonorous names.

Smokey, the bear of an antagonist

But there is something more behind the campaign to tweak our language.  The fire community remains haunted by the specter of Smokey Bear.  Many wish for an alter-Smokey, a campaign of equal stature that will promote fire’s return.  They might yearn, say, for a Flammy the Bear who could symbolize prescribed fire.  This would require a parallel story, since it was not the image or slogan that made Smokey successful, but the rendering of art into life when a bear cub was rescued from a wildfire on the Lincoln National Forest.  Such a tale is easily imagined.  Smokey and Flammy were twins, separated at birth, and now, at last, reunited.  The shovel and the torch – together again.

I think such a scheme misreads the Smokey challenge.  The Smokey campaign quickly targeted children, and increasingly – ballistically – those postwar kids grew up in urban landscapes.  They lived in cities and suburbs, and more recently in the splash of exurban enclaves we call sprawl.  Controlled fire was not a part of the world they grew into.  They did not cook over flames, did not heat homes with open fire, did not read by candlelight or kerosene lamp.  They did not burn off fields and pastures.  More and more it was difficult to burn lawns and fall leaves.  The only fire they knew from personal experience were wildfires, which they viewed virtually and which devastated buildings and took lives.  Smokey was right.  They shouldn’t play with matches.  The issue was not that they were brainwashed by clever messages and a faunal spokesman insidiously designed to resemble their Teddy bears.  It was that, paradoxically, Smokey’s message made sense for the built landscapes they inhabited.  He expressed brilliantly the fire scene they knew.  The problem with fire’s restoration occurred far away, in wildlands or outright wilderness.  They were happy to accept fire there, as they did grizzly bears.  They just didn’t want them in their backyard.  A change in slogans wouldn’t change that reality.

Now fire is returning to the fringe.  The wildland/urban interface fire is a dumb name, but then it’s a dumb problem because, unlike so much of wildland fire, it has technical solutions.  Then again that’s because it’s not a wildland fire so much as it is an urban fire with eccentric landscaping.  A name change might help.  Call it “fire sprawl.”  Or the exurban fire.  Or the fires of the urban fringe.  Or the edge-city fire.  (I tried for years to make “intermix” fire the operative term since it conveyed a sense of the ecological omelette being put over the flames, without an eyeblink of success.)

Smokey haunts the fire community the way the Apollo program does NASA.  It was a one-off, not a paradigm.  We don’t need a new Smokey because we face not one mission but dozens: each kind of reserved land, each agency purpose, each patch of ground has its quirks and odd needs and requires its own fire, or at least a bath of burning that nature can sort out.  We’re beyond Smokey.  We should be well beyond dressing up every complaint in a Smokey Bear costume.  That discourse ended two generations of fire officers ago.  The future of American fire does not belong with a massive anti-Smokey campaign any more than NASA’s future belongs with an Apollo program for Mars.  It’s not about prescribed burning as a counter-program to suppression: it’s about getting the right fire regime for the land.  It’s about a messy pragmatism.  The future doesn’t rest with inventing clever words, but with making progress in fire management, and then finding the words to express those actions.  Words can help shape what we do and how we understand what we do.  But words alone can’t restore fire, or else we have words without real referents, which is to say, fiction.

Mop up

We all know situations in which a clumsy word retards understanding, and a clever one enables it.  We can point to klutzy terms that unintentionally belittle their subject.  We can cite mixed metaphors that scramble purpose, and misguided narratives that misdirect attention and energies (think of the definition of wilderness as a place where the hand of man has never set foot).  Some words that come easily to mind carry a heavy burden of unintended connotations.  “Restoration,” for example, locks us into irony by its very invocation.  Better to call the process “ecological regeneration” or “renewal,” which sheds the aura of atonement but also spares us from the fact that we can never restore something and from the ironic sneer with which the attempt must end. By contrast, “prescribed fire,” a term favored by practitioners, avoids the problems of “controlled burning,” a term favored by the public, because not all fires in fact remain controlled.

But we can equally note words, phrases, and narratives that attempt to do with language what isn’t or can’t be done in the field.  As Orwell put it, “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”  The contemporary equivalent is the company that seeks to wipe out its failures by rebranding itself with a new name, or by inventing a fresh slogan for an ad campaign, or the bureaucracy that seeks to paper over flawed policies by a better public relations program.  They confuse branding with describing, and slogans with explaining.

If they are rooted in realities, in acts on the ground, the right words will gush forth as they did for earlier generations.  They will speak to acts; they will come from verbs.  If not they will seep away or pejorate.  Words can give expression to what is or is coming to be.  They can’t substitute for them.  If we want to set words on fire, we must first set the world on fire.

 Steve Pyne

1 November 2012; Corvallis, OR

But we don’t need history as a source of analogues.  They swarm around us like midges.  The swamp of the future will be as full of them as mosquitoes on a summer day.  The question is knowing which of them speak in helpful ways.  In contemplating the tortuous state of the American fire community (AFC), my personal favorite is the slow smash-up unfolding in the euro zone.

§  The euro proposed a monetary community without a commensurate political union.  Countries from Malta to Finland, Greece to Netherlands would share a common currency overseen by a central bank with limited powers.  For countries that adopted it the euro was a powerful fiscal stimulant.  It instantly extended access to high-value funds even to countries that lacked an infrastructure adequate to absorb them, that were more ready to consume than invest.  When the money tightened, the stresses became unbearable and the system cracked.

The outcome has divided the euro region into two realms, one central and one peripheral.  As the flames have spread, various oversight agencies have sought to douse them with emergency funds.  But the fires keep returning, the bailouts get larger, and donors have become less forgiving and hopeful.  They want serious structural reform to work down the accrued debts and end the demand for further tranches.  Some critics demand austerity as the only answer.  Others argue that growth is the best solution, and this requires fundamental changes in the recipients’ economies, which is to say, in how they live.  Meanwhile, the contagion has continued to spread.  It is one thing to have Greece crash.  It’s another to flush Spain.

Among the cognoscenti the sense grows that the euro realm must either reconstitute its governance structure to align with its fiscal, or else it must break up.  The alternative – a Sisyphean exercise in crashes and bailouts – cannot continue.  Those with the money don’t wish to pour it down bottomless wells, and those who receive it are unable to leverage it to escape their accumulated debt bondage.  The money is simply spent.  The problem persists.

§ Anyone familiar with the American fire scene will recognize the signs.  Over the course of a century, a system of interlocking agreements was negotiated that cobbled together fire agencies into something resembling a national union.  Eventually every state, large and small, every federal land agency, the gargantuan and the gangly, could assist every other.  In practice, the big supported the little; by 1970 even giants like the Forest Service could no longer operate on their own and had to turn to others for support during emergencies.  “Interagency” became the vogue term, and “total mobility,” the capacity to freely move crews and engines to where they were needed, became the Schengen agreement for American fire.

What held it all together was not good will or a neighborly desire to help, but money.  In particular, emergency funds – off-budget, liberated during fires – saturated the system like groundwater.  There was a logic to the arrangement because no one could predict in advance what kind of fire season they would face.  Ultimately, those monies came from the federal treasury.  Through transfers they could move to wherever the crisis struck.  They made it possible for those with smaller fire economies to join those with bigger.  They glued an odd-bodkins bin of fire institutions into a pastiche that resembled a system.

In practice, the system worked, even if in principle no one liked it.  It would be far better to have budgeted funds from a controlled spigot that could be spent on prevention and presuppression than to simply open hydrants during emergencies.  In 1978 Congress severed Forest Service authority to access those supplemental funds while boosting its base fire budget.  Nearly a decade of relatively quiet fire seasons followed.  Then the West entered a long drought.  The Yellowstone fires of 1988 blew any restraint away.  Year after year, somewhere, fires roared, and increasingly they pressed against the exurban communities that were reclaiming rural America.  Faced with telegenic emergencies luridly broadcast on the evening news, Congress ignored its own rules and paid for the emergencies.  Rather than being weaned off supplemental funds, the monies became addictive.

The 2000 National Fire Plan boosted budgets for preparedness, but instead of watching the flames quell, the West coughed up a decade of megafires.  In 2003 the Bush administration decided that firefights in Montana and California were less significant than those in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Forest Service was told to stay within its programmed budget. Fighting the monster fires consumed half or more of the agency’s funding, and it was no longer able to cover the costs of its cooperators.  The system plunged into massive deficits, only redeemed at the price of a crippling austerity for everything else.  So even as the fire scene quickened, the system entered a slowing spiral in its capacity to respond.  Like Wall Street’s house of securitized cards, the American fire community’s over-leveraged mutual aid agreements threatened to collapse and take the entire system with it.

In 2009 Congress passed the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME) Act.  FLAME was a kind of TARP for fire: it was intended to arrest the free fall of big-fire deficits.  It boosted the base budget for firefighting, enough (it was believed) to allow some fiscal control over operations.  The expectation was spelled out that agencies should better anticipate their needs and “prevent future borrowing from non-fire programs.”  FLAME would end the fiscal transfers.  But the fires kept coming, and the contagion spread from California to Colorado and Montana to Texas.  The fires are no longer banished to the periphery.  They are moving into the core.

They have burned away not only the new monies but any pretense that further supplements will not be needed.  OMB cannot dictate fire seasons.  The fact is, the AFC is woefully undercapitalized.  The critical landscapes are too big to fail and too large to manage.  In May, 2012 the Forest Service reversed 44 years of policy reform and in the name of a fiscal emergency reinstated the old all-suppression policy.  Better to attack every fire quickly than risk long-lingering burns that could run up costs.  Instead of fixing the problem, the new funds, like another bailout package to Greece, have only calmed until the next flareup.

§  Embedded in FLAME was a requirement, based on a notion first broached by the GAO a decade earlier, that the agencies devise and submit to Congress a national cohesive strategy for managing fire.  The idea was to better coordinate programs and so fill lapses and shrink overlaps.  But that proved a matter of politics, not just policy.

The American fire community had created an arrangement for sharing resources, backed by emergency monies and other subsidies, but without a political structure by which to govern among all the unequal parts, which have to include states, counties, cities, and private landowners, all of whom have different purposes, capacities, and risks.  The American fire community has to reconcile very different economies of fire and distinctive historical geographies, some deeply rooted.  (The regional map of the American fire scene is a cartography of Civil War America.)  The upshot is, the AFC could spend money but not oversee the conditions that mandated those expenditures.  Ultimately, you control fire by controlling the landscape in which it burns.  So, too, if you wish to control fire’s costs and reduce its damages, you must control the institutional landscape within which those fires happen.

Discussions that underlay the National Cohesive Strategy began in October, 2008 with an informal congress of fire officers at Emmitsburg, Pennsylvania.  The Emmittsburg 13 realized that it was impossible to manage the national fire economy without rechartering the politics that underwrote it.  A solution would have to bring together the frequently cooperative but oft-suspicious and always factious members of the AFC to reconsider roles, rights, and responsibilities and to draft a new constitution for American fire – or rather, to move from an Articles of Confederation to a federal constitution.  A loose union for transferring firefighting resources and funds had to be replaced with a more orderly mechanism for allocating monies and attention.  The Emmittsburg 13 issued a series of Foundational Documents to direct the process.  They openly described their proceedings as a kind of Federalist papers.  Then the FLAME Act mandated a formal program.  The NCS completed phase 1 in March, 2012 and entered phase 2.  Phase 3 will follow in 2013.

The National Cohesive Strategy is happening because the FLAME Act ordered it.  But behind it lie two competing theories of how to reconcile fire and finance.  One strategy promotes austerity.  The fiscal transfers must end; the agencies must live within their much-reduced means; and if the land burns, they can rebuild landscapes out of the ashes.  The other strategy wants significant stimulus to get ahead of the fires, to build resilience into wildlands and exurbs so the system won’t incinerate and won’t require endless transfers in the future.  But neither can impose an ecological order unless the political order is in place to make choices that the community recognizes as legitimate about what to emphasize and how much to spend.  It’s about governance, not just policy.  Ultimately, it’s about reforming how we live on the land.

With the NCS so far advanced, the American fire community is ahead of the euro.  A deeper integration is underway at least on paper, although it is unclear whether the fire constitution will, when final negotiations are complete, be accepted.  The process has both carrots and sticks, large and small.  Some places and programs will gain funding, some will lose.  If the AFC fails, the threat is implied that responsibility for fire will be turned over to FEMA, which would be the equivalent of having the IMF run the euro zone.  While that threat is a political rant, not a reasoned policy, it helps place fire on a Richter scale of attention.  Strengthening the analogy, too, is the realization that there is no Plan B.  If integration stalls, a fragmentation of the AFC is the logical outcome.  The rich landscapes will take care of themselves.  The poor will burn.

Fix the deep politics or break up – that is the challenge before the euro zone.  And it is why now is the American fire community’s euro moment.

 Steve Pyne

September 2012

While there DeSmet wrote accounts of what he found, and Point sketched and painted people and scenes – a kind of Jesuit George Catlin.  Among that record is a painting of a fire hunt in which flames are driving deer into the lake where hunters in canoes can easily kill them.  This was not an uncommon technique; there are reports of indigenes similarly driving deer into the tidewater of Virginia, and Fenimore Cooper describes hunting deer from canoes in The Pioneers.  But the painting records something else, for it depicts the same flames as savaging the hunters’ village.  Almost certainly the immolating encampment is something Point inserted into whatever he and DeSmet witnessed.[i]

In a few strokes, however, Point’s painting captured an ethnographic practice, an ethnocentric perspective, and the seemingly exclusive interpretation that could overlay them as two peoples viewed the same scene with different eyes.  For the Belgium-born Jesuits burning the landscape was the same as burning one’s house, for it destroyed habitat and was an expression of what, as much as with spiritual beliefs, they had come to reform.  For the Coeur d’Alenes landscape fire was part of what made that land habitable.  They burned seasonally for hunting, for camas and berry production, for pasture, and for the protection of villages.  For the Jesuits landscape fire was, in a sense, hellfire on Earth and a symbol of the perdition they had come to replace.  For the Coeur d’Alenes – and the other tribes that inhabited the Northern Rockies – fire was a gift of the Coyote and its possession was much of what made them human.

That well-intentioned and mutual misunderstanding of what fire meant would continue.  Point’s painting is a visual metaphor of what was to follow with regard to people, land, and fire, and the way each side could read the other wrongly.  In reality, two images coexisted, not so much side by side, as overlaid, as though viewed through a stereopticon.  They might appear to the casual observer as one, but they were less a synthesis than a holographic card that assumed one image or another as the card tilted.  They remained separate, however much blurred by visible emblems of acculturation such as religious conversion, adoption of farming, or going to school in brick buildings.

§ At the time of the DeSmet mission, Salish speakers claimed most of the Northern Rockies and spilled west and north.  Three tribes became especially significant: the Flatheads in the Bitterroot Valley and the Pend d’Oreilles and the Kootenais, a non-Salish group, both further north.  Remarkably, observing the thickening swarm of white transients and settlers, the Flatheads requested the Black Robes to visit them as they sought to learn about the newcomers and their powers.  The missions commenced in 1841.  Acculturation was seen by many as a means of resisting, or at least allowing the option of a choice to retain power over their lives not possible by overt fighting.  The Nez Perce and Blackfeet, west and east, showed the alternatives.[ii]

The larger trends were determined by powers far removed from the mountains.  In 1846 the U.S. and Britain divided the collectively held Oregon Territory along the 49^th parallel, accelerating the political assimilation of the Northern Rockies.  Subsequent history hinged on the Hellgate Council (near Missoula), convened in 1854 by Governor Isaac Stevens to present the terms of a treaty that would establish a common reservation, formally identify tribes and chiefs, and create terms of engagement.  Stevens insisted on a single reservation for the Flatheads, Pend d’Oreilles, and Kootenais, all of whom he treated as a single tribe.  The reservation’s location would be determined in the future.  Other peoples might also be housed there.

Each side viewed the incident and its outcomes differently.  Discussions were conducted through interpreters, refracting through terms and concepts peculiar to each people.  “Very likely,” as historian John Fahey observed, “neither the white nor the Indian negotiators understood one another well.”  In the end, Stevens got the Hellgate Treaty, signed in 1855, on the terms he wanted, and the newly confederated tribal nation got a chief they didn’t recognize, a collective polity they didn’t seek, and a reservation they couldn’t yet locate.  The Flatheads, in particular, worried that they might lose their Bitterroot Valley homeland, which proved correct.[iii]

General map of land ownership. The Flathead Reservation is highlighted in orange, at nominally 1.3 million acres. Note that the center – the agricultural lands in the valley along with the Bison Reserve – has been alienated.

