Firewood

Forests afire
For the last century in the United States, embezzlers have been more popular than forest fires. These fires scourged the landscape, burned the birds, threatened to render Bambi a homeless fawn. The fear and loathing of forest fires was fueled by one of the most successful publicity campaigns in history.

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© North Carolina Division of Forest Resources.

But over the past couple of decades, ecologists have come to three startling conclusions about fire:

Forest and other wild fires are regular events in many ecosystems.
Fires cause little or no long-term harm to these ecosystems.
Fires are inevitable -- they can be postponed, but not eliminated.

The most recent spark for the reconsideration of fire was the "catastrophic" conflagration in Yellowstone National Park in 1988. But the debate about wildfire is much older than that, according to Stephen Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University.

There is no way of measuring the prevalence of fire five centuries ago, Pyne acknowledges, but he estimates that it consumed five times as much land before Columbus sailed the deep blue sea, compared to today.

In Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the debate between "primitive" agriculture, based on fire, and "modern" agriculture, based on plows and chemicals, was replayed as the Europeans colonized the Americas and Africa and found widespread use of fire by hunters and farmers.

The debate over wildfire in the United States in the early 20th century, as the national parks were being established, he says, simply "mirrored the argument in Europe over the role of fire."

The U.S. government opted for a policy of total fire suppression in its national parks and other lands -- of fighting fires pretty much wherever they could be fought. At first, the policy worked. "Absolute suppression will work for a number of years, even a few decades," says Pyne, "but you are always going to have fires." In the long run, he contends, total suppression is futile or counterproductive, since it increases the fuel load and makes subsequent fires more intense and harder (or impossible) to fight.

How did this translate into reality in Yellowstone National Park in 1988?

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