In May, forest fires ripped through the American West, scorching the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and singeing the Grand Canyon. Controlling fires is a part of US ecological history. But today all is not well with the US’s forest and fire services. Especially when it turned out that the Los Alamos fire had been started deliberately as a “fire protection” measure. Arizona State University pyromantic Steve Pyne is perhaps the world’s leading fire historian. Pyne has been there, pointed the hose and written the book. He even has a little cabin in the pines. Fred Pearce asked him what it is about Americans and fires.
Last summer, our TV screens were full of fires ripping through the American West. Seems like there are more of them these days. Is that true?
This sounds counterintuitive, but there are a lot fewer fires in the West today than in, say, 1850. Then the US looked like Brazil does today. Fires everywhere. The truth is that we have largely eliminated fire from the land that we tend. Where we do still have fire is in wild landscapes, and those fires can be very intense.
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What went wrong at Los Alamos?
It was a screwed-up fire. There was a patch of dense forest in Frijoles Canyon, a part of the Bandelier National Monument near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was reckoned to be a threat simply by virtue of being a big cache of fuel. Fire crews tried before to burn it out to remove the hazard, but had never succeeded. This time they were determined to ensure it burnt. They fired through the night. It went slowly and the boss went for a break. The guy left in charge was trained to start fires but not to fight them. So when the fire extended past the approved site, the crew set backfires to create a firebreak. The backfires got out of control too and the whole thing blew up. About the only place they didn’t burn out was that supposedly immensely hazardous fuel in the canyon.
Sounds like bad luck . . .
Well, no. At the same time, out on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, another deliberately set fire got out of control. I think, as Oscar Wilde might have said, to lose one fire might be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
So historically, what has happened out West? And why is there a problem in the wild?
Well, wildfires are endemic in the West, but their character has changed. Much of that old forest was really savannah. The America West used to have huge areas of grass. And it had Indians. Like peoples everywhere, the Indians burnt wherever they could to make their world more habitable. They used fire systematically and skilfully for hunting and farming, for arson and war.
When did all that change?
When the Indians were thrown off the land and Europeans began grazing cattle. The first change removed the main source of fire: ignition. The second destroyed the grasslands and eventually led to massive invasions of woody bush and forest, especially in areas we designated as public wild lands. As a result, we entered a new regime with less ignition but more woody fuel, so fewer but bigger fires. We are seeing the consequences almost annually. At Yellowstone Park in 1988, for instance, fire burnt off a century’s worth of forest in one summer. It might not matter if the wildernesses remained empty. But increasingly, we are recolonising them and building houses. We want them to remain wild and free, but that means having wild and free fires, too. That’s the difficulty.
How has US firefighting policy tried to deal with this?
At first, officials tried to exclude fire from the wild lands-eliminating the Indians who traditionally started fires, and fighting those fires that nature set. In 1935, the Forest Service adopted the “10 am policy” whereby every fire should be controlled by 10 am the day following its report. This ambition only faltered in the 1960s. Then, since removing fire had not worked, the belief grew that “restoring” fire would fix the problem. So they let nature take its course or tried to help it by deliberate burning to reduce fuel. The back-to-nature strategy collapsed with the Yellowstone fires. The strategy of deliberately burning fuel effectively collapsed this spring at Los Alamos.
Your colleague Wally Covington got a lot of publicity for his plan to stop the fires by thinning out the forests and recreating them pre-1870. What do you think?
Well, Wally developed his prescriptions for ponderosa forests, which are biologically simple. The outcome has the structure of “pre-settlement” woodlands, not that of a commercially thinned plantation. It makes ecological sense and I hope we adopt the experiment. Some people are wholly against it, and some think it could solve all our problems. Both are wrong. The environmental groups are opposed on principle. They don’t want any cutting, logging, thinning or any kind of manipulation. They don’t trust the Forest Service, which, after all, got us into this mess. They don’t want to let woodcutters of any variety into the forests, nor do they want smoke, or escaped fires, or threats to endangered species. But if we don’t do something, we’ll end up with forest-scouring wildfire or forest-smothering natural litter. If Covington’s plan is adopted, there is a real risk of it becoming yet another “one size fits all” blueprint for fires in the West. The government is talking of spending billions of dollars on thinning and burning tens of millions of acres of the West. Two months ago, The New York Timesran a front-page picture of Covington’s test site, claiming this treatment could “prevent” fire. Covington doesn’t say that. And it won’t. But it might change the fire into something we can handle.