What followed was viewed by white observers as a story of successful acculturation and by the tribes as one of alienation.  Through the usual political pathologies and legal shenanigans, the confederated Flathead nation lost most of its ancestral homelands.  While their new reservation in the Flathead Valley was large by the standards of small-settler homesteading, it was tiny for a people who were accustomed to seasonally migrating over the mountains and to the plains for sustenance.  Even that reserved land began to flake off.  In 1882 the Great Northern Railroad bought, against tribal wishes, a 53-mile right-of-way that cleaved through the collective allotment.  Forest reserves spalled off some two-thirds of the reservation: the Flathead and Bitterroot national forests (1897); the Missoula, Kootenai, and Lolo (1906); the Cabinet (1907); and the Blackfoot (1908).  The Dawes Act of 1887 fractured the tribal commons into 2,460 parcels of 80 and 160 acres, along with a dozen townsites, a survey not completed until 1909.  That year a National Bison Range was established on 18,500 acres of reservation land.  Meanwhile a 1907 agreement allowed the U.S. Forest Service to oversee the tribe’s still-retained wooded lands.

But population and identity were lost as well.  Smallpox and other introduced diseases swept away significant fractions.  Treaties reconstituted the extant population by combining tribes, and adding peoples even outside the Salish linguistic orbit.  At one point, despite tribal protests, Canadian Crees and metís were folded into the demographic mix.  Intermarriage was common, not only among the subtribes but with the surrounding white communities.  In 1900 the reservation held a population of 1,734 persons, half of whom were classified as mixed bloods (mostly French Canadian).  With the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe replaced the misnomered Flatheads.  Like its reservation, a tribal identity was both displaced and imposed.

The losses reached a climax in 1910.  The tribe lost further control over its lands when unclaimed homestead lots were opened to the public, which hollowed out the arable middle of the reservation (of 1.3 million acres, some 700,000 remained tribal).  It lost further local control over its forests as the agreement with the Forest Service was terminated, and a Forestry Branch, authorized the year before, was funded and established within the Office of Indian Affairs.  And it lost control over fire, as the Great Fires – “in nearly every point” – swept over the reservation.  The Flathead Agency was wholly unprepared for flames of this magnitude.  It hired gangs of workers, and when they proved ineffective, it twice requested assistance from the U.S. Army, which dispatched two companies from Washington and North Dakota and two from Fort Missoula.  The fires gutted the embryonic forestry plans; some 60,000 acres of mostly young timber burned off, and the salvage logging of the killed mature timber was undercut by a market flooded with dead forests throughout the region.[iv]

Even amid a tribal history replete with symbolic inflections, the year stands out.[v]

§ Like a campfire, so common and expected that it is as unnoticed as it is essential, landscape burning had always been a part of the annual circuit of the Salish economy.  Every season had its fire: the winter buffalo hunt, the spring harvest of camas and bitterroot, the summer hunting and fishing, the fall gathering of berries and roots.  The Point painting of a fire hunt was inaccurate on several counts, but one was its alignment of where people lived and where they burned.  They resided one place, with campfires; they burned in other places, with broadcast and spot fires.[vi]

As the tribes contracted, pressed by enemies on the Columbian Plains and the Great Plains, and by white intruders, their fires no longer remained in the old mosaic.  To live the old way was to burn the old way, but the newcomers sought a novel pattern of land ownership that left fires to the mountain reserves.  During an 1875-76 hunt two Indians were shot by settlers for setting the prairie afire.  Even when escorted by troops on their circuit, they slipped their leash long enough to kindle traditional grass and camas prairie fires and prompt complaints by settlers.  The 1910 fires began as spring burns by berry-pickers, later supplemented by the promiscuous kindlings of white prospectors.  Probably, as J.W. Powell had documented along the Utah mountains, settlement pressures were also forcing old fire practices to push into new settings.  The mixing of tribes had also mixed fire habits for which a common land did not provide a common policy.  The sequestering of the indigenous burners went a long way to sequestering fire.  But railroads added new ignitions.  Then, as wooden towns arose, fires even swept through stores and schools.[vii]

Fire atlas for Flathead Reservation, showing distribution of contemporary fires.

The new order of fire began with forestry, and it dates, as so much of the Northern Rockies fire scene does, from the Big Blowup.  The fires coincided with the creation of a Forestry Branch within the Office of Indian Affairs, which put fire protection on the national agenda and confirmed forestry as the received oracle for all matters pertaining to fire.  The Flathead Agency began hiring seasonal forestry guards who could serve as an on-site fire crew.  By the late 1920s some 15-26 guards served each summer.  Improved roads and mechanical transport quickened initial attack; a speeder patrolled the Northern Pacific Railway lines; and an annual campaign of fire prevention was inaugurated.  Cooperative agreements with the U.S. Forest Service helped align practices on the reservation with those on the national forests, which also provided the only fire lookouts.

The big change came with the New Deal.  The Indian Reorganization Act helped modernize the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Civilian Conservation Corps almost overnight created the infrastructure needed for fire control in the Mission Range, Salish Mountains, and Hog Heaven Range.  In 1931 the Flathead reservation had a solitary lookout on Saddle Mountain.  By 1942, when the CCC ceased, it had seven, all joined by telephone lines and a radio station.  More roads divvied up the unbroken countryside, providing better access.  The CCC furnished fire crews.  Moreover, the Corps served as interagency sinews to bind fire protection on the reservation to the neighboring forests.  Cooperative fire protection expanded from mutual aid agreements with the Forest Service to include contracts with the State of Montana and private lands under the Northern Montana Forestry Association.  The Flathead Agency (after 1934, the Consolidated Salish-Kootenai Tribe) created a facsimile of Forest Service programs.  It did so, however, without a comparable funding mechanism.  Its annual report for 1959 noted that, while they appeared similar, the CSKT’s fire program – personnel, equipment, maintenance of trails and repair of towers – was rapidly falling behind its federal neighbors.  Everything needed updating.  The stereopticon effect that had characterized fire understanding since Nicolas Point’s allegorical painting had assumed a modern, mechanized update.

Fifty years after the Great Fires, the reservation suffered a bout of big burns that began in early July, 1960 and, bolstered by dry lightning storms, had reached over 100 ignitions by July 20.  The fires blew away the increasingly flimsy tissue of fire protection erected over the past decades.  The CSKT doubled down.  It signed a cooperative smokejumper program with the Aerial Fire Depot in Missoula; later created an helitack crew; trained fire crews on call-up out of forest workers; and hired professionals out of the Forest Service.  It started a prescribed burning program to handle the fast-amassing slash from accelerated logging operations.  It joined the USFS in constructing a lookout on Baldy Mountain.  Over the next decade the program rebuilt.  It hired fire officers from the Forest Service.  It looked like fire programs elsewhere in the region.  It became a part of the Missoula matrix, although like the Flatheads it had relocated from the Bitterroot Valley proper northward.

By the late 1970s the image of the Flathead Reservation resembled the scenes around it, save for poorer funding.  Tilting the image a bit, however, revealed another image beneath.  Like Point’s painting, reality was an unstable composite made from an overlay.  Already events were twisting in ways to bring the two images into sharper parallax.

§ What happened was the fire revolution with its ultimate ambition to restore free-burning flame.  For the national forests and parks of the Northern Rockies, this meant allowing natural fires to burn, or creating the conditions that would permit such fires, or substituting prescribed fires where untrammeled burns could not be tolerated.  For the Flathead Reservation, however, it meant restoring something of the landscapes and fire practices that had prevailed in Precolumbian times.  This was a deeper reform made possible by a parallel revolution in Native American governance.  The two restorations overlay each other.

In the 1950s the long trend to assimilate had led to a policy of outright termination – the cultural equivalent to the fire suppression.  The resulting reaction occurred in lockstep with the fire revolution.  In 1961 a pan-Indian conference convened at the University of Chicago and led in 1962 to a “Declaration of Indian Purpose” presented to President Kennedy.  At the same time a National Indian Youth Council organized as an advocacy group for a new generation.  A series of reform legislation and court decisions began addressing education, health, tribal courts, access to natural resources (notably, fishing and water rights) – these culminated as a protest movement in the American Indian Movement and as a legal regime in the American Indian Civil Rights Act (1968) and then the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act (1975).  An American Indian Policy Review Commission oversaw a panoramic survey, which led to a report in 1977.  All this set in motion a series of restorations – of tribal identity, of religious sites, of historic sites, of control over natural resources and even the return of some ceded lands.  What happened in fire, as a national program moved from a hegemonic agency with a single policy to a pluralism of lands and practices, had a parallel in American Indian history.  At places like the Flathead Reservation the two movements braided together.[viii]

Throughout the 1970s the CSKT acquired more control over its forestry and fire programs, even as it emulated the planning guidelines and practices of the other federal agencies and commissioned a detailed history of its forestry program.  In principle, the BIA’s charge to hold the land in trust obligated it to emulate the best programs, which also meant funding them at comparable levels.  In practice, it had tended to add encumbering layers of bureaucracy while never financing programs adequately.  What had been a separate but equal doctrine had inevitably proved neither separate nor equal.  In 1992 the CSKT accelerated its move toward self-government, including its management of woods, waters, and lands generally.  It sought working landscapes; production forestry continued; and revenue helped finance other programs.  But it also wanted special areas, the equivalent of wilderness.  A primitive area had been proclaimed in 1979; in 1982 it became the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness – the first tribally mandated wilderness nationally.  This was supplemented by three special use areas; the South Fork of the Jocko, Lozeau, and Chief Cliff.  Throughout, the proclaimed norm was a restoration to more Precolumbian conditions or at least ancestral attitudes adapted to more modern times.  That included fire.

A complex process of planning commenced that resulted in a kind of alternate version of multiple-use land.  An interim forest management plan emerged in 1997, an EIS in 1999, and a new forest management plan in 2000, coincident with the National Fire Plan, with a dedicated fire management plan in 2007.  Mostly prescribed fire remained in logging slash, but some underburning was spreading particularly in ponderosa pine savannas, and there was a willingness to grant fires in the wilderness some play, especially since much of the adjacent lands were Forest Service wilderness.  Yet tribal wilderness was not the same as wilderness on federal lands, and an acceptance of fire did not originate solely from the same wellsprings, so as part of the commitment to restore something of the old fire regimes was to recover the old lore that had underwritten human occupation of the land.  The upshot was a remarkable summary of legends, techniques, and regimes coded into an interactive DVD and website, Fire on the Land: a Tribal Perspective, released in 2004.  Where the national forests and parks looked to natural science for a foundation to practice, believing that the best landscape was one that was as wholly “natural” as possible, the CSKT accepted a former cultural landscape as its ideal.  Both perspectives looked to the past, but one peered into a past before humans and the other into that past before Europeans.  One appealed to wilderness and natural science, both presumed transcendent and above culture.  The other appealed to culture, from which concepts like wilderness and practices like science derive and through which they must be nourished.

Today, the Flathead Reservation has a fire program that looks much like those around it.  It fights fire on its timber lands and burns slash.  It prescribe-burns select tiles in its landscape mosaic.  It encourages, on a case by case basis, some wilderness fire, and may intervene to put more black in if needed.  It suppresses fire under contract for some state and rural lands.  It supplies 20-person crews for work off the reservation.  It meets comparable standards for training, operates identical equipment, attends the same conferences, and serves on shared NWCG panels.  For all intents and purposes, it is interchangeable with other major players within the national system and regional complex.[ix]

General map of FMUs. While particulars are not evident, note the general trend in which suppression is the norm for the developed center, and more liberal actions are possible along the perimeter, especially the Mission Range to the east.

And yet it has fashioned an alternate vision, an overlay in which the commonalities, on casual inspection, have blurred the distinctions.  While the CSKT fire program is encumbered by layers of bureaucracy and oversight and legal filters not true of its allied fire agencies, it is also spared some of the public and political scrutiny that constrain the others.  It has freedoms to act that they lack.  It has what it calls wilderness, but is not subject to the Wilderness Act.  It can have its own airshed plan, and managed smoke accordingly.  Even when it engages in endeavors similar to those around it, those practices are refracted through a different perspectival prism.  It tells a counter narrative in parallax.

§ In the modern era the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe’s most famous member has surely been D’Arcy McNickle.  His biography encapsulates perfectly both the blending of peoples and the incomprehensions that divide them.  He had an Irish father and a Cree metís mother; he could live in both tribal and white worlds; he could seem to whites both acculturated and progressive, and to Indians a defender of rights and tradition.  He became a major figure in the movement for national reform.  And he wrote three novels that exactly pan those times and illustrate brilliantly how two people could, even with the best of intentions, read a scene in diametrically opposite ways.

The first, The Surrounding, was published in 1936, two years after Indian Reorganization Act.  The last, Wind from an Enemy Sky, appeared in 1978, posthumously, three years after Indian Self-Determination and Education Act.  The plot of Wind turns on the construction of a dam.  To whites it is a marvel of applied science, a taming of natural processes to better economic purposes.  To Bull, the Indian protagonist, the act is insane.  “They can’t stop water.  Water just swallows everything and waits for more.  That’s the way with water.”  Worse, the dam buries a sacred site.  Each side holds to its culture and the perspective it encourages, while their interaction unfolds into tragedy.  What McNickle wrote about water might equally apply to fire, except the tragedy is borne by the land not persons.

Throughout, the two cultures have not only viewed fire differently, but have incommensurate understandings about how to view a firescape at all.  Today, it is possible to imagine a remake of Nicolas Point’s painting in which crews light the woods to promote ecological benefits while deer and bison forage on the refreshed browse.  The prevailing perspective would explain that scene as a reinstatement to a better, more natural world in which fire has returned to work its biotic alchemy, with the implication that keeping the fire and removing the fire-starters would improve the scene even further.  The firescape should be viewed through the moral prism of wilderness and the analytical prism of science.  Another perspective would parse that image as a restoration to a former world in which people had co-existed with those woods and grasses and creatures and did the task uniquely assigned to them; they burned.  In this rendering to remove the people would unhinge the fire and unbalance the prelapsarian order – the Fall in this case resulting from the encounter with Europe.  It is a firescape encompassed by culture, however decorated along its margins, like an illuminated manuscript, by the machinery and clothing of modern technology.

That the two visions can co-exist is possible because places like the Flathead Reservation survive.

Steve Pyne

August 2012

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Jim Steele and Tony Harwood for generously sharing a morning of their busy days to explain how a change in spectacles can change the spectacle being seen, and then for sharing maps and documents.  I could not have written this piece without them.  I should not need to add that the resulting text can indeed be read several ways.

When the Hayden Survey probed into Yellowstone in 1872, they found their cross-country passage blocked by jack-strawed lodgepole pine left by fires.  Extensive burns marred the scenery and made travel onerous.  The expedition’s artist, Thomas Moran, painted its hot springs and woods and, spectacularly, its grand canyon; but not its burns.  Partisans for reserving the place as a public park knew the Yellowstone’s value lay in its display of Nature’s wonders, and they believed these could be damaged by nature’s outbursts as well as by human vandals.  The park’s enabling legislation accordingly sought to preserve the place “from fire and axe.”  The origins of fire protection by the federal government, and its paramilitary style, commenced in 1886 when the U.S. cavalry assumed control over the park.  Fires greeted M Troop as it rode over the park boundary.

Over the next century the meaning of “wild” changed and “fire in the wild” with it.  Initially, wild fire was, by definition, uncontrolled and unwanted.  The more protected the scene, the more its overseers railed against free-burning fire.  But by the time wilderness received its legislative mandate in 1964, a reconsideration was underway.  Wilderness held a cluster of values, like an electron cloud.  It was an outdoor gymnasium, a place of solace, a laboratory, and a baseline from which the relationship between humans and nature might be surveyed.  At its nuclear core it was a place “untrammeled” by meddling humans, who might visit but would not reside.  For most of the public it remained an untouched scene, still dewy from the Creation.

