“The Solution is Aircraft”
Pyne, Stephen J. “The Solution is Aircraft”: Aircraft and the Political Economy of Canadian Forest Fires. American Review of Canadian Studies, 2006, pp 458-477.
Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and author of 18 books and numerous essays. This essay derives from Pyne’s newest book, Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Introduction: Fire and the Northern Economy
The paradoxes are two, and both are well grounded in Canadian experience. The first is that institutions must reconcile the dynamics of political confederation with the rhythms of the boreal forest. The former builds on measured action, a steady pooling of many competing interests into a collective mean. The latter revels in extremes. Especially when it burns, the boreal forest goes from boom to bust to boom; and while nowhere is wildfire a bureaucratic category, the boreal landscape particularly mocks the norms, means, and statistics of aggregation that allow most agencies to plan. Almost always there is too much or too little, and never do reforms after the last firefight immediately lead to successes in the next. Instead, institutions repeatedly take a drubbing.
Aggravating the situation is the British North American Act that led to Confederation in which the provinces were granted control over their lands and natural resources. For 60 years an exception emerged in that the territory acquired from Hudson’s Bay Company, notably in the west, along with the Railway Belt and Peace River Bloc in British Columbia (B.C.), remained under the auspices of the Dominion even as provinces evolved and sprawled over those lands. Instead, the Dominion administered the resources; of particular significance was the Dominion Forestry Branch (DFB) within the Department of Interior which oversaw an archipelago of forest reserves, modeled closely on those of the United States. This estate gave the national government an active presence in and considerable leverage over how forestry might be conducted. Then in 1930 the Dominion ceded those lands to the provinces. The Dominion Forestry Branch nearly vanished, spared only because of its research capabilities. Thus, while the dynamics of the boreal environment argued for large entities, the politics of Canadian confederation pushed for smaller ones. That is the first paradox.
The second is that the Canadian scene matches the world’s most savage fires against its most advanced machines. Here, free-burning flame meets internal combustion. For Canada, however, combining the primitive with the technologically modern is far from unusual. Harold Innis early pointed out the apparent incongruity of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the industrial tip of global capitalism’s spear, thrusting through the Canadian wilderness, and later observed the necessity, for a country that was both modern and dispersed, to seize the latest developments in communication and transportation. Donald Worster, less kindly, has pointed out the industrial basis for Canada’s exploitation of its natural wealth, likening the country to a technological crack-baby. That Canada should turn to industrial technology to cope with backcountry fires should surprise no one…
The apparent solution was to apply capital to acquire equipment to move water. The outcome was a magnificent expression of the Canadian genius for applied knowledge. Canada became the world authority on portable pumps and hoses, and in order to move those appliances to the flaming front, on aircraft. Planes did for fire what railroads did for wood, wheat, and minerals. Instantly, aircraft began to change the geography of Canadian fire, and reformed permanently its political economy. Equally helpful, it allowed technology to substitute for philosophy. Cansos, float-equipped Beavers, Wajax pumps, these could furnish a common medium for the Canadian fire community in ways that politics could not. Canadian fire officers would come to share technology, and the means by which they would commit technology; they would not share institutions or ends. That technology imposed its own politics of power was a consideration they ignored in their determination not to surrender the levers and throttles that governed the relationship between province and Dominion.
Burning Border
Pyne, Stephen J., Burning Border. Environmental History, 12 (Oct 2007)
Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and author of 18 books and numerous essays. This essay derives from Pyne’s newest book, Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada, reviewed [here].
Full text of Burning Border [here]
Selected excerpts:
ABSTRACT — The United States and Canada approach wildland fire differently. Fire matters to both countries for reasons of economics, public safety, duty-of-care to nature preserves, and bureaucratic identity and inertia. A useful survey of their differences could focus on three simple indices: how each assesses fire threats, how each assigns responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don’t merge. These differences reflect larger national traits.
IT IS OFTEN SAID that fire is no respecter of borders. In fact, it respects any boundaries that affect its ability to propagate. Satellite images routinely reveal stark contrasts in fire behavior among landscapes partitioned to farming, ranching, nature preserves, public forests, shopping malls, and exurbs. The U.S.-Canada border is no exception. The delineation would remain abstractly political if both countries had identical land use, adopted similar fire policies, and managed fire the same way. They don’t. There are national styles in fire as in literature and health care. Their practices are only superficially interchangeable, like pumps and CL-215s. In their deep structure their fires differ as much as the divergent politics behind the American style of federalism and the Canadian brand of confederation.
