Humanity can do little but sound the alarm as 85 major wildfires continue to rage throughout the West and Florida. The blazes already have killed at least 10 people and charred more than 7 million acres, and there is no end in sight. The worst forest conflagration in a half-century shows how badly a 90-year war against nature has been lost, says Stephen Pyne, generally considered to be the world’s foremost authority on fire and its role in human culture. By stopping blazes at all costs — often with patriotic fervor and martial fervor — we kept fire from performing its natural housekeeping chores. The results are wildfires that keep getting bigger and seasonal catastrophes with a mounting death toll, or so predicts Pyne, a history professor at Arizona State University who spent 15 summers on a forest fire crew at Grand Canyon before becoming an environmental historian. He has written 10 books and is best known for his essays and environmental histories in “Cycle of Fire.”
Q: You call for fundamental changes in the nation’s wildfire policy: Mechanically thin out forests and remove dead litter; stop the grazing of cattle so grasses can return; tighten building and zoning codes; make officials combine fire suppression and prescribed burning in a single organized program. But all that would cost billions and take a long, long time. Why not just hire a rainmaker? It seems as plausible. Are you being realistic?
A: That depends on the extent of the current disaster. Right now, big fires are the story of the moment. Next month, it’s another disaster story. But fire is not just a natural hazard but an important cultural issue, and the fire problem in public lands is actually a complex of fire problems, some easily solvable, some not.
The story in the Western landscapes that resulted in the disruption of the pattern of fire began with overgrazing and the removal of the American Indian. This began in the 1870s, long before we created the U.S. Forest Service, and many of the landscapes that today are overgrown with combustible materials were originally grasslands.
Q: How did patriotism enter the cultural mix?
A: Federal firefighting began with the army in Yellowstone in 1886. Right from the start, with the feds we got locked into a military metaphor. We’re still locked into it. With the creation of the national forests came the belief that fire was an enemy. We had to destroy it. That was the wisdom of those who had been trained in Europe and who looked to forestry as part of an emerging elite of the educated and technocratic who wanted the government to have a national conservation policy. They did this for a reason–much of the landscape was being shattered.
Q: So land was set aside. Surely, a good idea?
A: But when we began to reserve land, we broke the pattern by which people had traditionally controlled fires. It had been hoped that as settlement converted wild land to farms and towns and pastures, fires would disappear. This was a painful transition period, but everything should work out.
But in the national forests, you’ve interrupted that pattern. It’s not going to change. It’s going to stay. So you don’t have fire protection, no system of roads and trails and plowed fields to interrupt fires.
That’s our unique problem. We are committed to conservation, and we are committed to the effort to fight fires.
Q: You point out that our relationship to fire is profoundly symbiotic, yet fire has no constituency. How costly is this?
A: Look, I’m a pyromantic, not a pyromaniac, and I would like to see a lot more fire. We are a uniquely fire creature. We have a species monopoly on it. We alone can start and, within limits, stop fires. In fact, the ability to use fire may have been what separated us from our prehuman ancestors.
We have always used it to make the world habitable, to shape it to our own ends. And the best way to control fire is with controlled fire–humans prevented wildfires by igniting their own. Not until the industrial revolution was fire put into machines and our relationship with the natural world reordered, so that people began to assume that free-burning fire could be suppressed and, if necessary, eradicated.
When this debate first occurred, the U.S. was largely rural, and people relied on fire. They burned their leaves and spring cuttings. They burned off their fields and pastures and ditches.
In a city today, it’s hard to find any place for open fire. People are told it is inherently dangerous. Fireplaces are endangered in some places–barbecues, even. There’s even talk about restricting lawn mowers.
So while there are groups representing every side of the debate over what to do now, fire has no constituency. The liability laws are against it, the air quality laws, the Endangered Species Act, even the battle over global warming–just try to burn millions of acres every year.
Q: Equally difficult, you contend, is that in the battle for the human heart, the fire control myth holds all the power.
A: In August of 1910–the same month as the worst wildfire in our history–an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War” was published by William James, one of our great philosophers. He was a pacifist fearful of the growing militarism in Europe. Why couldn’t there be a moral equivalent of war, one that directed the energy away from people hurting other people into a common constructive good?
So he urged a national conscription of youth to begin a war against the great forces of nature that seem to always threaten us. Then the Rockies caught fire, and he had his test case.
James’ call to arms is still with us. The great fires of 1910 established the standard. We weren’t going to have another 1910. Later, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps of unemployed young people planted trees and fought fires.
Eventually, the government demanded that all reported fires be extinguished by 10 a.m. the next day. It didn’t matter if the fire was 100 feet from the ranger station or 100 miles, or if it was burning in grass, chaparral, or old-growth Douglas fir. There was one universal standard: There would be no sanctuaries for fire.
The National Park Service broke ranks in 1968, and the Forest Service finally revised the policy in 1978. But even though the policy changed, what hasn’t changed is the poetry behind it.
Q: You contend we’re still reacting to the worst wildfire disaster in American history, the conflagration known as the Big Blowup of 1910. It was on Aug. 20 and 21 that a firestorm of epic proportions swept across Idaho, Montana and Washington. Three million acres in the Bitterroot Mountains exploded in flames. Whole towns were incinerated. Eighty-five people were killed, dozens of them burned alive.
A: Those were the bodies that we could identify; the real number was much greater. Smoke drifted across the country, darkening the skies so much that the streetlights remained on all day in Watertown, N.Y.
This disaster taught America that fire was bad and the forest should be rid of it. The big irony is that the lessons we thought we learned from the Big Blowup have contributed to the mess we find ourselves in today.
It had so traumatized the nation that Congress decided to spend federal money to fight forest fires. We never had an honest debate about how to do it. It was immediately polarized politically with one side demanding compete suppression and other calling for the Indian method of light-burning (controlled burns).
Light it or fight it. There was no middle ground.
Q: We know which side won.
A: In many ways, we’re reliving 1910, determined to do things right this time but missing the point, I think. The forced absence of fire in the forests didn’t cause the mess we’re in now. It was due to the linked changes between fire and human land use–grazing, logging, hunting, farming, foraging.
Nor can controlled burning alone reverse those massive shifts. Thrusting a torch into a fuel-choked site today, without suitable preparations, is an incitement to ecological riot. The forest will merely explode.
What we need, I think, is some new story as compelling as the Great Blowup story. We need an equally compelling reason to change our policies. Otherwise, I’m afraid, I don’t see things getting any better.
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An edited transcript.