For an increasing fraction of the populace, however, a wilderness did not seek to preserve that scene like artifact in a museum, but aspired to retain its essential processes.  In the philosophy of wilderness, process preservation replaced scenic preservation.  If wolves, grizzlies, floods, landslides, and storms belonged, then so did fire.  What unhinged wild places was not fire but fire’s exclusion.  Suppressing fire had no more justification than exterminating predators or channeling streams.  The philosophical thesis for restoring fire was unanswerable, and unsurprisingly, the wilderness movement added powerful leverage to the fire revolution of the Sixties.  On working landscapes fire might be useful, but in wild ones, it was mandatory.  For the first 20 years of the revolution, beginning with policy reforms by the National Park Service in 1968 and ending with the 1988 Yellowstone fires, wilderness fire dominated national attention.

More than a century had passed since Thomas Moran’s gorgeous canvases, there was scant argument among the informed over whether fire belonged.  The issue was how to do it.

Paradox 1: the natural as cultural

What has made a reconciliation tricky is that neither wilderness nor fire is a constant.  They are variables, and while both have obvious natural properties and wild and fire can survive nicely without people, they are deeply embedded in human culture.

Fire has been a defining property for humanity since our origins as a species; nothing so clearly informs our ecological agency as our species monopoly over flame.  Even to yield the exercise of our firepower willingly is a deliberate decision and one that typically has the threat of political coercion behind it.  But wilderness, too, however ironically, is also a cultural invention.  It is not “natural” for people to remove themselves from a landscape, and the American notion of wilderness, as distinct from traditions of sacred groves or protected natural sites elsewhere on Earth, is an expression of an exceptionalism that does not travel well outside the U.S.  Combine fire and wild, and the confusions multiply.  Each destabilizes the other.

The premise behind wilderness is that it stands outside culture.  It can’t.  Rather, there are compelling arguments for wilderness as a state of mind more than a state of nature and for the wilderness idea as an invention.  To appreciate how this might happen, consider a famous essay in which Hugh Trevor-Roper revealed how the “whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention.” It was, in fact, a creation of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, a time when the Highlands were becoming extinct as an autonomous polity, when Highlanders were being removed from the land, and when industrialization was replacing a folk economy with a modern one.  Instead, a combination of Romanticism, literary forgery, commercial connivance, and the creation of a Highland Society among elites conspired to “invent” a tradition.[i]

The Highland epic, the poems of Ossian, was the 1760 fabrication of James Macpherson.  The bagpipe replaced the harp as the instrument of choice decades later.  The iconic kilt was invented in the 1730s by Thomas Rawlinson of Lancashire to make the customary belted plaid more appropriate to life beyond the hills.  It was devised not to perpetuate Highland life but to bring Highlanders “out of the heather and into the factory.”  The clan tartan resulted from the legal formation, after Culloden, of Highland regiments by a British government desperate to direct tribal belligerence into the service of the Empire rather than against England.  The regiments sought their own colors, as it were; these were codified in 1822 by Colonel David Stewart’s Sketches of the Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland and chistled in literary stone with the Vestiarium Scotium.  The kilt, in brief, was “invented by an English Quaker industrialist” and “saved from extinction by an English imperialist statesman.”  What remained was the creation of a “Scottish pedigree,” which fell preeminently to the Highland Society of London founded in 1778.  Due notoriety arrived when Sir Walter Scott, a Lowlander, in a fit of “hallucination” (as it appeared to critics), adopted not only the bogus history but the whole kit and caboodle and made an eccentric passion for reenactment glamorous.  Thus, the irony: “the upper and middle classes, who had previously despised the ‘service’ costume, now picked up with enthusiasm the garb which its traditional wearers had finally discarded.”  And the upshot: “the Celtic Highlanders, so recently despised as outer barbarians, were claiming to be the sole representatives of Scottish history and culture.”[ii]

The history of American wilderness as an idea maps so neatly onto this scenario that it’s surprising that the Big Trees weren’t draped in tartan bunting and Mammoth Hot Springs serenaded with the “Braes of Lochiel.”  The authoritative survey, Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, is a self-proclaimed history of an idea, one that came to a handful of poets and prophets and then propagated throughout the culture and became embedded into the national narrative; was coded into law with the Wilderness Act; and is valued for its celebration of an American identity.  In this rendition, the idea of wilderness helps do for Americans what the Highland tradition does for Scots.

Paradox 2: the wild as narrative

Americans have generally subscribed to a version of Scottish common sense realism that holds the world outside our minds is real.  With or without people nature goes on, and with or without a notion of wilderness, there exists a natural realm that has, can, and will continue to function on its own.  In recent decades various non-anthropocentric philosophies have appeared that argue for the intrinsic value of that world and that plead for its preservation.

Yet these notions assume various national forms or intellectual traditions.  Parks Canada sets its goal as ecological integrity, not naturalness or a historic condition.  The Soviet Union established zapovedniks as pristine sites available for research.  Most societies have some variety of sacred grove.  Even in the U.S. a commitment to biodiversity may trump other values, and require active intervention.  American nature finds protection in many forms for many reasons, and these may not – often do not – agree in their particulars.

What holds together the American notion of wilderness – the strong-nuclear force that keeps a buzzing cloud of values in orbit – is a narrative that makes wilderness part of a national creation story.  The United States, so this saga goes, is the outcome of the encounter by European civilization with American nature.  The early conversion of the wild into the cultivated traces the narrative of American progress.  The more recent preservation of the wild as wild testifies to the maturity and triumph of that national narrative.  Wilderness, in brief, is not something marginal or decorative to American identity.  It is what makes the dialectic by which America has evolved.  In place of monuments from antiquity America has marvels of nature.  Wilderness matters ultimately because it explains who we are.  It is another emblem, a foundational one, of American exceptionalism.

Wilderness is also a historical construct.  When and how it appeared as landscapes granted legal definition reflects certain times and conditions of the national experience.  With eerie parallelism the modern wilderness movement is bracketed by the country’s demographics.  The first primitive area in the national forest system, the Gila, was proclaimed in 1924, the year the restrictive Immigration Act took effect which yielded the lowest and most selective era of newcomers in American history.  Both could be seen as acts of assimilation, of stabilizing a sense of American identity, while the country weathered the Great Depression, World War II, and the onset of the Cold War.  The modern era of immigration, the largest by number in American history, commenced in 1965, the year after Congress passed the Wilderness Act.  Wilderness, in brief, was not just an idea bonded to American experience but to a particular era of American experience in which the nation looked inward even as it confronted global crises.

This helps explain why the concept has traveled poorly outside America’s borders.  National parks, biosphere reserves, wildlife refuges, national forests, even private lands held for public goods (such as the Nature Conservancy) have all circulated around the globe with relatively modest adaptations and concessions to local norms.  Wilderness has not.  It tends to be too absolute in its segregation of the natural and the cultural, and it is too closely bound to a particular narrative of American experience.  If one wants to protect values in nature, or promote ecological goods and services, there are other concepts and practices possible; and wilderness may not be the best means to advance such goals.  What grants it particular cultural traction in America is the narrative that has evolved to justify it – and this narrative is what halts it at nation’s frontiers.

There is nothing to prevent similar cultural alienation from happening within the U.S. as immigration again overflows, as the origin of immigrants shifts from Europe to Latin American and Asia, and as the newcomers do not head for geographic frontiers but to social or economic ones.  The old story of wild America confronting civilized Europe no longer makes sense except as a historical moment.  If what bonds people and land is culture, what shared culture allows for wilderness to continue to exert such force?  The U.S. is becoming ever more multi-ethnic and pluralistic.  The wilderness narrative can no longer embrace its multitudes.

Paradoxically, however, it is the putative a-cultural quality of the wild that may allow it to thrive.  Critics have often noted that the presumed lands beyond the frontier were not genuine wilderness but homelands to native peoples.  In the classic revisionist phrasing, these were not virgin lands but widowed lands.  The wild was created by forcibly vacating the people who had resided there.  Yet for a multi-ethnic nation, the standard formula for nationalist homelands – blood and soil – cannot succeed.  The only land that all parts of a syncretic society can accept is one that is shorn of those ties.

Interestingly, wilderness has met with the greatest resistance where, in the national estate, the notions of blood and soil, of a people bound by a separate story of an ancestral or promised land for which they have suffered and endured, is strongest; in the South, in Texas, in Utah, on Indian reservations.  Wilderness as a legal landscape works best where no population can claim it as a homeland.  It works as a national commons precisely because it is not tied to any single group or ethnic-frontier narrative.  It has the appearance of transcendence.

To endure wilderness will need a philosophy, an ethics, and a story that can speak to all, and to make any practical difference in how Americans actually live on their land it will have to work on the ground.

Paradox 3: the wild as managed land

Specifically, wilderness has to work within the agencies that manage fire on public lands (there is no legal wilderness outside the public domain).  And it has to devise routine tools, a standard operating procedure, that will make overseeing fire in wilderness as much a part of the American fire scene as suppressing fire in the I-zone or burning off the rough of a Florida wildlife refuge.

America’s public domain is a patchwork of purposes and agencies that have evolved over the course of roughly 75 years.  The usual formula was, as Congress created new categories of land use, it identified an agency to administer them.  The lands came first.  The first national park, Yellowstone, had a hapless civilian superintendent; then the U.S. cavalry took over the parks; and finally the National Park Service was created to oversee them in 1916, 42 years later.  The forest reserves began in 1891, received an organic act in 1897, were run (more or less) by the General Land Office until in 1905 when responsibility was handed over to the Bureau of Forestry, which renamed itself the U.S. Forest Service.  The first wildlife refuge was set aside in 1901, and given to the Biological Survey to administer; the Fish and Wildlife Service came into being in 1940 after a whirligig of reorganizations.  The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 closed the public domain to further privatization; the unpatented lands organized themselves into Grazing Districts; and the Bureau of Land Management was created by administrative fiat in 1946 and received a proper organic act in 1976.

But wilderness was different.  The Wilderness Act established a distinct category ofland with its own prescriptions for what can and can’t be done, but it left designated wilderness sites within whatever agency held the original land.  Each of the federal land agencies held wilderness; and since the Forest Service had so much land, and threatened to alter its roadless backcountry more gravely than the Park Service, so it received the most public attention, and drew the greatest controversy.  The Act did not create a National Wilderness Service to bring a common sensibility and protocol to the archipelago of the legally wild.  (A compromise was to create an interagency Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center and an Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute.)

In one respect, letting agencies administer the land made a wilderness designation easier for a bureau to accept since it would not “lose” those lands.  But it also meant that the agencies had to absorb internally the tensions between what its founding charter (and evolved identity) urged and what wilderness accepted or shunned.  For agencies like the Forest Service, committed to multiple use and the norms of professional forestry, the strains could lead to ruptures within as well as rifts between the agency and the public.  In the wilderness movement the Forest Service resisted, stalled, and generally put itself on the wrong side of history.  To the new environmentalism that in the postwar era replaced old-style conservation, the Forest Service became the Evil Empire.  The fight over wilderness alienated the agency; and the internal stresses threatened to tear it into pieces.

Paradox 5: wilderness fire as managed fire

Absorbing wilderness also caused internal schisms in field operations.  Managing wilderness fire requires a different set of skills, temperament, and culture – a tradition that also had to be invented.  Yet fire suppression still laid down the basic infrastructure.  The same organization that had for decades committed to putting fires out as aggressively as possible would now have to let some of them burn.  It was easier to accommodate prescribed fire since it put crews in the field, relied on similar gadgets and tactics for burning out, and often had pre-suppression as a goal.  A true wilderness fire program required extensive rewiring.

Reform was not simply a question of principle but of practice.  Although wildland fire had a place in the bureaucracy, it was not a bureaucratic category.  It could not be programmed, budgeted, predicted in the way timber harvesting or animal grazing units could be.  It was, rather, an anticipated emergency and something to be fought, suppressed, and if possible excluded.  At the time of the Wilderness Act fire control officers were using all available means to contain fire, including bulldozers, engines, air tankers, smokejumpers, hotshot (“shock troop”) crews, and local agency militias.  Along the fireline the Cold War met the backcountry.  All this, however, violated both the spirit and language of the Wilderness Act.  Natural fires belonged; as a matter of policy, it was wrong to expunge them.  Ideally, fires should be left to free-roam.  And when unwanted fires occurred, as they would when started by people or when wild fires threatened to cross borders, they had to be contained without recourse to the mechanization and heavy-boot-on-the-land that characterized the firefight as battlefield.

In some places, the Sierra parks most notably, parallel organizations were formed, one to fight fires and one to light or monitor them.  Mostly, one organization had to learn to do both.  It had to deal simultaneously with monitors as well as smokechasers, and branching decision charts in place of a simple directive for suppression.  It had to learn when and how to tolerate fires that burned over seasons not until 10 am the next morning.  It had to learn to tread as lightly as possible or suppressing would scar the land worse than burning.  This was a wrenching transition, like demanding a military engage in nation-building instead of crushing an enemy.  Wilderness fire caused as much internal tension as the wildland/urban interface, which forced wildland fire agencies to absorb the terms, tactics, and ethos of urban fire services.  The Forest Service made its own transition worse by mulishly insisting it had to read the Wilderness Act with maximum literalness, like a teenager deciding to follow instructions in such a way that he hopes to show their fundamental foolishness.

Principles and practices were not easily segregated.  Wilderness, after all, was not a scientific or logical idea but an evocation that spoke to a people’s identity and hence to an ethic that embraced the land they shared.  Yet apart from whether wilderness could be parsed from culture, there was the conundrum of people as the planet’s keystone fire creature, as an integral chain in the natural history of being that had shaped wilderness for millennia.  As in principle proponents had to deny wilderness as a homeland, so they had to deny anthropogenic fire as a process shaping those landscapes, even though removing the human presence might be as powerful as stripping away the alpha predators.  Even wild places – save the most remote and barren – had co-evolved with humanity and its fires.  Abolishing anthropogenic fire might be as disruptive as suppressing natural fires.

There was no neutral position possible.  Overseers might choose not to hack out roads, log off woods, or dam streams.  But they might need to burn.  By the time wilderness fire came to dominate the fire community, everyone agreed that there was a lot less fire than in the past, and that this loss did ecological harm.  Were those missing fires ignitions that nature had set and people unwisely suppressed?  Or were they fires people had once set and no longer did?  Such questions were neither trivial nor obvious.  They required a sustained commitment that could only come from culturally compelling beliefs.

The outcome of not burning might be wild; but it might bear little relationship to the mix of natural features that had defined the land when Europeans first contacted it.  But if people were justified in burning, then why not other practices as well?      Principles and practice could not readily be teased apart.  Legal wilderness had at its nuclear core a paradox, that people must manage what is, by definition, autonomous from human meddling.  For many practices it was possible to finesse around the paradox.  It was not possible with fire.

Paradox 6: the pragmatic evaluation of the wilderness ideal

Nearly four decades of experience suggests both the power and the limits of wilderness fire.  What seemed obvious in principle has blurred in practice as cultural ideals met natural realities.  What seemed easy – simply standing aside and letting nature determine the outcome – has proved hard in practice.  But the contours of fire and wilderness can now been rudely mapped.

It is clear that wilderness fire, which is to say, allowing natural ignitions as much autonomy as possible, works best in remote, self-contained landscapes; places with abundant natural ignition; landscapes with lots of room to maneuver, both for flame and smoke; and a local culture that favors the wild and is willing to make concessions to accommodate it.  Where the wild is embedded within a larger domain of public wildlands, the local culture may be mostly the agency.  And it is obvious that natural fire programs don’t just happen: they work best when given hard leverage – when they become the default setting – through legislation such as the Wilderness Act or Endangered Species Act.  If the program is to flourish, managers must justify a decision to suppress rather than a choice to allow to burn, which is less a choice than standard operating procedure.

Similarly, the limits of wilderness fire have become apparent.  Size is a critical consideration.  Wilderness areas can be as small as 5,000 acres, which doesn’t allow much room to promote natural burns or to protect against outside fires which in recent years are 20 to 100 times larger.  The land will burn, and needs to burn; the issue is how, and with what consequences, or whether within the scope of the historic fire regime.  Location (location, location) is equally critical.  Escapes include smoke as well as flame; proximity to an urban area can be lethal to a program that tolerates large or long-smoldering burns.

