The Nature of Yellowstone’s Fire

Like old wars, the Yellowstone forest fires of 1988 will be refought time and time again. The more the fires are studied, along with the conditions that led to them, the better equipped scientists and Park Service officials will be to manage the nation’s wilderness and parklands in sensible fashion. As two experts note in the November issue of Scientific American, the most obvious lesson of the summer of 1988 is a reaffirmation of the obvious: “that nature is complex, subtle and not always easily controlled.”

The authors also reached some interesting specific conclusions. William H. Romme of Fort Lewis College and Don G. Despain, a research biologist at Yellowstone, said the fires were more or less a natural event of the sort that might occur every 200 to 300 years, regardless of human efforts to control them. Their work indicates that the fires probably behaved very much like ones that burned across the same area about 300 years ago.

They also rejected the theory that one reason the 1988 fires were so extensive was that vigorous fire suppression programs had permitted the buildup of forest cover and other fuel. While Yellowstone was established as a national park in 1872, fire control really was not very effective until almost the middle of this century, the researchers said. If massive fires occur naturally every 200 to 400 years, they added, then 30 or 40 years of suppression was not long enough for such quantities of fuel to accumulate. The 1988 fires came, finally, when they did because of an unusual combination of dry, hot and windy conditions.

Romme and Despain did not make specific recommendations about future fire management programs. But their findings seem to reinforce the concept of allowing lightning fires to burn naturally in the future. That may not prevent another catastrophic fire two or three centuries from now, but could reduce its severity even though the area burned each summer may be quite small.

The Romme-Despain study further contradicts the irate snap judgments of politicians a year ago that the Park Service’s so-called “let-burn” policy was responsible for letting the 1988 fires get out of control. They conclude that the natural conditions that existed in Yellowstone last year would have overwhelmed any such human endeavor. And tourism figures this year put to rest the fears of the same politicians that the area would suffer economically because of the stigma of the giant burn. In fact, more tourists flocked to Yellowstone than in almost any other year in history precisely because they wanted to see the results of the fires and witness the magical rebirth of Yellowstone plant life in 1989 from the ashes of 1988.