The Politics of Fire   Part 1, by Brian Allison

The 2000 fire season in North America was one of the worst ever, burning over six million acres, wreaking havoc in nearby communities and igniting a heated election-year national debate over wildland policies.

The season started early, in May, with a thousand-acre fire in the breeding grounds of the Monarch butterfly in Northern Mexico.  The environmental group Greenpeace at the time berated the Mexican government, saying its fire containment policies were woefully inadequate.

But if Mexicans were no good at extinguishing fires, perhaps Americans were too good at starting them.  Also during May, the Park Service in New Mexico set a “control burn” which quickly blazed beyond control, consuming nearly 50,000 forested acres and racing through the city of Los Alamos, destroying over 200 homes and threatening a vital nuclear research facility.

Things did not improve after that, with American resources being taxed beyond their limits on runaway fires all throughout the West.  There wasn’t enough of anything: airtankers, hose engines, trucks, sandwiches, and, most importantly, firefighters.  Crews from Canada and Mexico – and as far away as New Zealand, were brought in to bolster the front lines.

Daily newspaper accounts were peppered with staggering statistics:  20,000 acres here. 80,000 acres there; this town evacuated, that one burned to cinders; this forest closed, and other ceasing to be forest altogether.  And well before the first ember cooled, the blaming began.

Republicans impugned the Clinton/Gore administration, claiming that its policies of less logging and road closures exacerbated the fires severity and hampered efforts to put them out.  President Clinton said it wasn’t his fault, shifting responsibility to previous administrations.  Panels were impaneled, investigations launched, battle lines drawn.

One thing all factions agree upon is that Western forests are perilously overgrown and need to be managed differently to avoid the cataclysms of last summer.  Exactly how to go about it raises more questions than answers and seems to polarize the various combatants.      (To be continued in the next issue.)