The deeper challenges pertain to wilderness as a cultural construction.  The legal wild is only one amid a pluralism of nature protections; the choice is not simply between the wild and the wrecked, but among a constellation of reserves, parks, refuges, and working landscapes dedicated to ecological goods and services.  Each must seek a fire and management regime suitable to its purposes.  As experience with wilderness matures, America will likely discover that the wild is not a place where ecological goods converge, that it involves a choice among the values a society wants from its lands.  The likely outcome points toward a pluralism of fire practices, that wilderness will be one alternative among many, not simply the polar opposite of the urban.   Probably the country needs less to recover its wilds than its middle ground, needs its working landscapes remade to promote values other than the maximum production of commodities and extractives.

To many partisans the idea that wilderness has a history will seem odd, if not offensive.  The wild is transcendent – that’s its essence – and hence lies outside history.  The only history relevant to the wild is how people have over time come to understand it as a fixed concept better, not that the idea has itself evolved.  But history runs all through wilderness, like quartz veins in granite.  As an insight it grew out of a particular time, place, and people; as a legal entity and a historical event, it helped shape an era of American fire.  Very likely the fire revolution could not have happened without the fulcrum it furnished.  The fact that it changes with its times makes it less a constant like the speed of light than a variable like interest rates.

Paradoxically, the wild is not something just there.  It is put there by our engagement with it.  A hard concept to grasp, perhaps, and a harder one to realize on the ground.

Epilogue: Aldo Leopold as exemplar

Over the course of a century and a half, wilderness has attracted many philosophers, publicists, prophets, and in recent decades practitioners.  But since the publication of A Sand County Almanac in 1949, it has increasingly bonded with Aldo Leopold.  For a meditation on wilderness and fire Leopold’s biography makes an apt exercise in synecdoche since his thoughts recapitulate the tortuous phylogeny of wilderness and fire as both idea and deed.

He began his career as a conservationist at the Yale School of Forestry where he submitted an essay condemning bad logging and the slash fires it sparked.  In 1913 as supervisor of the Carson National Forest he exhorted his staff that “we can at least assert that fire prevention is the most direct of all our activities, and hence also susceptible of developing the greatest relative efficiency.”  In 1920, after a decade with the U.S. Forest Service in the Southwest, he staunchly upheld the agency’s commitment to fire exclusion.  “The Forest Service policy of absolutely preventing forest fires insofar as humanly possible is directly threatened by the light-burning propaganda.”  Over the next two decades he began to soften his approach to fire.  Trashy logging, not fire, was the primary culprit in the North Woods; overgrazing, not burning, was the primum mobile in the Southwest.  In the prairies of Wisconsin and the Chihuahuan Sierra he saw places that regularly burned without obvious damage.  He corresponded with Herbert Stoddard, a pioneer in controlled burning and wildlife conservation in the southeast.

But he never made an argument that fire belonged or that it might be necessary to burn in wilderness, or to argue against fire suppression as he did against predator eradication.  He never wrote a “red fire” in the woods essay to match his “green fire” in the wolf’s eye one.  In 1925, a year after he successfully lobbied for the first Primitive Area in the national forest system, he lectured that “it would be idle to discuss wilderness areas if they are to be left subject to destruction by forest fires.”  The sand counties of Sand County Almanac, where he attempted to rehabilitate abandoned land and had his famous “shack,” was stripped to sand by ruthless cutting followed by deep burning.  Fire had been part of the problem.  It was not obvious how it might also be part of a solution.  Fire was complicated.[iii]

A history of conflagrations had branded itself into the consciousness of the founding generations of American conservationists.  Leopold joined the Forest Service a year before the Big Blowup; fire control was a mandatory and accepted duty of his years as a ranger.  He died when a fire sprinted across a neighbor’s lot, and attempting to halt it, he suffered a heart attack, fell to the ground, and was burned over.  His notebook bears the scorch marks.

So, after a fashion, do his ideas.  Even in the wild fire’s management is a concept easier to work in the mind than in the hand.

Steve Pyne

July 2012

- Plutarch

Begin with the fundamentals, which is where a fire science that wants to think of itself as applied physics likes to begin.  The first question is how a fire gets started and the second how it spreads.  Know that and the rest follows.  The same might be said about fire scientists.

In 1950 when Jack Cohen was born, Tucson had a population of 45,000, and the family homestead was in any event closer to mission San Xavier del Bac.  The landscape was open high desert split by the riparian cleft of the still-flowing Santa Cruz River.  When he left 18 years later, having graduated from high school at 16 and spent two years at the University of Arizona, the city had swollen to 263,000 and in its search for water had pushed wells so deep that the Santa Cruz had become a ditch.  It was an object lesson about sprawl and its environmental disruptions, but Jack was not one to look back.  By then he had become the equivalent of a firebrand lofted into the prevailing winds, looking for a suitable place to alight.

What gives that simile some verisimilitude is that he spent his youth starting fires.  He was the one to kindle whatever fire someone needed set.  He burnt off the lawn in spring.  He burned leaves in a burn barrel.  He ignited the barbecue.  He shot firearms, which in an age before ear protection ruined his hearing.  If someone needed a cigarette lit – this was before the Surgeon General plastered warnings on packages – Jack volunteered to make the flame.  The family had a summer cabin in the Santa Rita Mountains amid the Coronado National Forest, a place readily sparked by summer lightning storms, and prone to fires, although aggressive firefighting held nature’s electrostatic match to sparks and snags.

Such were the basic facts, but like principles they needed some way to combine.

§    His youthful fireworks was all play; there was no malice and no one got hurt.  But it was not magic, because Jack Cohen was already an inveterate scientist who wanted tests, numbers, and proofs.  For years he struggled, however, to find the right science.  In high school he turned to chemistry, and majored in it at the University of Arizona; and in important ways he never abandoned it.  Meanwhile his interest in outdoor recreation grew.  But nothing jelled.  He did well in subjects he liked, and poorly in those he didn’t.  He took a year off, worked on drill rigs in New Mexico, learned some practical geology, and realized what he did not want to do with his life.  The rigs destroyed whatever remained of his hearing.

In 1971 he decided he wanted to be a forester and transferred to the University of Montana.  He soon became disillusioned with forestry, took the minimum courses, and loaded up on botany, physics, and math.  The critical moment of his Montana sojourn came in the summers of 1972 and 1973, when he worked as an assistant to UM professor Bob Steele who had contracts for prescribed fire research.  Jack had to learn everything: not just the science, but how to build line, work with hand tools, and set fires.  That’s what did it: direct contact with flame.  For someone who thinks visually and tactily, not verbally, it was a baptism by immersion that merged idea with act.  Jack Cohen found himself touched by fire in ways that jostled together the various parts of his unsettled life into something resembling a coherent pattern.

He went to Colorado State for a master’s degree, although, still bored with forestry, he enrolled in the atmospheric sciences program.  But he craved a fire connection both for hand and mind.  He found the one by working his first summer on the Pike-San Isabella hotshot crew, which expanded his practical understanding of fire operations but left him again twitching with intellectual impatience.  He resolved that issue by switching departments to biometeorology and bioclimatology, which led him to contacts with Forest Service researchers slowly assembling a National Fire Danger Rating System, a grandly synthetic program that brought everything known to bear on when fires might be expected to start and how vigorously they might spread.  His 1976 masters thesis processed the fire climatology of the Colorado mountains.

What had been mostly play now turned pro.  He was immediately hired by the Missoula lab to help develop the NFDRS, which was released in 1978.  And he switched from cutting fireline seasonally to analyzing fire behavior for going fires, graduating from the third Fire Behavior Officer class.  The NFDRS was about doing fundamental science but around a conceptual core that mattered to the field, and FBOs took the best of that understanding and spoke to the overhead teams on big fires.  The boy who grew up eager to light fire and easily bored had found a suitable fuelbed to alight on.

§  Fire was his field – that was confirmed.  But fire burned in many settings, and Jack found himself blown from one to another.  For the next twenty years he cycled through topics and Forest Service fire labs, at one point resigning altogether for 18 months.  Throughout, there were two constants, his curiosity about ignition and the need for direct contact, to connect what was known with what was done in the field.

In 1979, a year after the NFDRS was released, he transferred to the Riverside Lab in Southern California.  Here he met new topics like Santa Ana winds, Mediterranean climates, and chaparral, but they were also variants of old ones; the fundamentals were the same.  What was most novel was the urgency of unraveling how live fuels burned and how fire actually behaved in the fractal frontier between houses and wildlands.  The need for experimental fires led him to certify as a Lighting Boss on the San Bernardino National Forest.  He reconnected with fire teams as the South Zone FBO.  The need to put knowledge, the right knowledge, on the line persisted.

But fire had a way of crossing lines.  It crossed from wildland to urban fringe, which also breached methods of fire suppression.  The fabled foehn winds over the Transverse Range flung embers for miles, which mocked fuelbreaks and firelines.  So, too, flames on the mountains broke through the parameters of models developed in the smooth beds of laboratory wind tunnels.  Conducting field burns and doing tours with overhead teams mixed the administrative borders between research and operations.  When in an internal report he criticized the prevailing Rothermel model of fire behavior, now the nuclear core of the NFDRS prediction program, as unable to forecast the kind of fire behavior he was witnessing in the field and as propagating only “an illusion of understanding,” he was reprimanded.

By the mid-1980s fire research was on the ropes.  The Reagan administration    sought to reallocate government science from civilian to military purposes and, buoyed by a bout of wet years in the West, chose to believe the fire problem was solved.  Funding was gutted, and since the Forest Service had a virtual monopoly over fire science, that sent the entire field reeling.  In many respects, the agency never recovered; it could sweep up the pieces but never quite reassemble them.  The Forest Service tried to salvage what it could with a major redefinition of “the fire problem” and a massive reorganization announced in July 1986 that tended to anger and unhinge its staff.  The reorganization proposed to send Jack to the Macon lab.  “Uncompromising” family concerns, however, led Jack to resign and remain in Riverside.  For 18 months he worked as a research engineer for Dunham-Bush, Inc., a company that manufactured heat exchangers.

In August, 1988 he returned to the Riverside lab as a full-time temporary employee, and was fully reinstated a year later as he completed his transfer to the Macon lab.  His assignment  was to help adapt the NFDRS to the southeast.  But by the time he arrived the applications mission was being superceded by a new quest for fundamentals.  The American fire scene was itself undergoing a continental-scale transfer of themes and attention as the ignition of houses became as critical as the kindling of wilderness.  The wildland side had an NFDRS to forecast ignition and spread probabilities.  The urban side needed an equivalent.

§  It was an inauspicious time for an research initiative, but desperate to find a topic compelling to the administration, Fire and Atmospheric Sciences Research identified what was awkwardly termed the wildland/urban interface.  This was a place where an implacable urban sprawl met irrepressible wildland fires and hence collided with public safety and politics.  Those in Forest Fire and Atmospheric Science Research hoped that it might give handholds for a research organization otherwise stranded on a cliff face.

For 25 years, since the Bel Air-Brentwood conflagration swept over the Hollywood Hills, the problem had spread like blister rust, infecting the American landscape but without much visibility until it occasionally broke out in epidemics.  The worst were in California.  In 1985, however, the California plague went bicoastal.  On the West Coast fires ripped into Baldwin Hills, Los Gatos, and Ojai; Jack self-deployed to the first and went to the others on assignment.  On the East Coast a fire savaged the community of Palm Coast, Florida.

Suddenly, what had been a peculiarity of California exceptionalism looked like the next new thing in fire protection.  The wildland/urban interface fire – “a dumb name,” one critic noted, “for a dumb problem” because technical solutions existed – had become a national issue.  The next year the National Fire Protection Association, alert to the emerging crisis, partnered with the Forest Service to sponsor a conference, Wildfire Strikes Home, that became the basis for a program termed Firewise.  NFPA took the lead.  The hope that it might relaunch fire research faltered until the NWCG accepted a WUI Initiative in 1995.  Jack Cohen served as Forest Service adviser.

At first blush it was a topic that seemed remote from wildland fire.  But like the houses that crowded against wildland boundaries, its themes shared a common border in combustion science.  The critical questions were identical: how did structures ignite and how did the subsequent fires spread?  Better, it was a subject around which various Forest Service labs could rally.  By 1989 the contours of a research program had become visible through the smoke.  The pivot was the Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin, which took an interest because woodframe houses were the principal fuel.  It wanted to understand ignition properties of wood as it did the strength and durability of construction timber.  Initially it sought to create an expert system to identify the critical issues for research but soon discovered that, as Jack forcefully declaimed, there were no experts.  Instead, understanding would have to come from field work amid incinerated communities and from laboratory research into the fundamentals.

The Macon lab, excelling in combustion basics since the days of Wallace Fons and George Byram, took on topics in heat transfer and ignition.  The Riverside Lab had the problem in its backyard – an uncontrolled field experiment – ready for empirical analysis.  The Missoula lab, having sponsored the prevailing model of fire spread, should have been as vital to the WUI issue as it was to the NFDRS, but fire behavior in suburbs was not a topic that could be tested in its wind tunnels, and doubts among the knowledgeable grew about the validity of its core model, which assumed that fire spread by continuously radiating fresh fuel from an advancing flaming front.  Real fires seemed to burn in patches; there was little continuous about Rocky Mountain forests or subdivisions sprouting on a once rural countryside; and some blasted communities had their houses burned to concrete stubble while surrounding trees survived still green.  As a research topic, the WUI was ready to ignite.  Still, however dense the institutional combustibles, they did not self-combust.  They needed a firebrand.  They found it in Jack Cohen.

The disruptions from sprawl, of unthinking development destroying its own habitat, he had known from his childhood.  But throughout his career the flaming fringe had followed him like a peripheral glow.  He recalled as an undergraduate watching a documentary on the Bel Air-Brentwood fire, “Design for Disaster.”  Then he saw equivalents burn without the filter of editors.  As a new hire at the Missoula lab, he had observed, as a volunteer fireman on the ground, the Pattee Canyon fire leap through Missoula exurbs without, as he recollected, much of a flaming front.  The crownfire had dissolved into a firebrand blizzard.  As an FBO in Southern California, he had considered houses as another cache of combustibles, and again after the 1980 Panorama fire he had reconstructed the dynamics of ignition as wooden roofs broke into flame half a mile beyond the fire’s perimeter.  Such oddities of ignition had been, as it were, beyond the borders of his professional concern.  Now they began to gather into a coherent agenda of questions.

It fell to him to develop a prototype model.  What he discovered did not fit existing concepts but did follow his understanding of how science worked, by swarms of ideas searching for tests.  Ninety percent of science, he decided, was asking the right question, or expressed in combustion language, matching spark with the right tinder.  He learned that windows fractured from radiated heat before exterior walls ignited.  He found that fires did not rush across fringe suburbs like a tsunami of flame, but blew over and through them in blizzards of sparks.  Downstream of the plume or flaming front there were thousands of sparks, and even a mile away there might be scores.  With so many swirling in an ember blizzard, it was unlikely any point of vulnerability would escape.  Like the rain that falls on the just and unjust alike, the embers fell on everything.  If any way was possible to kindle a propagating fire – on a wood stairway, in a collar of pine needles around a yellow pine, amid a town dump – the swarming embers would find it.  By 1993 he had consolidated his insights into a prototype, the Structure Ignition Assessment Model, that shifted emphasis away from the flaming wildlands and onto brand-receptive houses; that also shifted the power of control from wildland agencies to what was in fact, if not acknowledged, an urban fire scene.

The insight was so counterintuitive that it seemed to defy common sense.  It was not the telegenic flaming front that took out houses, but invisible embers swarming like a cloud of flies on a deer.  As he came to dissect it, the whole WUI was a tromp d’oeil.  The problem was not about the flames but the embers, not the wildlands but the urbanizing fringe, not the woods but the houses.  To see it required a gestalt-like switch: what had once seemed like a vase became two faces.  So, too, in the mechanics of this new fire scene the lowly (or obscure) trumped the obvious (or celebrated and iconic); and that could be said equally about fire models and researchers.  But then, to Jack’s mind, it had always been the role of fundamental science to overturn common lore with positive knowledge.  The great ideas would always blow across the lines scratched in the duff by institutions.

