Cooling the Fires

The Yellowstone Park firestorm is burning its way toward the Interior Department building in Washington now. Critics led by Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) are demanding, at the very least, the resignations of National Park Service Director William Penn Mott and Yellowstone Supt. Robert Barbee. There even has been talk of axing Secretary of the Interior Donald P. Hodel.

It is time, however, to build a little backfire of common sense. Scapegoating and recrimination will not save the million acres of Yellowstone that have burned. Nor will instant junking of Park Service fire-suppression policy restore charred timber and blackened meadows. Congress and the Administration must begin painstaking study and work with the scientific and environmental people to determine what, if anything, must be done to help the natural revegetation of Yellowstone and to decide whether the Park Service’s fire-fighting policy really needs to be changed.

The unwarranted criticism of the Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and environmental experts has reached a level of misinformed hysteria that is racing out of control, as the fires have done. There is no evidence, as Wallop claims, that the Park Service policy of allowing naturally caused fires to burn themselves out has greatly contributed to the scope of the Yellowstone fires. Nor do the facts justify Hodel’s declaration that the Park Service’s let-it-burn policy has been a disaster.

Several of the major fires that have consumed so much of Yellowstone forest lands started outside the park on Forest Service territory, where efforts were made to suppress fires as soon as they were discovered. One huge fire was touched off by a chain saw in a logging operation on Forest Service land. Others did not start or get out of control until after July 21, when the Interior Department reversed its policy and ordered an all-out battle to control all fires, regardless of origin.

The fact is that modern forest managers never have been faced with a situation like this year’s, in which millions of acres of timberlands have been parched by four or five years of drought. Nor do most people realize the difficulty of stopping a major fire when it is driven by winds of up to 60 m.p.h. through timber that is even more parched than kiln-dried boards found in a lumberyard. One fire official said, “It’s like trying to put a line around a hurricane.” Wilderness Society President George Frampton was correct when he said that blaming the Yellowstone fires on the Park Service is a little like blaming the eruption of Mt. St. Helens on the U.S. Forest Service.

Now is the time to cool the political fires. The President can start by summoning a commission of the best scientific and environmental minds, along with forest managers, to determine whether any change in Park Service policy is warranted. Then the group should decide the proper course for the restoration of the park. Perhaps limited human reforestation and planting is justified in selected areas like those most prone to erosion.

Economic assistance to nearby communities that rely on tourism to the Yellowstone area may be in order. But most of the damage of the great fires of 1988 will have to be repaired by nature over time. This was a natural disaster that, at best, could have been blunted marginally here or there by more aggressive fire-control methods. The control that needs to be exercised now is over the super-heated political emotions of the moment.