Fire is of Satan
“Fire is of Satan”
Quote by William B. Greeley
“Sometimes what’s dead must be burned away to make room for new life. Sometimes you just have to step back and let the brittle bits ignite - but once those flames begin to dance their caustic dance, don’t you dare look the other way. Don’t close your eyes. Watch closely and let that image seer itself forever on your mind. Remember what it looked like in the midst of the soot, the smoke, and the haze. Remember, so you don’t repeat the same conditions that required such a blaze.”
― Cristen Rodgers
Earth was not a nice place for life the first two thirds (+_) of the planet’s existence. Yet, slowly, life crawled out of the sea and muck to form primitive plants and animals. Life evolved in sprints, jerks, sputters, and sometimes it failed, dead ends. But as millions of years past, smaller terrestrial firestorms and fewer spewing volcanoes meant that the sun could shine through clouds, cyanobacteria and later primitive plants pumped oxygen into the air. Primitive plants begin to sequester carbon in roots.
A brief somewhat accurate diary of earth from then to now:
4600 MYA earth and the other planets, in our solar system formed from dust left over from the birth of the sun.
4500 MYA dense elements sank to the bottom and formed a core and the outside layer cooled and formed the crust.
3850 MYA simple single cell animals appeared “mysteriously” followed by oxygen production by cyanobacteria.
1500 MYA oxygen trapped by iron at the earth’s core escaped.
530 MYA first simple vertebrates (fish).
400 MYA first plants.
250 MYA dinosaurs appeared only to go extinct 60 MYA and 13,000 YA hominids “mysteriously” popped up and spread like mushrooms across Africa, Europe, Asia, then the New World. The rest is modern history!
MYA=Million Years Ago YA=Years Ago
In summary: Dark, light, dust, coalescence, breath, garden, eat, alone, naked, afraid, sweat, ethnic cleansing, wars, atomic weapons, despots, the last election!
While the introduction above has been an oversimplification of the evolution of our spinning rock and would make most people, who study early earth, cringe, fire has been a principal agent of change on our planet. Earth was born of fire and after the climate began warming fire became even more of a tool and in the past hundred + decades has frequently become a devastating scourge aided and abetted by human growth and exploitation!
Fire has persisted alongside hominids, in our mythology, religion, and evolution as an untamed but invaluable tool, but when it escapes, it becomes a dangerous, unpredictable, and indifferent adversary. Humans are linked emotionally, primordially, ecologically, financially, and romantically to this semi-domesticated genie. It can be a tool—cooking, nurturing, warming, and mesmerizing us—or destroy whatever it touches. Toasting marshmallows or a chunk of mammoth around a campfire, watching the flames flicker, is mesmerizing, a primordial fascination. But, when fire escapes, wind drives it scorching and burning whatever lays in its path: grass, shrubs, trees, buildings, people. And given extreme conditions it has burned into and often through cities and towns using homes, businesses, landscaping, cars, etc. as fuel. Gaining velocity, it can and has laid waste to entire watersheds, subdivision developments, cities, and towns.
Personal, societal, and governmental belief systems have not embraced the inevitability of wildland fire even though year after year, fires increase in size, ferocity, and visibility. It’s seems the mentality is: “it can’t happen again this year. or here.” The unspoken urge of many people, driven by overcrowded cities and suburban developments, is to live in the country, the wide-open wildland, get back to nature. The only requirement, of course, is that the country home be an easy drive to employment and city amenities! Land developers, interested in selling property and building lots inside of private forests and shrub lands, are indifferent to wildfire threat. They’re in the business of selling land not fire protection. Their developments are a “natural” setting, a magnet for city-dwellers, humans wanting to escape at least for part of the day.
Wildfire is indifferent to human wants and lives. (I apologize for granting wildfire a soul and freewill as we know it!) It burns over, around, and through our forests, rangelands, homes, developments, and towns, with casual indifference to human needs and desires; has no respect for investments, net worth, zoning, religion, politics, ethnicity, gender, or how you self-identify. This natural curse has not changed except that on average wildfires have become larger and very difficult and extremely expensive and dangerous to control. The average size and increase in frequency have grown proportionately, since the middle of the last century, as global climate issues spiked upward and average temperatures climbed. Fire was a constant on public lands eons before there were Public Land Management agencies. Fire found a new home in the disastrous forest and range management “practices” on public lands and in the constant migration of human infrastructure into forests and grasslands. If it were possible to attribute human feelings to fire one could say it felt validated.