His discoveries did not immediately fit into fire protection schemes that were, after all, and had been for most of a century, directed at halting the spreading flames.  But neither did the agenda of the Macon lab fit perceived national needs.  In 1995 the Forest Service, still consolidating its fire research programs, like a body in shock pooling blood away from peripheral limbs and into vital organs, ceded the building back to Georgia and shuttered the lab.  Jack moved back to Missoula.  The research program (SIAM) moved with him.

Throughout, he visited and investigated in detail the major WUI conflagrations; Baldwin Hills, Painted Cave, Los Alamos, Rodeo-Chediski, Hayman, Aspen, Angora, Grass Valley, Myrtle Beach, and Fourmile Canyon.  Initially he had been invited to accompany teams fielded by the NFPA.  Then he began self-deploying: he needed to see firsthand where the flame made contact.  He became, in effect, an unofficial FBO for the WUI.  More and more, the story of conflagrations proved to be a tale of tiny kindlings that grew monstrous.  Then the International Crown Fire Modeling Experiment offered an opportunity to field-test theories of radiant heat transfer and house ignition.  The trials confirmed that radiant heat – so obviously seen and felt – was a minor contributor.  What mattered to exterior walls was flame contact.  And what mattered to the textured structures that made up a house were niches to accept embers.  As a colleague phrased Jack’s argument, the embers will always find a way.

In 1999 Jack presented a paper on his findings to the International Conference on Fire Economics, and sparked an uproar of controversy when environmentalists realized that the growing emphasis on wholesale fuels treatments on public wildlands, proposed as a means to protect exurbs, misdirected attention away from what Jack had termed the Home Ignition Zone, located on private property.  His research challenged the scientific testimony behind what, following the epochal 2000 fire season, became the National Fire Plan.  He felt he had become persona non grata for appearing to question the evidence behind evolving presuppression and fuels programs.

Still, in 2002 – as record fires romped across Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon and crashed into classic sprawl – he released a popular video produced by the NFPA-Firewise program (Wildfire: Preventing Home Ignitions) that distilled what he had learned.  The core problem, he continued to insist, was protecting the structure at risk, not suppressing the fire in the wildland.  Wholesale treatments of woods, expensive and dangerous mustering of crews and engines – these could be useful but only if they did not misdirect attention from the home ignition zone.  It was the point of contact that mattered.  The rest was a distraction, and he worried that it might distract the wildland agencies from actively managing fire on the land.  That September, thanks to the National Association of State Foresters and despite rumored grumbling by his own agency, he was awarded a Golden Smokey Award for fire prevention.

At some point what ignites burns out unless it can find fresh fuel to rekindle.  Jack Cohen had always believed that research that failed to connect lab with field was unusable; now he found that research that contradicted the field might be unwelcome.  The only solution, he felt, was to return to fundamentals.

§ The non-essentials fell to the wayside.  He was asked to leave the NWCG WUI working group; pulled back from counseling FireWise, for which the NFPA had assumed responsibility; and after the Angora and Grass Valley fires, quit touring WUI sites, from which he concluded he had little more to learn.  Instead he joined colleagues like Mark Finney in a quest to unravel the mechanics of crown fire behavior, which most fire officers regarded as the big fire problem of wildlands, the one that threatened fire crews, inflicted the gravest damages and ran up costs, and, rightly or wrongly, were perceived to power megafires.  Once again, he was starting over.

The research questions were the old ones: how did such fires start and how did they spread?  But there were wrinkles involving live canopy fuels, which did not burn like saturated dry fuels but more like popcorn kernels (one reason crown fires roared).  And there were surprises regarding the difficulty of getting pine needles to burn at all through simple radiant flux.  Like fins on a radiator, needles accepted heat, and also dispersed it.  What mattered was direct flame contact.  But then Jack Cohen knew that.  It had been the story of his life.

Ignition had informed his scientific biography and whatever else of his life underwrote that narrative.  He knew that big burns could start from a single ember, that great research programs could kindle from a solitary spark of insight, and that a reformation of practice could spread from the glow of an indomitable personality.  Of course he understood well that the real power of fire was its power to propagate, and that a start could only spread if it had a suitable setting.  But what he learned over the course of his career was that propagation was itself a process of rekindling, and that a lot of embers – or a really determined one – will always find a way.

Steve Pyne

July 2012

Acknowledgements:  This profile could not have been written without the help of Jack Cohen, despite his unintended efforts in person and in print to overwhelm me with a swarm of data.  He left the wording, the conceptual insights, and the organizing conceit to me, which is to say, any errors are mine.  It was a pleasure to listen to him and to feel his radiant enthusiasm, at least some of which I hope has caused a glow.

Excepting Yellowstone, always a special case, the regional politics, and the interest to national politics, follows the money, which aligns with state boundaries.  The classic survey of Montana – Joseph Kinsey Howard’s Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943) – identifies the state with its vast plains, which would also replace its mineral wealth in silver and copper with coal and gas.  Idaho aligns with its southern irrigated farmlands within the living periphery of Deseret, the old Mormon culture region.  Wyoming is too dispersed for much beyond livestock and drilling rigs.  The three states have a collective population less than that of Los Angeles, the city not the metro region.  In terms of population density they rank 44, 48, and 49 among the 50 states.

The other fire culture regions have populations to give them heft.  California, for the all-hazard emergency service; Florida, for prescribed burning; Texas, for institutional minimalism – rank first, fourth, and second for population among the states.  That grants their fire programs political punch.  The Northern Rockies have nothing like that clout, and have invested what political muscle they have in establishing wilderness.  Yet the Northern Rockies have influenced national fire policy from the time that big burns morphed from those associated with landclearing around rural settlements to those lodged in permanent wildlands.  The conflagrations of the Northern Rockies have sent their smoke, and made their influence felt, far beyond the Cordillera.

§ The region’s demographics stalled as extractive industries matured, then self-consumed themselves away.  Mines, commodity agriculture, timber, each boom led to a bust or stagnation.  Without a manufacturing base or a local construction market, state populations flattened, or even contracted.  When the economy revived toward the end of the 20^th century, it shifted to services and tourism, and its demographic surges became seasonal rather than permanent.  What had been a regional embarrassment or liability, vast lands without permanent inhabitants, became an attraction for visitors, for environmental controversies, and for fire management.

Cultural interest, too, deepened.  The region’s self-identity had long fixated on Charlie Russell’s premodern ideals or the first encounters of explorers and trappers on the model of Lewis and Clark, Osborne Russell, and Andrew Garcia; they spoke to a natural man in a state of untrammeled nature.  As the modern economy began to focus on recreation and wilderness tourism, those renditions were retouched, updated, and recycled as a celebration of the wild.  Fire programs followed suit.  They began with fiery encounters that overwhelmed the newcomers; then underwent a hard phase of protection, or the ecological equivalent of an extractive economy; and finally eased, full of sound and fury, into an accommodation in which management meant a light hand on the land, and ultimately the illusion of lands untouched.  The landscapes become valued to the extent that they are not formally settled.

Traditionally, the greater the human investment, the greater the human interest.  In Landscape and Meaning, his meditation on how landscapes become culturally valued, Simon Schama imagined meaning free-associating and quantum-leaping from one signifier to another until the most valued lands of Earth seem like a self-referential art gallery or echo chamber of human artifice.  The paradox of the Northern Rockies is that the less obvious the human investment the deeper the social interest; in the status orderings possible among nature, the wildest achieves here the highest ranking.

This matters because fire practices ultimately derive from culture.  However much science might be rallied to bolster ideals and social wishes, the values are stirred into them so completely they cannot be separated, like sugar dissolved into coffee.  They will drive the science, not the science the norms.  In the Northern Rockies what began as a traditional frontier to be developed into garden and factory, sank instead into a void bypassed by settlement until it seemed to boosters a vague embarrassment to be hidden from view.  Then, reversing the trend outlined by Schama, in which associations pile one on another, thickening the cultural deposition like sediments of meaning, the culture picked up the other end of the yardstick and began to valorize the vacant over the settled precisely because it was not, visibly, an expression of artifice.

The choice not to act is as much an expression of values as the decision to do.  While this promises to become the defining fire story of the Northern Rockies, it demands a different kind of plot, a seeming anti-narrative in that the conflict is internalized and pivots on a decision to withhold action.  It requires deliberately stepping outside the prevailing narrative templates.  Its story pivots on a strenuous inactivity, the determination to withhold an application of power.  The struggle and conflict, which make for moral drama, is among people in institutions.  The action of the fire itself takes place off stage, as moral drama replaces physical drama.  The focus is the firefight not staged; the resolution is something that doesn’t happen; the narrative more resembles a bank run that doesn’t take place than one that convulses in panic.  Catastrophe and ruin offer the more easily engaging storyline.

For a century the region and the national fire community have known how to tell the story of big burns.  But these – the ones that have come to most define the region – don’t fit the inherited formulas, which only furthers the illusion that they occur outside culture altogether and complicates the cultural engagement they need if they are to flourish.

§  The bigger frame is the one for which Glacier National Park can serve as a cameo.  In the Northern Rockies there are two parallel chronicles of big burns.  One traces flames within wildlands.  The other, invisible in its various combustions, burns fossil biomass in machines.  The first recycles forests, prairies, and landscapes.  The second restructures societies in the way they use and value the wood, grass, and scenery of those settings.  Since the recession of the ice, the first has shaped how fire appears in the mountains.  Since the onset of industrial combustion, the second has increasingly shaped how humanity tends, replaces, amplifies, or suppresses those landscape flames.  Unlike geometric parallels, these often cross, though no narrative exists to map their braiding channels.

The region has plenty of big burns in the mountains and ample fossil fuels buried beneath the plains.  One point of crossing is that industrial fire makes possible the society that values the wild as wild.  This is not simply a matter of wealth, but of how the shift in combustion economies underwrites how a society lives on its land.  Coal, oil, and gas replace other extractive industries.  It’s not an accident that pristine nature protection (and in America, the idea of wilderness) has advanced stride by stride with a fossil-fuel civilization.  The requirement that wilderness be roadless allows the two landscapes to segregate into distinctive realms.

But there are other links that join them as well.  The use of internal combustion machinery to control free-burning fire in wildlands.  The overloading of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that seems to be leveraging big burns into mega burns.  A tourist- and recreational economy that relies on gas-powered vehicles to transport visitors from afar.  When the time came to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Bad Luck fire, the first natural fire in the national forest system, participants inspected the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness from an airplane.  In this regard the Northern Rockies stand to the country as wilderness patches do in the region.

What does not exist is a narrative to bond the two realms of fire under a common theme.  The prevailing stories are still firefights: that’s what distills character, conflict, and plot.  Yet the great contribution of the region to the national fire saga and to a global fire philosophy of theory and practice is precisely the fire left as much as possible to free-burn.  The Northern Rockies is that conception’s heartland; not just where it was tested, but where it has thrived, and from where it can spread in the form of managed wildfire.  There are long-lived programs elsewhere but none with the scope offered here.  The others are isolated on sky islands or high-elevation granite massifs, or break out here and there as boutique burns.  Outside the Northern Rockies they are, however boldly announced, a niche practice.  Fire management will rely instead on prescribed fires, or reorder wildfires to promote the black they want, and shun landscape fires that may be many times larger than the legal wilderness.

The notion and its expression on the ground will survive, or expire, in its Northern Rockies hearth.  This also means that wilderness fire, as a natural fire, will not spread much beyond those few sites where the wild is expansive.  But it may not have to.  It may be enough to have ample demonstrations of what a quasi-natural regime might look like; to show, in the field, how such fires behave and so make it possible to calibrate models and fine-tune field operations.  The real payoff may be in underwriting the contemporary doctrine that “fire is fire” and using fires of opportunity – whatever fires occur from whatever source – to get the burning done.  Such techniques would not be possible (or acceptable) without the exemplar of the wilderness fire.  They distribute by second-hand not only the experience but the grace of the wild.

§ As the National Cohesive Strategy entered phase III, the fire policy of the United States rested on a strategic triad.  One leg was prescribed fire, one was suppression hybridizing with urban fire services, and one was natural fire.  (If the Great Plains continue to blister and fry, the stool may need to become a chair with a fourth leg.)  In principle the parts of the triad are equal, but in practice they are laughably lopsided such that urban fire dominates and natural fire struggles for room to flex its muscles.  But the country needs them all.  One or the other always seems to settle between the other two.

Whether in wilderness or not, its big burns drive the Northern Rockies fire scene.  The sense in which those burns are good or bad evolves with the culture that sustains them.  Wilderness fire is not vast in area, but it influences the larger geography of American fire much as wilderness does American land use overall.  Its fires make wilderness real, that is, an operational concept, not just an ideal.  Locally, of course, such burns are big enough.  What makes them of general interest, however, is their continued capacity to influence thinking beyond the region, their ability to matter to American civilization.  But it is no less true that they engage the larger society because they matter deeply to the subculture that is the fire community.  For decades fire has remained as informing and tenacious a presence among agencies, crews, and families as it has been on the land.  For both it speaks to an integrity that is inextricable from identity.

There is a pivotal scene in the Mann Gulch tragedy when, having witnessed a blowup in the making and coming at them, Wag Dodge orders the crew to drop their packs and heavy tools.  Some had already discarded them, some held them to the end, and commentators have taken that moment as critical to their sense of what was happening since without their tools they didn’t know who they were or what they ought to do.  From the origins of wildland fire protection, its tools have told its community who they are; the enduring symbol of the Big Blowup, after all, is the pulaski.  Dodge himself evades the issue by striking a gofer match, lighting an escape fire, and inventing a new tool for the occasion.  When, in the early 1970s, fire crews were told to drop their tools, they hesitated, and not without cause.  Those big burns were still coming at them.

Over the past 40 years, although the fire culture of the Northern Rockies has learned to trade one tool for another, it has been reluctant to drop the old ones, and wary about following Dodge into a fire of his own making.  Knowing what to drop and what to pick up, and when to do it, and how to do it with blowups at your back is no simple task.  It is one generations of young men and old have faced here, where the mountains roar, and one they will certainly have to keep relearning until that vast hole in the sky, as Norman Maclean once called it, seals shut.

Steve Pyne

5 August 2012

- Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

 From Bill Bell to Bud Moore

“[Bud Moore] and I soon discovered that both of us had worked in the Lochsa when we were boys and when the Lochsa was thought to be accessible only to the best men in the woods.”

- Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

In 1930, as Bertrand Russell readied for publication his speculations about a human future driven by applied science, he inserted a counter observation from the long past.  At issue was the concept of “state of nature.”  The view that “man should live according to nature” was a conception that is “continually recurring throughout the ages,” he intoned, “though always with a different connotation.”  In practice, he concluded, “return to nature” meant the conditions that the writer knew in his youth.  That same year a 12-year-old Bud Moore, on a solitary trek, crested the Bitterroot Mountains and looked across the landscape of the Lochsa Valley.  It was a panorama that became a vision that evolved into an epiphany.  The Lochsa would inform his life.[i]

Bud Moore saw his first fire when he was six.  His father extinguished a nearby snag kindled by lightning and was paid by the Forest Service.  Young Bud fought his first fire four years after his defining Lochsa trek.  He imagined rangers like the celebrated Bill Bell as the logical successors to the free-spirited mountain men he admired as a youth.  It was a way to live within the wild.  The Forest Service had a founding legend, a comaraderie, and a code based on toughness with a call to duty that made its rangers the offspring of the western hero.  All this showed itself most spectacularly in their astonishing fight against wildfire.

In 1928 he was hired to work on the Powell District, mostly trail and telephone line maintenance, and of course on fires whenever they popped up.  Smokechasing was a mainstay of life on the Lochsa.  He met many of the legends of the Northern Rockies – Bill Bell, of course; but also Ed MacKay of the Powell, Elers Koch, Major Evan Kelly.  They were backcountry and fire men all.  He was on the line during the big Selway fires of 1934.  When World War II broke out, MacKay and Kelly recruited him to help with the guayule project in Southern California.  While there Moore enlisted with the Marines, where he found himself again fighting fire at Camp Pendleton before heading to the Pacific.  When the war ended, he returned to the Forest Service with a war-service appointment, and was assigned as an alternate ranger to the Powell, where he mostly fought fire.

