fires

In 2005 the USGS published a map of large fires (burns over 100 acres) from 1980-2005. It overlays with eerie fidelity the cartography of the public estate, or in the Great Plains with mixed landscapes of extensive grazing and public lands. In brief, America has extensive wildland fires because it has extensive wildlands. What are the options for managing wildland fire? After a century's experience, four strategies suggest themselves. They apply to those lands that are both public and fire-prone.

For the last week the Idaho Statesman has run a three part series written by reporter Heath Druzin and I about the paradox of fire policy. Based on the research of Forest Service fire behavior expert Jack Cohen we showed that fire does not burn into communities as a ball of fire but almost always as a ground fire.

Heath Druzin (Idaho Statesman State Government Reporter) and I have spent much of the spring and summer gathering together a new look at the federal fire policy . It began during a conference of the American Society of Environmental History in March here in Boise.

It was one of many revolutions that bubbled up during the Sixties, and for most people not a very significant one, but for those concerned with fire and wildlands it amounted to America's great cultural revolution on fire. The inaugural Tall Timbers fire ecology conference in 1962 was its opening salvo. Intellectual opposition collapsed like a wet sack. Over the winter of 1967-68 the National Park Service formally rechartered its fire policy. The Forest Service followed a decade later.