fires

The firefight is the great set-piece of American fire management.  It seems so obvious: Control the bad fires before you introduce good ones.  Seize the battlefield.  The drama is overpowering, a moral equivalent of war; exciting, potentially lethal, inextinguishably telegenic.  For some seven decades the U.S. threw everything it had into the fight against fire.  It won far more battles than it surrendered, and in the end it lost the war.

When the fire community contemplates global warming, most know what it means. It means more fires, more big fires, more damaging fires, fires in places that have few now, and megafires everywhere. It means or should mean more engines and air tankers, more hotshots and fire teams, more funding, more prophylactic prescribed burns, more research - always more research.  It means more prestige, perhaps glory, to firefighters as first-responders and defenders against a fiery madness. The warmed new world to come will be today's world in a crock pot or turning over a spit.

When did the modern era in fire management begin? For much of the American public it began in the summer of 1988 when flames soared through Yellowstone day after day on their TV. The message broadcast by the fire community was that fire was a natural force of great majesty, that fire belonged in Yellowstone as much as wolves, that trying to suppress such a outburst of natural power was as misguided as fighting a hurricane. The forest would return. Yellowstone would renew itself.

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, long one of the timber industry's biggest supporters has always had a novel alternative history of forest management in the West.