In the summer of 1910, a devastating series of forest fires “the Big Blowup” burned in Montana, Idaho, and Washington States. Citizens in New England reported seeing smoke and soot reportedly fell in Greenland. The “Big Blowup” happened five years after the U.S. Forest Service was established. The numbers and sizes of the fires as well as the deaths of 85 people had a deep and lasting impact on the management of the agency and wildfire. It was a bureaucratic Big Blowup. It pushed forest fire issues into the public discourse, and led to new fire prevention and suppression policies, policies that today still influence fire and natural resource management around the world.
The backlash was a myopic focus on fire prevention and suppression policies which dictated that every fire be attacked and extinguished as soon as possible. Smoky Bear became a national icon. But the policies kick-started by Greeley, and later the Smoky Bear campaign, contributed to severe understory growth and in some species of trees. Lodgepole Pine, saplings sprout in such thickets, often more than 30 or 40 stems per square meter, that walking thru them is difficult. Before full-on fire suppression fire thinned the stands. The trees grew in close proximity to each other and were subject to crown-fires that swept through the stands like a scythe. The mosaic of post timber harvest is perfect for fire. The desired effect of reducing wildfire by immediate suppression has had the opposite resource management, public perception, political, and ecologic result.
Ten years after the Big Blow-up William Greeley became the third Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. The fire of 1910 convinced him that Satan was at work, and elevated firefighting to the raison d'être — the overriding mission of the Forest Service. Under Greeley, the Forest Service became the fire engine company, protecting trees so the timber industry could cut them down later at government cut rate prices, that ironically, in a way sold at “fire sale prices.” The timber industry successfully oriented the Forestry Service toward policies favorable to large-scale harvesting via regulatory capture (1) and metaphorically, the timber industry had morphed into the fox in the chicken coop. It was the hand inside the puppet!
Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the USFS and mentor of Greeley’s, was appalled by the mission shift. He and Theodore Roosevelt had envisioned, at the least, that public timber should be only sold to small, family-run logging businesses, not to big syndicates. Pinchot preached of "working forests" for working people and small-scale logging at the edge, with preservation at the core. In 1928 William Greeley left the Forest Service for a lucrative position in the timber industry, becoming an executive with the West Coast Lumberman's Association. Greeley, the fox, designed and built, in cahoots with the timber industry, his own chicken coop!
When Pinchot traveled west in 1937 to view those forests what he saw "tore his heart out." Greeley's legacy, combining modern chain saws and government-built forest roads, allowed industrial-scale clear-cuts to become the norm in the western National Forests. Entire mountainsides, mountain after mountain, were treeless. Industrial-scale clear-cuts soon infected forests in other western states. Insects, disease, extreme erosion, and invasion of flammable undergrowth followed. More frequent wildfire followed, increasing almost at an exponential rate.
"So, this is what saving the trees was all about. Absolute devastation," Pinchot wrote in his diary. "The Forest Service should absolutely declare (write and implement policy) against clear- cutting as a defensive measure.” But the saws buzzed and swaths of clear-cuts opened large blocks of forests indifferent to his opinion and ecologic view and beliefs. The saws continue today.
A wildfire needs an ignition source (heat), flammable grass, brush, timber, houses, etc. (fuel), and hot air temperatures (oxygen). Public lands contribute fuels with the invasion of undesirable and flammable species due to over grazing and clear-cut logging; the residue of powerful lobbies and companies. Government silvicultural practices (pushed by the private sector and Congressional allies from both parties) in the last half of the last century, made western forests prone to infestations of insects and diseases. Coupled with human exacerbated climate change--resulting in hotter, dryer conditions--wildfires have increased in quantity, size, and ferocity.
From the late seventies, through the eighties, and until 1990 wildland firefighting, both in active suppression and as an ecologic restoration professional formed my work portfolio. In 1990 I shifted to ecologic restoration full time. In the seventies, a large wildfire I might be assigned too, as a member of a team, was usually less than a thousand acres. Fires above a hundred acres were the anomaly and most were less that. When a wildfire ignited, we were dispatched immediately, presumably to douse Satan’s fire at any cost and with whatever resources we needed. The fire was to be extinguished as soon as possible regardless of cost and with whatever resources were needed. Yet fire numbers and size continued to grow. Year-round permanent fire staff in State and Federal Agencies, along with budgets, increased dramatically in the mid-eighties. Wildfire was driving the fire engine!