Bud Moore was an American type, the self-educated boy from the frontier whose grit, talent, and instincts allowed him to rise through the ranks.  His stroke of fortune came when, soon after his return, he was “grandfathered” into a “professional” appointment as an assistant ranger without the expected education.  He oversaw the postwar development of the northern Lochsa.  Then he joined the committee of inquiry that looked at the string of tragedy fires in Southern California, in which he returned to his Marine Corps training and restated the Corps standing orders into the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders.  He went to the Washington Office as an assistant training officer, became more fully involved with fire (which is where most of the training belonged), and joined the National Fire Coordination Study that surveyed the American fire scene for the Office of Civil Defense.  In 1967, as big fires swept the Northern Rockies, Moore reviewed the scene for the national office and reaffirmed the value of initial attack.  Soon afterwards he became deputy national Director of Fire Control, and then director.  Finally, yearning for the homeland of his youth, he returned to Missoula as fire director for Region One.  When he retired in 1974 he probably knew as much about fire across the country, and from the ground up, as anyone in the USFS.

In his final tour he appreciated that the old ways couldn’t continue.  He distrusted the analogy of firefighting to battle; he knew the difference, disliked the Marine Corps’ singularity of focus and reductionism of everything to the single task at hand, which might work on a battleground but could only fail in complex landscapes.  He recognized that fire couldn’t be stopped and that in many settings more fire not less was needed.  What tipped the scale was the Wilderness Act.  He harked back to his youth and that epiphany on the Bitterroots and decided that “nothing is more needed in wilderness than fire,” certainly in the Northern Rockies.

Perhaps, too, he saw the restoration of a natural process as partial redemption for what he had done as ranger on the Powell District, for he had helped introduce the toxic worms that had eaten into the wild apple of the Lochsa.  When a spruce budworm epidemic broke out, the proposed remedy was wholesale logging; so he watched bulldozers achieve for timber companies what the Nez Perce, Army engineers, and railroad magnates had failed to do: open the Lochsa Valley to active exploitation.  It was one thing to hunt lynx and marten along traplines accessible only to snowshoes.  It was something else to push unstable slopes into once-clear trout streams and fell whole hillsides.  When the axe failed to keep up with the insects, the agency turned to DDT.  Throughout, the Forest Service continued, at enormous labor, to fight fires.  In the postwar era aircraft became an indispensable part of its armory as fire officers sought to reach ever more remote fires sooner and with ever greater power.  The aerial firefight was the mechanical equivalent to those dozer roads crashing through the wilderness.

Bud Moore had begun to doubt.  Perhaps fires were no different than free-ranging grizzlies or wolves, and the countryside was the worse for their absence.  Besides, after 60 years of attempted suppression, and 35 years since the 10 am policy had been promulgated in large measure to control the big burns of the Rockies, the policy had failed.  It was expensive, dangerous, and self-defeating.  The fires would come.  The more they were held off, the worse their sweep when they eventually kindled.  He had spent his entire life fighting fires, and still they came.  It seemed the agency might be destroying what it sought to save.  Maybe fire was not an enemy to be annihilated but a storm of nature to be accommodated and weathered like blizzards and droughts.  When the wilderness movement arrived, Moore felt a kinship with its ideals.  The upshot was the White Cap Project, chartered in 1970 for the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness; it received its first natural fire in 1972.  Two years later the Forest Service officially retitled its Division of Fire Control as the Division of Fire Management.  It was time, Bud Moore decided, to retire.

In New England, when you wish to proclaim your status and retire in the style of the countryside, you buy a colonial farmhouse.  In the South, you buy a plantation.  In Texas, a ranch.  In the Rockies, you get a cabin.  Bud Moore did one better.  He built his out of logs by hand, returning to the world he had known as a youth.  He then turned his vision into a philosophy of land ethics.  He sought to replace the timber cruising that had ripped open the Bitterroots with “eco-cruising.”  He wrote a book.  He became for a new generation what Bill Bell had been in his own youth, the beau ideal of the ranger.  He was the man the next cohort looked to for insight and approbation.  And while the University of Montana awarded him an honorary doctorate, a triumph for a man whose schooling had ended in the eighth grade, probably the greater pleasure came when the White Cap Five convened around a campfire on Cooper’s Flat in early September, 2002 for the 30^th anniversary of fire’s reintroduction to the greater Lochsa.

The restoration had been, in the deepest sense, an ethical act, and it had been one designed to pass the torch from one generation to another.  It was not only about the wild but about initiating the young into it.  “To me,” Bud Moore confirmed at his retirement, “most of all the Forest Service is the eager uncertainty of young men and women as they confront an old pro at their first job in the woods.”[ii]

From Bud Moore to Bob Mutch

“Could you expect less from a boy who grew up in the woods and grew old as a schoolteacher and so spent most of his life staying close to the young who are elite and select and, by definition, often in trouble?  I came to Mann Gulch expecting to catch glimpses of them as far as they could go.  That’s why I came.”

- Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

It’s a long way, in more than geography, from Cleveland, Ohio to Paradise Guard Station in the Selway country.  But it’s a leap Bob Mutch made first in his mind as a boy, then as a smokejumper, and finally as lead scientist on the White Cap Project.  What imprinted on his childhood memory were the woods around that gritty city.  What initiated him into his mature years were wildfires in the Northern Rockies.  They merged, as they had for Bud Moore, into an epiphany that became an ethos.

From Cleveland suburbs Bob went to Albion College and decided he wanted to be a forester.  In 1953, at the age of 19, he joined a blister rust crew at St Maries, Idaho, close to ground zero of the Great Fires of 1910, and it was fire that “rescued” him from a grueling summer of plucking Ribes like gooseberry along endless transects.  That first fire demanded a long hike into the Salmon River country and concluded with a magnificent panorama.  He tasted his first coffee, served by logging crews impressed for fireline duty.  He met some smokejumpers from Missoula.  The next year he joined them – a member of the first class in the new Aerial Fire Depot, which President Eisenhower dedicated that September.  His two years on the cadre were slow but Bob made his first jump, the Ballinger Point fire, in the Selway-Bitterroot primitive area.  He was hooked.  He enrolled at the University of Montana for a graduate degree in forestry.

He moved into research.  He worked at the Priest River Experiment Station – Harry Gisborne’s stomping grounds – and when the Missoula lab opened in 1960, he was among its first hires.  Meanwhile, he remained active in making knowledge relevant to fire protection by serving as a fire behavior officer on an overhead crew.  But the sense gnawed at him that something was missing, that the era of fighting every fire everywhere and of ramping up research to help fight them and even (among one of the founding objectives of the Missoula lab) trying to suppress lightning in order to stop ignitions, could not continue.  Something was fundamentally out of alignment.

His personal annus mirabilis came in 1970.  He published in Ecology an article – his most famous – that reversed the usual conception of fire adaptation.  The Mutch hypothesis argued that plants not only adapt to protect themselves from fire, but some can be seen to promote fire; that flammability, paradoxically, can confer selective advantage to those plants better adapted to recover from them.  The subtext was, fire is not just something out in nature like ice storms or floods against which species must shield themselves, but something that has emerged out of a long co-evolution to which plants themselves contributed.  Fire was not simply the outcome of climate and fuels but expressed complex biological processes.  The upshot was, suppressing fire is not only unnatural but disruptive to precisely those species that have most accommodated it.  At the same time, Bob saw a flyer at the lab soliciting a “wilderness planner” for an experiment in natural fire management.  His application went to Bud Moore, by that time Region One director of Fire Control.  Bob Mutch joined Dave Aldrich to create the plans behind the White Cap Project that would begin restoring fire to biotas that needed it.  If insights were meaningful, they had to find expression on the ground.

The two men traveled to Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park to see firsthand the earliest trials of letting fires burn.  In 1971 they joined Moore, Bill Worf, and Orville Daniels – what became known later as the White Cap Five – on a trek into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to discuss their conceptions on site.  The following summer the program got approval as an exception to the 10 am policy; the next day the Bad Luck fire provided nature’s imprimatur; a year later the Fitz Creek fire blew up, tested ideas and resolve, and confirmed the program.  The year following, having completed what he regarded as his life’s task, Bud Moore retired.  In 1977 when fire research sought to relocate him to the Riverside lab, Bob balked, and instead transferred to the fire staff of the Lolo National Forest.  When, the next year, the Forest Service officially renounced the 10 am policy, he was in a position to advise that fire-rich forest with fresh plans.  He was where he wanted to be, the place that most melded head, heart, and hands.

When he left, he traded the Bitterroots for the world.  In 1986 he accepted an assignment in the Washington Office as the first program manager for the Disaster Assistance Support Program through which the Forest Service satisfied requests from the State Department.  He became, in effect, America’s IC for responding to fire and other emergency requests throughout the world; but it was, as Moore’s first WO assignment had been, an educational as much as an operational mission.  For five years he set up train-the-trainer programs, oversaw specialists to help control locusts, counter famines, respond to hurricanes, and of course cope with wildfires; fire specialists or equipment went to Latin America, China, and even the Galapagos.  In 1988 he self-deployed to the Yellowstone bust, effectively bringing the world home.  Throughout, he was once again translating knowledge into practice.  He continued for five years, then recycled back to the Missoula lab as a specialist in technology transfer.  From time to time that included overseas assignments.

It was in Brazil in 1994 that it all came together.  Suddenly, while drinking beer with a Brazilian bombeiro, he had another epiphany that he believed “could also appear as [his] epitaph.”  His life’s purpose could be summed up in six words: “finding harmony among people and ecosystems.”  That meant putting fire back where it belonged; stopping fire where it didn’t; and keeping those who managed fire safe.  The discovery brought “a sense of closure and satisfaction” to his career.  Although the terms had morphed – “land” had become “ecosystems,” and “technology transfer” had replaced “passing along what you know” – the sentiment was nonetheless interchangeable with Bud Moore’s vision, or with Russell’s.  It conveyed both a mission and a morality.  That year Bob Mutch retired.

He remained active, opening up a consultancy, accepting assignments from the World Bank and FAO that took him to Bulgaria, Ethiopia, India, Mongolia, and (many times) to Brazil.  He spoke often at training sessions and conferences.  But his most fulfilling moment, hands down, across his 59-year career in fire was his work in the White Cap where he harmonized, at least in principle, people and ecosystems.  Before retiring he bought land outside in the West Fork and built a cabin.  In 2002 he joined the White Cap Five for a 30^th anniversary of the Bad Luck fire.  Still able to do so, he returned a decade later for the 40^th.  By then, the torch had passed beyond the West Fork.

Beyond 40

“It is a great privilege to possess the friendship of a young man who is as good or better than you at what you intended to be when you were his age…It is as if old age fortuitously had enriched your life by letting you live two lives, the life you finally chose to live and a working copy of the one you started out to live.

- Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

That a man might treasure the moment of his initiation into manhood is common enough, especially if it involves a hard physical trial, and there is little novel if he should identify it with a place, particularly one as overpowering as the Selway-Bitterroots that can boost a routine coming-of-age saga into a vision-quest.  That it might crystallize into a code for living is less typical, but far from rare.  What Bud Moore and Bob Mutch and uncounted others experienced has counterparts elsewhere throughout the fire community and beyond.

What distinguishes the Northern Rockies is not the individual moment of revelation but its transfer across generations.  Only the South with its tradition of handing down burning from parent to child has a comparable social character.  Its inter-generational theme (even across cultures) may be the most unusual feature of the Lochsa story and of fire in the Northern Rockies generally.  It reverberates in campfire stories, memoirs, and ceremony; and it inscribes an interlinear text in the region’s most prominent fire writer, Norman Maclean.  “USFS, 1919,” one of the tales in A River Runs Through It, is his coming of age story under the gaze of Bill Bell.  Young Men and Fire, his mediation about the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy is about old men as well as young, and the connections between them as the young man ages, and the aged author tries to explain something about the universe.  The book opens with Maclean’s youth, then seeks to rescue the memory of the youths lost at Mann Gulch, and throughout accents his relationship with Laird Robinson as they pull each other along, one relying on the wisdom of more than his Biblically allotted six-score-and-ten years and the other on the residual vitality of youth.  The cycle of fire in the Northern Rockies involves generations of people as much as scorched conifers.

Often the hand-over occurs within families.  The federal land agencies have long displayed a quasi-caste quality akin to military families in which children, having grown up on bases, follow their parents’ career.  The record of second- or third-generation fire officers is striking.  It may be that the region’s generational theme will become still more genealogical, particularly after the Forest Service underwent a wrenching court-mandated demographic shift as a result of the 1981 consent agreement that brought in large numbers of minorities, notably women.  The agency had to find new ways to move people rapidly through the ranks; the newcomers were often older, better educated, and not drawn from traditional or common pools of experience; they could not wait for the inherited processes of initiation.  The saying in Region One used to be, Until you’d been on a hundred fires, you kept your mouth shut.  That would not be possible with the volume of workforce turnover.  Instead, continuity may come through family lines rather than bureaucratic ones.

Maybe, or maybe not.  For a hundred years, however, the lore of the Lochsa has passed from old to young.  In 1971 Bob Mutch began taking his children, Dale, Brian, and Linda, with him when he backpacked into the SBW.  His daughter, Linda, was 10 when she first trekked with him.  Growing up she studied fire, worked summers on fire crews when she went to college, worked two seasons on fire-related projects for the Park Service in Alaska and then in Sequoia-Kings Canyon’s Big Trees before migrating into wilderness inventory and monitoring.  At the 30^th anniversary of the Bad Luck fire, she spoke about how the trails taken in the White Cap had become a career path.  And when in the summer of 2012 the Salamander fire free-burned on the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Bud Moore’s son, Bill, was a volunteer staffing the Salmon Mountain Lookout to report its movements.

Steve Pyne

August 2012

Acknowledgements: I need to thank Bob Mutch for sharing his career during a long conversation and for graciously allowing me to poach on his own literary plans to describe his experiences in the SBW.

Classic Glacier panorama, here across Bowman Lake

Glacier appears like a patch of prelapsarian nature still fresh from the Pleistocene.  Everything about the place screams monumental, a vast sculpture garden from Nature’s Romantic age.  Its fundamentals seem far removed from human meddling.  Snow, ice, streams, lakes; water hard, water soft, water flowing, water still; chiseling, caressing, abrading, covering – here water in all its forms acts on an upswelling of rock to make what most viewers would regard as an ur-scene of natural grandeur.  Even amid the Rockies, the massif is striking, like a glacial erratic left from the ice age, moved not over space but through time.  So immense are the domes and peaks that the cliff-covering forests appear like a veneer of lichens and those in valleys like moss.  They frame the core scene like vignettes in an illuminated manuscript.  Once the place was discovered, the founding question was never whether it deserved to be a national park, only when and how.

Yet Glacier’s story is equally one of fire.  The park was birthed amid the Big Blowup, its fires have repeatedly influenced the National Park Service, and its future may well be decided by the Big Burn of industrial combustion.

§ When Major William R. Logan arrived to assume his post as superintendent of the newly authorized national park, Glacier was burning.  It was an outlier of 1910′s Great Fires, but the fires threatened the park’s entry and core.  The Forest Service assumed control, assisted by the Great Northern Railway.  Perhaps 100,000 acres burned.  Another 50,000 acres within the park burned in the regional fire bust of 1919.

Its fire regime has a northern rhythm.  A big burn comes every decade or two, and the administering agency finds itself with too large a fire organization in the off years and too small a staff in the hot ones.  What has aggravated the scene is the feudal nature of the national parks, which is less a system than a coalition of baronies, each park separately created and governed.  Not until 1916 did the country create a civilian agency, the National Park Service, to assume responsibility from the U.S. Army.  With its scattered holdings, the NPS found it hard to match fires and staffing.  There were few buffers and backups; unlike the Forest Service, it did not have access to emergency funding for firefighting; and the administrative apparatus could crack when its dispersed political structure, which could not muster much collective response, met a northern fire economy in which the extreme years drove the system.  In this way Glacier both miniaturized and exaggerated the national conundrum.  As a big fire could upend Glacier, so a big-fire year at Glacier could unbalance the National Park Service.

