Nature sometimes has suicidal impulses. This year in the American West, it has set itself on fire--fire's version of The Perfect Storm, a convergence of dry summer lightning, blast-furnace air and millions of acres of tinder. The worst is yet to come.
And in the midst of the superfire rages a culture war, a revival of old American arguments: Who owns the land? How should it be used? How can it be saved?
The war has mobilized experts and extremists. It is in part a familiar religious struggle--Earth Firster vs. logger, environmentalist vs. entrepreneur. The argument is also about the dynamics of land and trees and weather and man, about forestry and wildlife habitat and flames and money and reverence and recreation. It is about what has gone wrong (if anything) to allow such a conflagration, about whether the fault lies with nature or with man, and about how to manage the nation's patrimony of forests in the longer term.
Forest fires come and go. But this year's may be the worst in a half-century; they could prove to be the worst ever recorded. Some 6.5 million acres have already burned, and by the end of last week, 68 large fires were burning in 10 states. Almost everyone agrees the fires are not normal, not part of the harmonious burn-and-regenerate cycle of nature in business for itself. Brittlely dry heat and lightning without moisture, abetted sometimes by man-made sparks, started the fires. Could past human errors, activating a law of unintended consequences, be to blame for spreading them? And if so, which errors?
Experts focus on a paradox: too much effective, overzealous fire fighting in years past unwisely extinguished the natural, smaller, healthy burns that any forest needs--fires that clear the lesser undergrowth but spare the big trees. Most foresters agree that small, "prescribed" burns, carefully controlled, are essential to prevent the larger apocalypse.
Now comes the war: logging managers say this year's fires are in some ways the result of insufficient logging, which led to the buildup of dense "fuel loads" that, given this summer's conditions (drought and dry heat) produce fires so hot they create their own fierce weather systems: fire winds and exploding trees.
Galen Hamilton, a tall, fourth-generation logger, contemplates the timbered mountains (ponderosa pine, Douglas fir) where he grew up around Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. He points to vast, unregenerated bald patches burned off in earlier fires he blames on Forest Service fecklessness, and speaks bitterly about Washington's clueless authoritarianism (so he thinks of it) in shutting down logging operations--in letting the forest become a rank, dangerous tinderbox. The sticker on his pickup reads: ARE YOU AN ENVIRONMENTALIST? OR DO YOU WORK FOR A LIVING?
Historian Stephen Ambrose looks feelingly at the Missouri Breaks, a stretch of the Missouri River that winds for 150 miles in north-central Montana. He sees it, he believes, pretty much as Lewis and Clark did almost 200 years ago. "This is the least inhabited, most precious part of the Lower 48," he says. "It's ours to preserve for our progeny. It would be sacrilegious not to." Note the vocabulary.