Quagmire

“Paper 2”

Quagmire

Sometime this summer or maybe late fall, news programs will be filled with images of catastrophic wildfires ravaging forests in the American West. If the trend continues from the last five fire seasons, homes will burn to the ground causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, millions of acres of public lands will be stripped of their value, and thousands of part-time fire fighters will unnecessarily risk their lives, all in the name of the protection of our environment. This next fire season will likely yield the same results, a tremendous loss of timber, ecological degradation, and an enormous expenditure of tax revenue, because the underlying issues are not going away. The United States’ Public lands are in a state of emergency due to the current strategy of implementation of the National Fire Plan. The path to recovery is a long and expensive one. Supporters of the national suppression policy see the path to recovery as counter-productive, more will be lost in the time given to recover than will be lost with the use and expenditure of immediate resources. With out a drastic reform of the rules governing fire suppression, an exorbitant loss of tax revenue and the extinction of our forested lands are inevitable.

In the summer of 1910, 2.6 million acres of western Montana and Idaho burned, and a fledgling land management agency (Unites States Forest Service) was held accountable by the public. Rising from the ashes is the fundamental ideology of today’s fire suppression policy, “Rangers knew in every fiber of their professional being that it was evil” (Pyne 3). The eradication of this “evil” meant one thing, total suppression of all fire on all public lands. The social perception of fire as an agent of destruction rather than a necessary ecosystem function has led to decades of successful suppression, which in turn has amounted to a significant accumulation of forest fuels. “This one change has produced one direly important ecological change. In forests once dependent on fire, fire prone climax species have replaced fire-tolerant species. Resulting in ladder fuels and significant increases in dead and downed woody debris” (Mutch 32). In essence the social perception of “evil fire” has precipitated a now truly evil fire environment.

The evolved fire environment of today supports an enormous fie economy. Tens of thousands of students and U.S. citizens are employed seasonally for emergency fire suppression by all federal land management agencies (National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service). The mass hiring of this seasonal work force is a governmental sponsored boost to rural economies. This however, is not the fundamental reason our current fir policy is held in reverence by the politicians who control policy reform. The extreme length of time, and enormous budget required to change our current fire suppression policy are the key prohibitive factors of reform. In human terms the vast amount of time required to restore a natural fire environment would be several generations, too long for the “powers that be” to observe a noticeable effect. The extreme budget spawns directly from the aforementioned length of time. One fire season’s budget is but a fraction of the projected expense of restoring natural fire to the environment. The support for current fire suppression policy is deeply rooted in business and instant gratification; where as reform is a long-sighted goal with very little monetary profit potential.

The physical act of wild land fire suppression is and of itself destructive to the environment. Fire line construction or the act of creating a perimeter around an active fire to contain it, is the foremost destructive element of fire fighting. The width of these lines varies from one foot to fifty feet. Within these fire lines all ignitable material must be removed. Just the act of containing a fire requires a firefighter to scar the landscape permanently. Secondly, the utilization of chemical fire retardants creates a wet line near a fire’s edge. Under the guise of concentrated fertilizer, fire retardant or slurry makes for an effective weapon in the arsenal of fire suppression. When slurry is introduced, at concentration, into streams and lakes, the retardant is no longer fertilizer, but