Just that happened in 1926.  In 1910 the park had essentially no staff when the fires began; in 1919, it was still a fledgling, finding its wings as a civilian agency; but in 1926 Glacier was a relatively mature park and one of the system’s crown jewels.  Several fires began outside the boundary, and one burned across the western border on 7 July.  Public complaints led the Department of Interior to dispatch Horace Albright, then assistant director of the Service, to handle them.  Then on 31 July a fire started from an exploding gas tank on a salvage logging operation within the park that swelled around Howe Ridge into the Lake McDonald fire, and high winds on 5 August then sent another fire, the West Huckleberry, over the north slopes of Apgar Mountain and into the Lake McDonald burn.  The two fires merged, blew up, burned over 50,000 acres, and cost $230,000 to fight (nearly $3 million in 2012 dollars).  Without emergency funds to draft from, the firefight caused the Park Service to shutter some parks to pay the bills.  The 1926 fire season was, by almost any measure, a disaster – financially, administratively, politically.

The big burn worked on the NPS much as the Big Blowup had the Forest Service.  It made a local issue into a national one, a move boosted the next year by the establishment of the Forest Protection Board to oversee the federal government’s commitments on forested land and fire protection.  The FPB required fire plans, of which the NPS had none.  Planning demanded someone knowledgeable to write plans and administer them.  The Service recruited John D. Coffman from the Mendocino National Forest, a man toughened by fights with local ranchers over light burning and familiar with duBois’ concepts of systematic fire protection, which had been devised for California.  He focused on a national scheme to satisfy the Forest Protection Board with a report released in 1928, and the creation of a fire organization at Glacier to prevent a repeat of the 1926 debacle and furnish an exemplar for the system overall.  The outcome could do for the national parks what duBois’ treatise had done for the national forests.  In early 1929 he and chief ranger F.L. Carter wrote that fire plan.

Still, in 1929, as Albright became director, the NPS’s national fire organization amounted to Coffman, a solitary fire guard at Sequoia National Park, and the planned operation at Glacier.  By August fires had again invaded the park.  The Half Moon fire, started outside the west boundary in logging slash, burned over 100,000 acres (50,000 in the park) and cost the Service $120,000 to contain.  Coffman again appealed to Forest Service techniques, this time a style of postfire analysis, to critique the Glacier fire program.  The review became, like the park’s fire plan, a model for the Service.  The Northern Rockies’ big burns worked on the National Park Service as they had the Forest Service.

Then the fires began to fade away.  The fulcrum was the Civilian Conservation Corps, begun in 1933, which at Glacier fielded 1,278 enrollees organized into nine camps over the next eight years.  The CCC erected much of the infrastructure of the park, including its fire program.  Enrollees even removed thousands of acres of unsightly snags killed by the 1929 burn.  The 1935 and 1936 drought years racked up most of the burned acres, 5456 and 7722 (the Heavens Peak fire claimed 7,600), respectively; but together they amounted to a third of the area burned by the Half Moon fire.  The 1936 outbreak destroyed park facilities at Many Glacier, led to mutual-aid agreements with the Blackfeet Indian Agency, and inspired a Service-wide review of every park’s fire program, the promulgation of national guidelines for protection, and accelerated training for CCC crews.  In the 1940s, despite wartime drafts on manpower, the largest fire, the Curly Bear of 1945, burned only 289 acres.  By the end of the war aerial fire control replaced the lost camps of the CCC.  Smokejumpers were attacking fires by 1946; in 1953 aerial reconnaissance was supplanting all but a small handful of lookouts.  Meanwhile, visitors started far fewer fires, and the national forests were better at holding fires before they could break over the boundary.  The 1950s had only one bad year, 1958, when 33 fires accounted for 3,000 acres.

In 1963, as the Leopold Report introduced the fire revolution to the National Park Service, only 12.3 acres burned.  Over the next years even that annual acreage fell by two orders of magnitude: 0.0 acres, 0.1 acres, 0.2 acres.  Glacier National Park had become what Albright and Coffman intended – a model of fire’s exclusion.  When Glacier published a new fire plan in 1965, it retained the 10 AM policy as its lodestone.  The park’s residual fires seemed as much a relic of a former age as its mountain glaciers.

Recent burns along the western border of the park

§  The illusion vanished in 1967.  Big burns returned to the Rockies, and two of them slammed into Glacier.  On 11 August drought and dry lightning kindled 20 fires; other storms ignited another 15.  Two grew large, and both swept through lands that had burned in earlier conflagrations.  The Flathead fire chewed through the Apgar and Huckleberry mountains, the scene of the 1926 burn, and whipsawed by the wind-shear of cold fronts spilled outside the park boundaries.  The Glacier Wall fire burned across the region of the 1936 Heaven’s Peak fire.  Between them the fires consumed 12,330 acres.  The park threw everything it had at them.

Glacier was as well endowed for fire control as any unit of the National Park Service, but it could hardly cope with burns on a scale it hadn’t seen for 30 years, and since the region was up in smoke with more than 30 fires over a thousand acres, there was little reserve it could call upon from allies.  The park responded by hiring what labor and equipment it could (3,500 men), it brought in overhead teams including the best fire officers in the NPS, ordered helicopters and National Guard units, authorized whatever means were necessary, expended $2.5 million, and after the smoke cleared hosted an elaborate postfire review.  The siege went on for 62 grueling days.

What prompted the review was political attention.  Local inholders primarily gave Senator Burton Wheeler a club with which to beat the NPS, while the more sympathetic Senator Mike Mansfield had to respond to constituents as well; the Washington Office had to reply.  The intent of the two day review was to demonstrate that the Park Service was serious about fire suppression (“fire is today, without a doubt, the greatest threat against the scenic grandeur of our National Parks”); that it had done everything possible to beat back the two big burns; and that Glacier remained a crown jewel not only of scenery but of effective administration.  A primary conclusion from Superintendent Keith Neilson was that the major failure lay in public relations, in not getting the proper information to the press and public.[i]

Yet through the course of the discussion there were queries, mostly a subtext, about the wisdom of sending in a phalanx of bulldozers, particularly against the Glacier Wall fire.  Les Gunzel voiced the most emphatic concern.  The Flathead fire threatened developed areas and private cabins and had been burned over at twice in park history; the dozers were warranted.  At Glacier Wall they only wrecked havoc, and left scars far more vicious than burned snags.  He wanted explicit guidelines.  Others, not in the firefight, looked from the Leopold Report to the costly wreckage and wondered why in the remoter areas the fires were being fought at all.[ii]

The next year the Service published its famous Green Book for the administration of natural areas, which replaced the 10 AM policy with options drawn from Leopold Report recommendations, including the need to restore fire, through natural means where possible, through prescribed burning where otherwise necessary.  The effects were felt most immediately in the Sierra parks, particularly Sequoia (a proponent of light burning in its early years) and at Saguaro (where Gunzel was chief ranger).  Yellowstone rewrote its fire plan in 1972.  Glacier was slower; after all it had been a centerpiece of Park Service suppression for almost half a century or nearly all the existence of the NPS.  The new policy nudged forward in 1974, and a revised fire plan in 1978 put forth some tentative feelers while still supporting suppression.  In 1980 the fire organization drew a zone of 100,000 acres in upper elevations for natural fire; it was a safe strategy in part because there were no fires.  In 1983-84, in association with researchers at the Missoula lab, it experimented with a few prescribed fires.  Other parks, many much smaller (and perhaps more nimble) or with fewer fire problems, were experimenting boldly with the new options.  The era pointed to Wind Cave, Saguaro, even Rocky Mountain.  But Glacier – a big status park with a history of big burns – was a laggard.  When the 1988 season rolled over the Rockies, it attacked all starts.  Even so, some 27,520 acres burned, the largest since 1936, although the Yellowstone fires mesmerized the national audience and deflected political attention away from Glacier’s blowup as it did the Canyon Creek fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness which shot out of the mountains and overran tens of thousands of acres.

This time serious reform followed from the postfire reviews not of Glacier’s fire bust but of Yellowstone’s.  Every park with any aspiration of incorporating natural fire had to rewrite its fire plans.  Glacier completed the task in 1991.  It zoned patches for prescribed natural fires and conducted some low-complexity burns in Big Prairie, an isolated ponderosa pine savanna.  But the push was on for more black: the program needed to show some burned acres.  Then, as so often before, a fire in Glacier rippled throughout the system.  The year was 1994, a season notorious mostly for running up the first billion dollar suppression budget and for the catastrophic South Canyon fire outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  Those events, as emergencies are wont to do, overshadowed at the time what happened at Glacier, which pivoted on a managed fire not a crisis.  By sucking attention like stars into a black hole, they granted Glacier and the NPS some political space.

The Howling fire began on June 23, 1994 from a lightning strike on the North Fork of the Flathead River near the park’s western border.  At the time Glacier was one of a handful of parks with the size, funding, and clout to allow prescribed natural fires.  A large burn, the Starvation Creek fire, which burned across the Canadian border, was under the direction of an IMT.  Suppression resources were strained.  To oversee the Howling PNF the Park Service assembled an ad hoc team to predict the fire’s behavior and plan for contingencies.  The Howling fire did not blow up, and by late August was blocked to the east by two other fires, both wildfires, but both controlled through a confinement strategy.  They three fires burned together.  After the Starvation Creek fire was controlled, the Howling PNF overhead team assumed control for it as well.  For 75 days the team stayed with the fire until responsibility was ceded to the park.  It burned for 138 days.[iii]

The recession and return of fire by decade

By accident, necessity, and daring the Howling PNF experience demonstrated how to cope with long-duration fires by substituting fire behavior knowledge for heavy machinery, trading land for options to maneuver, and adapting opportunities presented by nature to the strategic purposes of the park.  They began by making the best of an awkward situation.  They ended by inventing a new mode of operation.  The 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy received its momentum from the shock of the South Canyon tragedy and the season’s cost in lives, dollars, and burned area.  But the outcome led to a steady liberalization of how to handle wildfires that dissolved the PNF in favor of the wildland fire use or resource benefit fires.  Out of the Howling PNF team emerged the idea behind fire use managers and modules.  To the architects of those ambitions the Howling fire was the proof-of-concept test.  Once again, without drawing national attention, Glacier had helped reform how the country would tend its fires.

Still, not until Glacier amended its fire management plan in 1998 did it fully leap into new era.  Within a year it was managing the large Anaconda fire as a WFU.  During the 2000 season, which ravaged so much of the Northern Rockies, Glacier suppressed the fires it received, but selectively, letting many blow out into rocks.  The next year it accepted – it had little choice, really – the Moose fire from the Flathead National Forest, then 43,000 acres and let it burn itself out for another 28,000 acres until it hit the site of the Anaconda and expired.  The breakout year, however, came in 2003.

The fires grouped into seven complexes for a total of 145,000 acres, or 13% of the park; two of the complexes, the Robert and Wedge Canyon, burned 45,659 acres in adjacent national forests.  The Robert rambled over the Apgar Mountains and Howe Ridge, the scene of the 1925, 1926, and 1929 Half Moon burns.  The Trapper fire reburned much of the 1936 Heavens Peak and the 1967 Glacier Wall fires.  To protect against the Wedge Canyon fire, Parks Canada bulldozed a line 100 feet wide and 10 miles long just north of the international border.  Fighting the fires would have been hopeless – there were too many fires in the region and too few suppression resources to throw at those in Glacier.  The park felt instead that it could manage those it had; use the techniques it had pioneered on he Howling fire; keep the burns out of headquarters; let them do their ecological work in the backcountry.  Its neighbors were still evolving toward such notions.  They all had different standards and NEPA approvals.  In 2003 Glacier burned more acres than in any year since its creation.[iv]

Glacier had gotten its black, and then more.  In 2006, despite attempt to suppress it from the onset, the Red Eagle fire blew up to 19,153 acres in the park before blasting out the park’s eastern borders for another 15.050 acres on the Blackfeet Nation.  By the time the 2010 fire management plan had coded the new strategies into bureaucratic language, some concerns were being voiced by Resource Management officers that there might be enough fire for a while, that the park could use a few years to assimilate what it had, that it might think about protecting some rare or old-growth patches in the name of biodiversity regardless of whether free-ranging fire, however natural, might be prepared to take them.

To some observers the value of a pause pointed to the future, that fire management needed to serve goals beyond getting the black, that this was not Big Burn National Park.  To others, however, the real concern was not the fires recycling lodgepole pine or cleaning out western red cedar groves.  It was that other big burn, the one that was driving out the glaciers.

Glacier’s eastern portal, burned in 2005

§  Much of the Glacier National Park story is about boundaries.  The park itself was created by slashing out a big chunk of the Blackfeet Reservation.  Its northern perimeter traces the international border with Canada.  It’s flanked elsewhere by private holdings and national forests.  These are not borders that matter to fire.

For its early years the park’s fire problem was to keep fires that started outside from burning in.  More recently it’s to keep fires that start within the park from burning out.  As national forests like the Flathead move away from extractive industry to recreation and wilderness, their aligned goals have allowed for more mutual fire plans.  Park and forest can accept fires from one another and to redraw their management strategies to work with fire behavior considerations rather than against them.[v]  The northern border delimits different thinking about how to restore fire, which trace alternative conceptions about what parks mean.  Parks Canada, under guidelines to enhance ecological integrity, favors prescribed fire, even high-intensity burns.  The National Park Service leans toward letting natural fires, or loose-herded wildfires, do the job.  The eastern border with the Blackfeet Nation is tougher since prevailing winds will drive fires – crown fires – from the park outward.  Proposals surface from time to time to construct a fuel break along the perimeter, but it would take a swath a mile wide to break the chain of wind-borne spots.  Today, every entry into the park is burned.  What a visitor first sees at Glacier National Park is a scorched land.

The most interesting border is along the south, particularly the main ingress at West Glacier.  The entry itself, through a small town on private land, is unburned.  Behind it, however, at the visitor center and concession area, lies Apgar Mountain and the backdrop to Lake McDonald, Howe Ridge, and these were burned over in 2003.  Yet the most significant fire scar lies outside the West Glacier complex: it’s an overpass for the BNSF Railway.  Visitors must drive under it to enter the park.  Its predecessor, the Great Northern, was instrumental in promoting the park, or in other words, the park as park is partly an artifact of steam.  It’s not simply academic muttering to suggest that this industrial gateway too is a portal of fire.

The eponymous glaciers for which the park is named also represent a blurry border, in this case of climate or of climate inscribing geologic epochs.  The end of the Pleistocene, and the onset of the Holocene, is usually reckoned at 10,000-11,500 years ago when the latest interglacial became undeniable.  But the fundamentals behind the ice ages did not change then.  The Sun radiated as it had before; the Milankovitch cycles, with their stretching, tilting, and wobbling, continued; no replumbing of Earth’s heat transfer machinery occurred equivalent to Pleistocene-onset shutting of the Isthmus of Panama.  By geologic standards the Holocene is simply another warm period within a 2.6 million-year-old climatic wavetrain of chillings and warmings.  The ice should return.  In fact, by some accountings, it should have already begun to mound up.  Instead of still-shrinking glaciers we should be witnessing spreading ones.

We don’t, because the ice didn’t.  The Little Ice Age did not metastasize into a full-blown glaciation.  Instead, the planet has warmed.  It continues to warm in defiance of geologic history.  The evidence grows that the cause for the warming is humanity, or more precisely, a change in how Earth’s keystone fire species conducted its business.  We shifted from a primary emphasis on burning surface biomass to burning fossil biomass.  That pyric transition has taken vast amounts of stored lithic carbon and released it as gases.  The Earth could adapt to changes in the rhythms and scale of burning grasses, shrubs, and forests; it has done so for over 400 million years.  It could not adjust to the sudden upheaval in planetary combustion, or rather, it is undergoing a slow accommodation that will take centuries.  So remarkable and recent has this revolution been that many observers believe the contemporary scene deserves its own geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, which begins in the late 18^th century when fossil fuel combustion becomes more than locally significant.  For fire history this redrawing of the geologic timescale is akin to the arbitrary geographic bounding of places like Glacier National Park.

