‘Fires’ Details the Rise and Fall of Prevention Policies in Forests

“Year of the Fires” is a jumbled yet in the end convincing account of the origins of contemporary American attitudes toward forest fires. Stephen J. Pyne, a professor at Arizona State who has made a career of writing books about fires around the world, turns his attention here to the huge fires in Idaho and Montana in 1910 that finally persuaded the guardians of the nation’s forests to protect them by eliminating fire as much as possible.

Now, some 90 years later, opinion is turning in the other direction. Forests swept regularly by fire are now thought to be healthier and more productive than forests strenuously protected from fire. Wildfires, for instance, that burned through Yellowstone National Park in 1998 have left behind a more balanced ecology. The mountain forest fires that last year burned part of Los Alamos, N.M.--and threatened to burn all of it--are persuading public and governmental opinion that attempting to prevent fires is like trying to stop the Mississippi River from flooding. You can’t do it, and trying to only makes the consequences worse.

Fires, like floods, will come. Man’s job is not to prevent them, but to control them and bend them to useful and manageable purposes. Even in 1910, as Pyne shows, there were government officials who held this point of view. After those fires were over, Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger said that “we may find it necessary to revert to the old Indian method of burning over the forests annually at seasonable periods.”

But Ballinger’s cause was lost for nearly a century. The men who had come to dominate the American practice of forestry had become fixed on the idea that fire was always wasteful and its prevention was always good.

One of these men, Harry S. Graves, as dean of the Yale School of Forestry, said it clearly: “The first measure necessary for the successful practice of forestry is protection from forest fires.” Graves was a protege of Gifford Pinchot, President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the Interior who was a powerful leader of the band of conservationists who came into power with Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s successor, President William Howard Taft, quarreled with Pinchot and fired him from government service, but Taft appointed his protege, Graves, to head the U.S. Forest Service in January 1910, a few months before the great fires began.

Pyne does a good job of describing the American forest landscape in the years that the advancing Americans and notably their railroads chewed through the continent’s vast forests. These settlers came for profit, quick and unrestrained. The forests’ wood was used for building materials in the cities and for railroad ties and for stobs in the mines to which hundreds of spur railroads ran.

As the cutting continued, the trash from the railroads and lumber mills piled up. Sparks from the passing trains regularly set the trash afire and from it the woods caught fire. Add these to the fires started by lightning, passing tramps and people who just liked to see the forests burn or who thought it was beneficial, and you had in the expansionist decades after the Civil War accounts of great palls of smoke covering the country. The smoke stretched from the forests of New York and the South, the upper Middle West and, increasingly, as the railroads pushed through, to the Northern Rockies, the Northwest and California.

It came to a crisis in the Northern Rockies in 1910, and the heart of the crisis was known as the Big Blowup of Aug. 20 and 21. This is the dramatic heart of Pyne’s book. Unfortunately, he makes his accounts, vivid in themselves, hard to follow, for he jumps from one place in the fire and one group of people to another, not following one story all the way through but shuffling them like cards in a deck. Little forest towns were burned or saved. Inhabitants fled by trains through the flames. Some people acted cravenly; others heroically; others just made do.

This much comes out from Pyne’s story: In those two days, 78 firefighters were killed. Perhaps 3 million acres burned. And when it was over, the fledgling U.S. Forest Service and its doctrine of fire prevention, period, was in the saddle for the next 90 years.