RENEWAL AT YELLOWSTONE : Fire Rules Affected : Controversy Still Smolders at Yellowstone
This has always been a land of stark contrasts and magnificent subtleties, never more so than in the aftermath of last summer’s spectacular season of fire which scorched enough timber and meadow to rival Rhode Island in size.
From the sky where the graceful bald eagles soar, the oldest and grandest of our national parks now resembles a peculiar marble cake, baked by the caprice of nature into patternless swirls of vegetation and death.
Much Unscathed
Despite infernos that whipped through the treetops like blast furnaces, most of the pristine landscape emerged unscathed, as did the elusive grizzly bears in the high country, the resilient herds of elk and bison and the famous geysers that fill the air with eerie puffs of steam and mist. With the last of the winter snow rapidly melting, much of Yellowstone is bathed in the glorious hues of spring.
But cut into the green are huge gashes of once-thriving forest that now appear either pitch black or rusty brown, depending on whether the trees were roasted or merely singed. Either way, they’re dead.
Once-lush hillsides are now covered by little more than the skeletons of stately lodgepole pines. Their needles, twigs and even limbs gone up in smoke, some of these “widowmakers,” as loggers call them, still jut precariously from the charred dirt. Others lay scattered across the ground like giant pick-up-sticks.
Down at ground level, the same scenery is a thing of beauty, not devastation, to the eyes of soil scientist Henry Shovic. He turns a spade of blackened earth and finds rich brown soil just beneath the crust, a sign that the forest not only remains fertile but will soon be teeming with new life.
Already, clumps of grasses are beginning to jut to the surface and here and there a yellow buttercup or purple shooting star has also broken through. In a few weeks, meadow floors will be carpeted in a thick blanket of wildflowers. “Did you see the green?” asks Shovic, ecstatic. “I’m amazed. It’s going to be a picture postcard.”
Spring Brings Rebirth
Spring has come to Yellowstone and with it an inspiring process of rebirth and renewal. But while the 1988 blazes have long since flamed out, the controversy they kindled is still smoldering. It is sure to leave its mark on future fire and management policies not just at Yellowstone but throughout the vast system of national parks and wilderness areas.
“It was a hell of a summer, let me tell you,” said Yellowstone Supt. Bob Barbee.
Arguments still rage over the impact of the fires on wildlife, the conduct of officials responsible for monitoring the blazes and the role of the media and others in creating an erroneous impression that a national treasure had somehow been reduced to cinders.
The debate has also served to underscore a basic conflict in the mission of national parks as set out by Congress. On the one hand, they are supposed to be preserves of the past, the last outposts in America where nature is allowed to take its course with as little intrusion as possible from man. On the other hand, they are also set aside as vacation and tourist havens for the taxpayers, who, after all, pay the bills.
If nothing else, said James Agee, a forest ecology specialist at the University of Washington, the furor raised by the fires should force environmentalists to temper their purist approach to park management. Ecologists argue that wildfires clear away dead timber and overgrowth and are vital to the rejuvenation of forests.
Tied to Neighbors
But “parks can no longer be considered ecological and sociological islands,” Agee told a conference of conservationists here over the weekend. “They are inextricably tied to their neighbors for better or worse.”
Some movement in that direction may already be under way. The Interior Department, parent of the National Park Service, has already ordered a summer-long moratorium on its politically sensitive “let-burn” policy, under which lightning-triggered blazes are allowed to burn unless they threaten human lives or property. The edict applies to all but two parks in Florida.
“With the exception of Big Cypress and the Everglades, we will be in full suppression mode,” a park service spokesman explained.
And, after a sweeping review and nationwide public hearings, the agency has tentatively decided to modify--though not flatly abandon--the controversial fire strategy once the moratorium expires. Under the changes, expected to be announced shortly by Bush Administration officials, all parks would have to run through a safety check list that includes an assessment of weather, moisture, winds and available firefighting crews before they could make a decision on whether or not to let a lightning fire burn.
Leading environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about the new plan because it retains at least a stated commitment to the retention of so-called “natural” policies. At the same time, however, they warn that saddling park managers with extensive conditions could effectively result in quick suppression of all wildfires.
May Become Gun-Shy
Michael Scott, regional director of the Wilderness Society, said restrictions could lead to a “systematic politicization of ecosystem management” and make officials gun-shy about letting fire burn for any reason.
“They’re going to say ‘we better just put out the fires,’ ” Scott predicted. “There could be a chilling effect on allowing nature to take its course.”
From an ecologist’s standpoint, the “let-burn” policy could be the most serious casualty of last year’s blazes, which swelled to historic proportions and ultimately seared nearly 1 million of the park’s 2.2 million acres.
Heeding complaints that fires were getting out of hand and could threaten surrounding communities, officials suspended the policy by mid-July. And some of last year’s most destructive blazes were triggered by man, not nature, and fought from the first sign of smoke. Eventually 25,000 firefighters were called in from around the nation and the bill for suppression efforts soared to $120 million, nearly 10 times the size of Yellowstone’s annual operating budget.
Authorities say the flames were fanned by record drought and gale- force winds and virtually nothing could have stopped them. “What is most humbling is that one-quarter inch of rain and snow on Sept. 11 essentially stopped what the greatest firefighting effort in history could not,” argued John Varley, Yellowstone’s chief scientist.
But many local politicians and residents disagree. They say the park did too little, too late and let the fires get out of hand. And many people who live in nearby resort communities remain bitter over what they contend was a preventable tragedy that could scare away tourists and imperil their livelihoods.