Does fire really matter? Here an answer is simple: Canada is a large and combustible swathe of fire-planet Earth. Historically, fires swept its prairies every two or three years; combusted its Cordilleran forests every five to fifty; and devoured its boreal forest, in immense chunks, every 50-120 years, a rhythm of binge-burning equaled solely in Russia. Only its sodden outer limits, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and Cape Breton, have evaded serious burns. On average Canada now experiences 8,500 fires a year that burn 2.5 million hectares, although statistics mean little in a place where the episodic big burn does all of the ecological work and where fires can blister 7.5 million hectares in a summer. All this matters because Canadians have sought to shield much of their national estate from flame and now spend $500-$900 million annually on the effort, a number galloping upward. The determination to battle blazes has come from commercial concerns over timber, a need to protect vulnerable human settlements, and bureaucratic inertia. Canada’s forest fires are thus a matter of economics, public safety, duty-of-care obligations to nature preserves, and, for those agencies who fight or study them, institutional survival. In all this it resembles American cognates-with a difference.
Byway of example, reflect how each assesses fire danger, how each distributes responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. (The fire communities of both countries are congenitally partial to grouping by threes-the fire triangle serving as the water cycle does for hydrologists.) In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don’t merge…
Your Political Will Does Not Mean A Damn Thing
Petersen, James D. Your Political Will Does Not Mean A Damn Thing. Speech to the Lolo Resource Advisory Council, Hamilton, Montana, November 27, 2007
James D. Petersen is Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation [here]
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Good evening,
Thanks for inviting me to join you.
Before I get started, would everyone in this room who works in the forest products industry please stand.
My message to the rest of you in this room is that if western Montana’s already teetering sawmilling infrastructure collapses – as it already has in Arizona and New Mexico – you can forget about your dreams for restoring western Montana’s beleaguered national forests, including those here in the Bitterroot Valley…
But radical environmentalists will tell you a very different story. They will tell you that the dead and dying trees that need to be removed from national forests… should be removed at taxpayer expense – that the trees that need to be removed from overstocked, diseased and dying forests should then be piled and burned or simply buried in the ground – at costs exceeding $1,000 per acre. Let me assure you, there is not enough gold in Fort Knox to pay for all of the restoration work that needs to be done in the West’s national forests.
Why would any environmentalist take such a bizarre stand, when everyone knows that some of the trees that need to be removed… have commercial value – and that some of these thinning projects could actually pay for themselves?
The answer is both simple and direct: radical environmentalists hate the free enterprise system more than they love the environment.
And the law is on their side. All of the angels in Heaven are no match for the astonishing power Congress has granted to environmental extremists – and until Congress finds the courage to stuff the litigation genie back in the bottle, there is nothing that you or anyone else can do to reverse the eminent ecological collapse of the West’s federally-owned forests. So a fairly strong case can be made for the fact that I wasted my time driving down here to talk to you – and you are wasting your time listening to me…
Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks
Van Wagner, Charles E., Mark A. Finney, and Mark Heathcott. Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. Forest Science 52(6) 2006, (704-717).
Charles E. Van Wagner, Canadian Forest Service (ret.), Mark A. Finney, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory, and Mark Heathcott, Parks Canada.
Full text [here]
Review by Mike Dubrasich
A remarkable and historic forest science paper was published last December in Forest Science, the leading US scientific journal about forest science. The paper is remarkable for a half dozen or more reasons, and in this essay we (attempt to) sort them out and explain them.
First, the authors are the cream of the crop. Charles E. Van Wagner is the unofficial dean of Canadian fire science. No one has advanced the science more, up there and few down here, during his lifetime. Finney and Heathcott are equally experienced grey beards of fire ecology. Hidden from direct view are dozens of field and laboratory researchers who contributed to the data collection for this paper, over a period of more than two decades.
Previous accounts of data collection and fire history have been published for all seven parks, some more than once. Jasper fire scar data were studied by Tande (1979a, b) but no formal reference exists for the whole-park age-class survey of 1987 to 1990. These data are on file at Jasper National Park; sampling work was begun by B. Wallace and G. Fenton, completed and mapped by S. Cornelsen, and finally compiled by R. Kubian. Fire history and age-class data for Banff National Park were reported by White (1985), Rogeau and Gilbride (1994), and Rogeau (1996); for Kootenay National Park by Masters (1990); for Yoho National Park by Tymstra (1991); for Peter Loughheed (formerly Kananaskis) Provincial Park of Alberta by Hawkes (1979, 1980), Johnson (1987), Johnson and Fryer (1987), and Johnson and Larsen (1991); for Mount Assiniboine and Spray Lakes Provincial Parks of Alberta by Rogeau (1994 a, b).