During the winter, wildland fire fighters, and public land managers prepare for an unpredictable “fire season.” The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), in Boise Idaho, was created in 1965 because the USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Weather Service saw the need to reduce the duplication of services, cut costs, and coordinate national fire planning and operations. The National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs joined mid-1970’s and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service joined in 1979. Each brings its purse of federal funding allocated to wildfire suppression and management. And each year these agencies ask for more and more appropriated tax dollars to throw at wildfire suppression. Wildland fire has become big business in the federal government, Tribes, and in State and County/City government infrastructures.
The percent of annual budgets allocated to fire management by these entities has grown following the increase in fire size and frequency. In 1994 the U.S. Forest Service allocated a bit over 15% of its annual budget to wildfire management. In 2015 the USFS allocated just over 50% of its annual budget to wildfire management and it is projected that by 2025 the agency will allocate almost 70% to wildfire management! The question is how to finance other programs the USFS and other federal and state agencies are mandated to manage, such as recreation, timber production, wildlife, grazing, water management. And how can they meet their land management obligations as detailed in their organic acts and Code of Federal Regulations? Are taxpayers getting a return on their investment?
Not all wildfires burn or even start on federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service or other Public Lands managed by States or the Department of the Interior. High voltage transmission lines can down-strike (arc) following the carbon of a smoke column. Roadways are common locations for fire starts due to casual tossing of lite cigarettes into grass and weeds. Some are started on private lands by people barbecuing, celebrating, camping, or doing yard clean-up. On September 5, 2020, at a gender reveal party, the El Dorado fire near Yucaipa, CA was accidentally ignited. The fire burned with demonic force, charring 22,744 acres, costing 8 million dollars (+-) to contain, and was declared officially out November 16th. The gender of the child is unknown to me as is the name; perhaps Prometheus?
Wildfires are not of Satan, are not a diabolical plot. Wildfire is as natural of an event as tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis or great sunsets, warm rain, and climate change. Early hominids sat in caves or other habitats around a fire surviving the wet and cold alternating with hot and dry climates of the last ice age. Getting from then to now there have been up and down temperature blips. However, since the beginning of the industrial revolution humans have seriously accelerated atmospheric carbon loading and accelerated our voracious gobbling of resources. Human population has exploded, public policies have become driven by big business, political divisiveness has stagnated Congress, and Americans are seriously divided along party lines, fractured by unmitigated ethnic, gender, and income inequalities. In the meantime, insanely huge quantities of carbon and methane have been and are being pumped into the atmosphere by human jobs, manufacturing, commuting, recreation, commerce, infrastructure. It has become the perfect storm exacerbating/accelerating climate change.
There is no question that climate change is a strong environmental influence but it’s not the only cause of increased wildfire. Expansion of human development into forests and grasslands, and historic exploitive natural resource wildfire management exacerbated by climate change are the principle causes of wildfire especially in the West. For decades most of the West has been in a long-term drying trend likely exacerbated by human/carbon accelerated changes in climate. Ecological sites are made vulnerable through exploitation and development which accelerate resource and watershed damage.
As average temperatures creep upwards and drought conditions increase, fire season starts earlier and ends later. The Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin have averaged dryer and hotter years for decades, interspersed by occasionally heavy winters and increased spring, summer, and fall precipitation. The flow in the Colorado River (2) clearly shows this trend. A temperature/fire frequency overlay of the river flow would show a proportionate increase in temperature and fire as the flow decreases. The bottom-line is that at least the Colorado Plateau and most of the west has been in a longterm drying trend.
Does our species have the same survival instinct of ice age hominids who against odds made it through the challenges of cold and hot temperatures and wildfire? They had primitive tools we have the technology of the developed world to give up or seriously modify a business model built around carbon. How will zero-sum theory impact social change, our view of accepting personal liability for our contribution to climate change? People in developing nations want what we have. We want to keep the lifestyles we have. I suspect because the outcome of zero-sum isn’t altruistic it’s going to be a challenge for my grandchildren, yours, and grandchildren of all humans on this spinning rock. Change in consumptive use is personal but does not suggest the wearing of sack cloth, it suggests thought, assessment, and personal action.
In the meantime, it’s fire season!
Note: As of July 24, 2021 eighty-eight large new fires have burned 1.456,925 acres in 13 states! Nearly 22,000 wildland firefighters are deployed!!
(1) Regulatory capture is an economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest. The result is that the agency instead acts in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be regulating.
(2) https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2004/3062/pdf/fs2004-3062_version2.pdf