So what should be done?
Every site is different. But one thing we should do is get the grass back in by regulating grazing. Not just cattle, but the herds of wild elk and so on. If we could thin, burn and rehabilitate grasses we would solve 90 per cent of the problem.
Are you really telling me that the US government proposes to remove millions of tonnes of carbon in the form of trees and bush from the West to aid fire prevention, when later this month its officials will be at a climate conference promising to plant new forests to soak up carbon dioxide to help halt global warming?
Good point. Right now, the forests of the American West are a great carbon sink that everyone is pleased to have to protect the climate. To prevent intense wildfires, we say we have to thin and burn on an immense scale and for a long period of time. The amount of carbon that would be released has not been quantified. Deliberately, perhaps, because people don’t want to know. The policy is full of contradictions. How can we condemn burning in the Amazon, when we start doing it at home and call it an environmental benefit? But in any case, I really don’t think planting “carbon sink” forests in the American West will be sustainable because of lightning fires.
How did you get into the fires business?
It was an accident. I grew up in Arizona, where I still live. After graduation, I got a summer job with a fire crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. In the end, I did it for 15 summers. I never studied fire at university. But in the end I thought I ought to apply my academic training to it. I got some funding from the Forest Service to do a history of fire, and I’ve been doing it ever since. But I’ve struggled to teach fire. Had geography not been strangled out of American universities, I might have ended up there. Here I moved from history to biology, though my course proposals are currently stalled in committees.
Where does fire fit into our ideas about ecology?
Ecologists used to believe nature evolved to create pristine ecosystems of “climax vegetation”. They saw fire as a ruinous interruption to that evolution. We can now see that fire has a major biological role. It shakes and bakes, it frees nutrients and restructures biotas-it takes apart what photosynthesis puts together. The critical action may be in the soil, where fire does exactly what fire ceremonies have long proclaimed-it purges the bad and promotes the good. That’s one reason why, whatever its detractors say, slash-and-burn farming works so well in forests. Today, people largely control burning over much of the planet. We have a species monopoly over fire. We are the keepers of the planetary flame.
So does your heart light up when you hear about fires raging across Borneo or Siberia or the Amazon?
Well, no. These events are mostly an abuse of fire. But I do resent seeing fire made the universal villain. The trouble is that fire gives colour, quite literally, to our images of environmental disaster. Global warming, deforestation, spreading deserts and so on are all illustrated with pictures of fire. In the end, people think fire is the great environmental problem. It’s not. With the exception of a few places in the tropics, we have less fire than ever before.
Have we always feared wild fires?
Not at all. People deliberately occupied land that was suited to fire. In traditional societies, you absolutely need fire. It is a catalyst for almost everything that people do. From hunting and ripening berries to clearing soils, creating firewood and cooking. Aborigines, for instance, had a massive impact on the Australian landscape through using fire. Before humans, the continent had several ecosystems well adapted to fire. There was a strong cycle of wetting and drying, so the vegetation grew and then dried out. But there was not much lightning to ignite the dry tinder. Then people came and started setting fires and were very effective in a very short time.
Europeans see much less fire than Americans because we have much less wilderness. Does that give us a different attitude?
Yes. Europeans have more difficulty than Americans in imagining an ecological role for fire. From ancient times Europeans have associated flame with drought, famine, plague and war. But the Mediterranean has a marvellous climate for fire. The burning along the Mediterranean in recent years has closely tracked changing human land use-the abandoning of farmland with the migration of rural folk to cities. Without cultivation, many Mediterranean landscapes have blossomed with fuels. And amid the breakdown of the old social order, fires can’t easily be put out.
Do you still chase fires?
I’m too beaten up now to enlist with a firefighting crew, but I have thought about leading a fire-setting operation. I think I know how to do it right.
Do you have a little wooden house in the wilderness, by any chance?
Yes, we have a cabin that borders the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and, yes, it is built of wood, although it has a non-combustible roof. We’ve cleared a good space around it, and I believe it is defensible except under extreme conditions. If fire comes, I’ll be there, shovel in hand.