The park’s mountain glaciers are shriveling.  The USGS estimates that the original site held 150 glaciers in 1850, and that in 1910, when the park was formally founded, all were still present.  In 2010 only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres still existed.  Some prognoses suggest that all the permanent ice will be gone in another 50 years.  As a scenic spectacle and geologic presence, the collapsing glaciers are being replaced by conflagrations.  The ice age is yielding to a fire age.[vi]

The two epochs differ, and not just in their temperatures.  The propagating fire is not simply an inverse of the melting glacier.  Glaciers rise and fall according to purely physical conditions.  For fires to shrink or spread the ambient temperature, or climate generally, must refract through ecological systems and human societies.  Still, ice and fire can’t coexist.  As the ice recedes, plants will reclaim that land, and as conditions favor, they will burn.  There are few ways to stanch the retreat of the glaciers.  There are many ways to intervene in the prospect of burning woods.  The future of fire management at Glacier will likely hinge on how to understand that pyric border and manage across it.  Wildland fire management can do little with the deep drivers; it can no more halt fossil-fuel combustion than it can sprawl of development behind the WUI.  It can, however, cope with the consequences.

Glacier fire atlas, 1967-present

§ The fire economy of the Northern Rockies is one of episodic big burns in which capabilities are almost inevitably out of sync with needs.  There are too many pulaskis on hand during the slow years and not enough during the peak ones.  Recurring crises push institutions to move responsibility up the chain of authority; like wars or emergencies big fires tend to centralize power.  Yet the issue is no longer how to stop such fires but how to live them and in places restore them in ways that help the habitat without burning down human settlements.  The thrust is toward landscape-scale management, a geography larger than the biggest burns.

In the future, the park must think similarly across temporal scales.  The real economy of fire, like the dual portal at West Glacier, must include internal combustion as well as free-burning flame.  The combustion of fossil fuels is the big burn that will shape the future.  How to draw boundaries around it is far from clear.

Steve Pyne

July 2012

Acknowledgements: I want to thank Dennis Divoky, fire ecologist, for devoting an afternoon at the end of a busy week to a tutorial on Glacier fire, and to Deirdre Shaw, archivist, for help in identifying and copying a stack of relevant historical documents.  Glacier is remarkable in having records, exemplary in its ability to access them, and exceptional in the willingness of its staff to make them available.  They made me feel like a historian up to his elbows in paper rather a journalist dependent only on oral interviews.

But it was never clear what exactly they signified and why they mattered.  Were they important because they changed American policy and practice, and made visible those reforms because they occurred at Yellowstone?  Or were they a celebrity event, made important because they happened at a landscape with global cachet?  Are they known today because they reshaped the American fire scene, or because, like celebrity itself, they are known for being known?

§ A box score of the fire season more or less speaks for itself.  The region experienced 4,168 fires that burned 2,175,903 acres.  On 10 September some 15,700 personnel were deployed against them, roughly 9,500 at Yellowstone.  Air operations racked up 24,950 hours of flight time.  Within the Greater Yellowstone Area 1,061,995 acres lay within fire perimeters, of which maybe 30-40% remained unburned.  Estimated costs for the GYA fires begin at $120 million.  Media coverage ran to untold numbers of words and film footage; by the end of July the fires had become a fixture of the national news, and remain so.  Before the Yellowstone blowup a big western fire might get noticed typically for a night or two.  Yellowstone, being Yellowstone, fire coverage went on night after night after night for over six weeks, the longest-running televised serial in American fire history.   Black Saturday, 20 August, the anniversary of the Big Blowup, saw the fires double in size.  On 7 September flames washed over Old Faithful and threatened developments laid down from the days when the U.S. cavalry ran the park.[i]

The symbolism was overpowering, but it was also oddly indeterminate, as shape-shifting as the flames.  It just was.  The bust was destined to be politicized, an outcome worsened by an election year and photo ops.  Out of its ash reviews sprouted like Morrell mushrooms.  Within the fire community discussion went on and on, rather like the newscasts, but for years.  Unquestionably, the 1988 fires – the Yellowstone fires, as they became known in shorthand – were a big event.  By most standards they were the biggest since 1910.  To some minds they constituted a second Big Blowup.

In size and shock value that is likely true.  And like the Great Fires of 1910 those of 1988 overwhelmed the system as the need to act blew over plans, ideals, preparations, and existing knowledge.  Expert opinions about how the fire season would evolve and the probable final acreage burned went up in convective plumes unlike any the old fire dogs and new computer-equipped wizards had ever seen or could imagine.  (On 1 August Dick Rothermel predicted that 200,000 acres would burn in the GYA.  Don Despain announced that the fires would soon run out of fuel.  They were off by a factor of five.)  Nor could fire agencies any more control raging public opinions and social consequences than they could the flames, although they rallied around both the notion of fire’s restoration and the valor of the firefight that followed.  After the Big Blowup, the dissenters were few.  While Elers Koch might despair that the Forest Service had suffered a rout, most rangers and supporters of government-sponsored conservation followed the lead of Gus Silcox who argued that with more resources and better public support fire suppression could be made to work.  So, after the Blowup of 1988, skeptics were brushed aside as an ill-informed sect.  With renewed commitment the larger project of the fire revolution could succeed.  The Yellowstone conflagration became, in fact, the squeaky wheel that brought a lot of grease to the National Park Service.[ii]

Enough time has passed that a more textured historical comparison is possible.  After all the outcomes to big events are known by their contexts, and they may evolve over several decades.  It took 25 years for the aftershocks of the Big Blowup to make themselves felt.  As we approach the 25^th anniversary of the Yellowstone burns, it’s a good time to survey the setting for what the fires did and haven’t done.  While a too-close reading hedges into historical astrology, consider the pre- and post-fire chronologies as parallel texts amenable to benign glossing.

A scan might look like this.  The national forests began in 1891, and received an organic act in 1897.  The Big Blowup occurred, respectively, 19 and 13 years later.  The National Park Service adopted the Green Book for administering its natural areas in 1968, and Yellowstone fashioned its new-order fire plan in 1972, or 20 and 16 years, respectively, before the 1988 blowout.  A year after the Great Fires of 1910, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which created the federal-state infrastructure for fire protection and Coert duBois published the precepts that would underlie Systematic Fire Protection in California, which would guide universal planning for fire protection.  In the year following Yellowstone’s burns, an interagency committee both reaffirmed and rechartered federal fire policy, after which all of the public domain lands with natural fire programs had to reboot according to the new software over the next few years.  The upshot of the Big Blowup, the 10 am policy, was promulgated in 1935, or 25 years later.  The National Cohesive Strategy, intended to shape national fire policy, was announced in 2011, or 23 years after Yellowstone.  If you want to argue that the Yellowstone fires had a catalytic impact comparable to the Great Fires of 1910, you can make a case.

Still, you don’t need allusions and comparative scenarios to identify the Yellowstone bust as a major moment in American fire history.  The bust led directly to a review of federal policy, and brought fire into the radar screen of the GAO.  The evolution of a common federal policy as distinct from a collection of reforms among individual agencies came out of the ashes of the North Fork, Clover-Mist, and Wolf Lake complexes.  To upgrade capabilities the National Park Service, in particular, received a boost in funds and attention that helped propel it into the vanguard of fire programs for the next decade.  The Yellowstone fires diverted attention from the Canyon Creek fire that might have compromised the natural fire program of the Forest Service, and so granted the USFS some space for maneuvering.

Mostly, the fires brought home to the American public, as probably nothing else could, the significance and practical consequences of the fire revolution.  The reformation meant that iconic places like Yellowstone would burn – would need to burn.  A broad understanding followed and largely took root, like the mass postfire reseeding by lodgepole pine.  The message propagated nationally, and internationally.  The Yellowstone example stood as a global exemplar, for good or ill.  Much as its convective columns spewed ash downwind, the fires sent images and information around the Earth through the plumes of TV, popular print, and technical journals.

Within a year it was clear that the revolution had withstood the test.  Its message, if not the particulars of its policy, had passed through the flames.  Twenty years later that conviction – that Yellowstone mattered – warranted a convocation of those concerned under the rubric of a Tall Timbers conference.  There is good reason to believe that by 2038 historians will judge the Big Blowup of 1988 as an event of major stature, if not quite comparable to that of 1910.  Yellowstone’s partisans, and they are many, would demand nothing less.

And yet the second Big Blowup was a lesser echo.  The Great Fires of 1988 did not splice themselves into agency DNA as those of 1910 did.  When the Big Blowup struck, the Forest Service was a fledgling composed, as one member put it, almost wholly of young men.  When the 1988 fires hit, Yellowstone had been a park for 116 years, had known fire protection for 102, and was overseen by an agency 72 years old.  Nor was the NPS positioned in 1988 to influence national policy as the Forest Service was after 1910.  The Yellowstone fires did not reform policy, and did not instruct the fire community beyond the fact that it did not know as much about extreme fire as it thought and needed to engage the public better in its deliberations; they did not redirect the course of American fire history.  Efforts went into defending the program, holding to what had been gained, not advancing it.  Still, if the NPS could not use the Yellowstone fires to promote the future, it did not cave in to demands from the past.  The firelines on the ground failed.  Those in the mind, and in policy, held.

The big difference is that the Great Fires of 1988 did not have an Ed Pulaski to symbolize its terrors and resolve, or to codify its lessons in a tool.  The Big Blowup invented the narrative of the wildland firefight, and adapted an inherited narrative of the conflagration as a disaster story.  While commentators tried to apply both to Yellowstone, neither fit.  Apologists for the park and for natural fire refused (rightly) to allow the disaster template to apply.  The firefight narrative faltered because, despite an immense investment in personnel and equipment, it failed, save for shielding some structures.  The grand difference between 1910 and 1988, in brief, is that the Big Blowup created an enduring narrative and the Big Blowout did not.  It left the interpretation of the fires – so vast they just had to mean something – unresolved.

§  Except for that last thought, this quick panorama encapsulates the received standard wisdom of the American fire community.  For a long time, however, I have resisted and withheld agreement.  My reasons are personal.  They stem from the summer of 1985 when, at the request of the Rocky Mountain regional office of the NPS, I wrote a draft fire plan for Yellowstone.

Over the two previous summers I had worked at Rocky Mountain National Park on fire planning.  I thought I was headed to Theodore Roosevelt National Park for 1985 when Jim Olson redirected me to Yellowstone.  The park’s program did not meet national guidelines as codified in NPS-19, did not align with neighbors, and not a few observers outside Yellowstone regarded the place as an accident waiting to happen.  Although Yellowstone National Park had size and cachet, it did not have an operational fire plan.  I was there to coax one into being.

I found a park staffed with dedicated long-termers (homesteaders, in NPS parlance), a group tenaciously committed to the Yellowstone ideal as they understood it.  They were also remarkably insular and self-referential and indifferent or hostile to outsiders.  For that last sentiment I could hardly blame them.  Still, Yellowstone did not have a fire plan; since 1972 it had a statement of philosophy that sought to encourage as much natural fire, which would mean crownfire, as fast as possible.  (It was also clear that what underwrote the fire plan – and at times, everything else – was elk.)  My task was to translate that sentiment into formal language.  I spent 10 weeks researching, exploring, and writing, and produced a set of documents, which I presented to Superintendent Bob Barbee and the park’s Fire Committee.

The final package had three items.  One was a fire plan written according to the guidelines of NPS-19.  It offered a few novelties but mostly just filled in the blanks.  The second was a slate of “recommendations for future actions.”  The third was a prospectus for a Yellowstone Interagency Fire Management Center that would ground the park’s ambition to restore natural fire in an institution and make the Greater Yellowstone Area the centerpiece for natural fire everywhere.  “It will seem odd for an observer to insist that Yellowstone take itself more seriously, rather than less so, but the opportunities for fire management are special, and Yellowstone, with all humility, should assume the burdens – not merely the status – of leadership.”  The prospectus went nowhere (it had no champion, and so no chance).  The recommendations gathered dust.  The fire plan was hefty and formal enough to get the regional office and Branch of Fire Management off Yellowstone’s case, and with revisions to strip away any loss of the park’s discretionary power, it was approved.  In any event, none of the protocols and prescriptions were followed during the 1988 season.  I was not surprised by the outcomes.  But my experience made me observe the season through a glass, darkly.

My objections were two.  I thought the park, its apologists, and the American fire community overall missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to present the fire revolution to the American public in a way that went beyond name-calling and slogans.  Instead, partisans fixated on the wrong question, which is to say, whether fire belonged in Yellowstone.  That was easy: of course it belonged.  Initially the media recycled the usual clichés about “destroyed” landscapes and the like, and politicians railed about ineptitude and government waste (it was an election year); but rather quickly that blather disappeared.  The educable public learned and accepted.  The fires were not an ecological catastrophe.  To my calculations they burned off in one year what would have burned over the past hundred had not people intervened.  The official Yellowstone position was that firefighting had been ineffective against the crown fires that mattered.  My reading was, the actions taken beginning with the cavalry in 1886 had stopped many ignitions before they became big and had virtually eliminated human ignitions altogether.  Behind that distinction lay deeper assumptions about the ways Yellowstone was or was not a purely natural or a cultural landscape.

The brouhaha over fire ecology became an exercise in misdirection that prevented a much more important question from being asked, which was, how does fire belong?  at what cost?  with what methods?  according to what social compact?  The Big Blowup of 1988 was not the only way to restore fire.  The park, however, refused any other kind – was adamantly opposed to prescribed burning as a violation of the park’s principles.  Once the fires had swarmed over hundreds of thousands of acres nothing short of early snow could halt them.  Whether or not the public was ready for that kind of discussion, the fire community should have been.  In many ways, the community still years for it in a public forum.

And this was my second issue.  The Yellowstone fire program, as I saw it, operated more as a personality cult.  It had its own classification of fuels, apart from national standards.  It dismissed NFDRS models.  It relied, rather, on the highly personal knowledge of its particular members.  The implied assumption was, No one outside Yellowstone could know the Yellowstone scene, and Yellowstone knew all it needed to put fire back.  It desperately wanted big fires.  It was the flagship park, others were actively accepting natural fires and kindling prescribed burns, while Yellowstone’s fire program was a script that wasn’t being filmed.  The only thing Yellowstone needed was ignition, drought, and wind: the park was so big that it could absorb whatever happened, both ecologically and politically.  It didn’t need protocols and prescriptions.  That sentiment proved almost true.

A fire plan, as I saw it, was not a nuisance but a social compact.  It was an agreement that specified what the park could do and not do, and would recognize the limits of any proposed action when confronted with what nature in its power and majesty could concoct.  Yellowstone’s view was that Yellowstone didn’t heed rules; it made them.  Plans were for the little parks.  The 1985 fire plan, as submitted, operated under the notion that ignitions would be handled as prescribed natural fires, which is to say, as events under prescriptions and within boundaries, and with procedures to evaluate and if necessary intervene.  Instead, the fires were let burns.

I thought the result was cynical.  If the park didn’t like the constraints, it should protest and try to change them rather than ignore them, or use them as cover while it did what it wanted.  I didn’t like that outcome and didn’t like that I had become by association an enabler of that deception and so didn’t like the fires.  I was wrong.  I should have been on the scene.  I should have self-deployed.  Instead I stayed home and wrote a book about Australia.

§  Enough time has passed that the size of the event has shrunk relative to newer blowups; some historical parallax is now possible; and with it, a few frames exist by which to measure and hang the event on history’s wall.

I have made my peace with Yellowstone.  Whatever unease my personal experience instilled, I have a duty as a scholar to assess the Yellowstone burns as a historical event, and I can only conclude that they were a point of inflection.  They were not the only tipping point, or even the most significant, but the history of American fire would be different if they had not occurred.  Had Yellowstone come out of its solipsism, had its partisans been more reflective, had the fire community been willing to criticize instead of instinctively circling its engines, had the fire been subject to thoughtful analysis by intellectuals other than scientists and journalists, Yellowstone might have become the hinge of the revolution.  It might have given the revolution what it most needed, a narrative.

Instead, the era of wilderness fire succumbed to an era of the wildland/urban interface, a problem with little sense and less poetry.  By its silence the fire community did not gain public acquiescence for the revolution.  It denied the revolution its story, and with it, the better part of a decade while reforms retrenched.  Instead, the torch passed to the 1994 season in which there were fewer big fires but many deaths and a connection with the larger culture that went beyond celebrity.  Yellowstone was big, but not, in the end, big enough.

Steve Pyne

July 2012

Note: To clarify my position in the years leading to the 1988 bust, I have scanned the dot-matrix printouts of my reports and posted them at www.public.asu.edu/~spyne/YELLrecommendations.pdf and www.public.asu.edu/~spyne/YELL-YIFMC.pdf.  My own worst-case scenario had 25% of the park burning.  By perimeter, some 45% burned in 1988.