“If (park superintendent) Barbee were here I’d choke him to death even today,” said Betty Morton, a motel owner in tiny Cooke City, where the threat of fire forced a temporary evacuation last September. “Even a 5-year-old child knows if something’s burning you got to stop it quick. All that stuff about burning’s good for growth is a crock. I’ll never see any of it in my lifetime.”
Will Keep Job
While many critics have called for Barbee’s head, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. said in an interview that the Yellowstone superintendent was in no danger of losing his job. Still, Lujan, a former New Mexico congressman appointed to his Cabinet post only this year, said park officials should have “admitted” that they erred in losing control of the blazes.
To a great extent, lingering resentment over the conduct of firefighting efforts is fueled by economic uncertainty. Morton, for example, said all 12 of the cabins she rents out are usually reserved for the Memorial Day weekend weeks in advance. This year, only one of the rooms has been taken so far.
There are conflicting signals over what impact the fires have had on the tourist trade. Other independent innkeepers, as well as lodges in the park, also report that reservations are soft. However, Marsha Karle, a spokeswoman for the park, said letters and calls logged by Yellowstone operators are about double their usual pace and the number of visitors entering the park so far this spring has been well above normal.
The park has embarked on an unprecedented publicity drive as well as an $8.5-million rehabilitation project to reassure reluctant tourists that it has not been transformed into a bleak wasteland. The centerpiece of the campaign appears to be an effort to turn what, to some might appear a disaster, into an opportunity.
“Welcome to the New Yellowstone,” reads the headline on a special fire brochure handed to each visitor as they drive into the park. “ . . . We have the rare opportunity to witness wildlife regeneration on a scale rarely seen anywhere on Earth.”
A new $250,000 exhibit on fire ecology is under construction, as is a series of wayside exhibits describing various fire scenes. Interpretive programs will feature talks on fire and its effects and there are even tentative plans to develop a children’s trail through a fire-damaged area to explain the phenomenon to youngsters.
Expect Many Scientists
While the response from tourists is still questionable, the park is bracing for an unprecedented onslaught of scientists looking into everything from fire behavior patterns to its effects on grizzly bears, fisheries, grasslands and the nesting status of bald eagles. “Hundreds of people are here doing research,” said Karle. “It’s like a big laboratory.”
Even local merchants, suppressing any anguish over the fire and its ultimate impact, are jumping on the bandwagon. Colorful souvenir books detailing the fires in words and pictures are big sellers at curio shops both in the park and gateway communities. Another hot item: videos. “Yellowstone--The Place Where Hell Bubbled Up,” comes in both 90-minute deluxe and 30-minute highlight packages as well as a Japanese narrative version.
Yellowstone officials are making no apologies for their handling of the fires, which they contend was not only ecologically sound but also in concert with then existing park service regulations. Circling the wagons against critics, they insist that the uncertainty and furor raised by what happened here resulted largely from media accounts that sometimes wildly exaggerated the extent of the blazes and their impact.
“There was no ecological downside to the fires,” Barbee said recently. “ . . . The media, in my opinion, went into a frenzy. They outdid themselves with hyperbole.”
Whether coverage was fair or not, the media’s impact on heightening awareness of the situation was clearly considerable. The blazes were probably the first major wildfire covered on television by live hourly updates emanating from satellite trucks in the middle of a forest.
Lujan’s reservations aside, an internal government review has largely backed up the approach taken by Barbee and other park officials in dealing with the fires. But it did fault the park service for a haphazard public relations job that fueled confusion.
Natural, Beneficial
Another major post-fire study, this one conducted by a panel of experts from several major universities, has yet to be released. However, the chairman of the panel, Duke University botanist Norman L. Christensen, told a congressional hearing last January that he considered the fires to be both natural and beneficial to the Yellowstone environment.
“Ecologists are in total agreement that wildfires were a natural part of the primeval North American landscape,” Christensen testified. “ . . . Although less frequent, fires approaching the size of those in 1988 occurred in the 1700s and probably occurred at 200- to 300- year intervals through the Western mountains over the past 10,000 years.”
Christensen said that there is ample evidence that such fires kill few animals and ultimately improve their habitat by promoting the growth of plants and shrubs that could not thrive in the gloom of a thick forest.
Bob Secter reported from Yellowstone and Maura Dolan from Los Angeles.
YELLOWSTONE FIRES 1--Human-caused fires originating outside of Yellowstone Park
2--Natural fires originating within Yellowstone Park
3--Natural fires originating on adjacent U.S. Forest Service lands
SOURCE: Yellowstone National Park
REFORESTATION IN YELLOWSTONE About 80% of the trees burned in the greater Yellowstone Park fires were lodgepole pines, a tree that is self-pruning. Branches below the productive region of the crown (upper 8 to 10 feet) die and fall off as the tree grows. Here is how reforestation process takes place after logging or a fire: Stage 1- Lodgepole pine saplings grow in stands before forming canopy (up to 40 years after a fire). Stage 2- Closed canopy of even-aged, usually dense young trees (40 to 100 years). Stage 3- Lodgepole pines dominate, canopy largely intact. Some spruce and fir below (100 to 300 years. Stage 4-Canopy quite ragged. Undergrowth includes spruce, fir and white-bark pine (over 300 years). Stage 5- Canopy, dominated by over-mature lodgepole pines, beginning to break up (over 300 years). SOURCE: Yellowstone National Park