In addition, the authors acknowledge “Parks Canada for providing the data, and Ian Pengelly, Cliff White, and Stephen Woodley, all of Parks Canada, for helpful comment and interest.”
Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks is about the fire history of seven contiguous national and provincial parks in the Canadian Rockies. They include Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, and others. Their combined total area is 21,900 sq. km., or 13,600 sq. miles. Of those, 6,300 sq. miles are forest, and the rest are rock, ice, water, or treeless vegetation.
No matter what units are used, that is a very large chunk of forest for a study, and one of the paper’s remarkable features. Another is that the study took over twenty years to complete and is the work of dozens of researchers. Another is that the fire dates they discovered go back to 1280 AD. To my knowledge, no other fire study has ever come close to the breadth of acreage and time comparable to Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks.
Another remarkable feature is the principal finding of the study. Historically, forest fires in the Canadian Rockies have not been controlled by climate or random chance. Van Wagner et al. disproved those hypotheses, with an intensive yet elegant work of deductive science.
Burning Banff
By Stephen J. Pyne
Originally published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 11.2 (Summer 2004) [here] by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
There are five of us, plus three pack horses, and we are strung along a trail that threads into Banff National Park. Banff is to the Rocky Mountains what the Grand Canyon is to the Colorado Plateau. A packtrip through its knotted peaks is the equivalent of a float trip down the Colorado River. We enter the park along the Red Deer River in the northeast.
Its critics dismiss Banff as a trash park-savaged by transcontinental highways and a railroad, the Bow Valley in particular deflowered by golf courses, ski resorts, swarms of tourists, a hydropower dam, its landscape degraded beyond redemption. In the mid-1990s Banff was even threatened with delisting as a World Heritage Site. Its defenders, however, note that the park has preserved nearly all its biotic pieces and holds intact its majestic matrix of streams, forests, storms, and slashing peaks. It yet retains its grizzlies, wolves, mountain lions; its elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats; a monumental megafauna to match its monumental scenery. Most spectacularly, nearly alone among Canadian parks, and rarely for North America, Banff has nurtured a habitat for free-burning fire.
A pack trip is thus a traverse through some of the most interesting fire management in North America. Banff is Canada’s first national park; a century later it had become for Parks Canada the flagship for an aggressive policy of ecological integrity for which free-burning fire was the vital spark. Ecological integrity aims to keep all the parts and processes of a biota and to grant them a suitable structure so that they can maintain themselves indefinitely. It contrasts with other preservationist philosophies by ignoring such standards as naturalness, wilderness, or historical authenticity, which may or may not contribute to the perpetuation of species and how they live. A policy such as Banff’s is, as postmodernists like to mutter, a contested matter.
All the themes are here: Banff is where they arose and where the relevant ideas took to the field to decide the issue. That makes Banff typical, or prototypical. What makes it special is that ecological integrity can apply to any landscape; at Banff it applies to an extraordinary menagerie of big animals and the habitats that sustain them. Fire matters because fire seems to be essential to those habitats. Ecological integrity may only succeed if Banff burns. The trick is to see that it burns properly. And that is the purpose for this curious expedition, an intellectual inspection…
Forestry in Indian Country
Over the last twenty years there has been one clear, consistent, and surprisingly infallible advocate for forests, Mr. James Petersen of the Evergreen Foundation. Jim is the founder, publisher, and editor of Evergreen Magazine [here].
Evergreen Magazine is a step above any other forestry periodical, but occasionally Jim publishes a super issue, one that is truly archival. Winter 2005-2006, is one such ground-breaking, deeply insightful, historic work. Entitled Forestry in Indian Country: Models of Sustainability for Our Nation’s Forests? the issue examines forestry as practiced by Native Americans on tribal reservations and compares it to forestry practiced on our National Forests. It is a superb collection of essays, expert reports, and stunning photography (many by Larry Workman of the Quinault Nation).
So much is revealed in this issue. The first articles are by outsiders, Euro-American forest scientists with political foci. They seek to impose “helpful” red-tape bureaucratic burdens on the tribes. They do not mention the interwoven historical nature of the forest and the Indians. Their approach is sadly prejudicial and bigoted. Imagine telling people who have managed their land successfully for thousands of years how the white man thinks it ought to be done, complete with phony ecology and “natural” catastrophic fire.
But then the Native American voices are heard in the rest of the articles. From A School of Red Herring by Gary S. Morishima, Technical Advisor, Quinault Nation:
Tribes have been managing natural resource systems for thousands of years, but protecting tribal legacies for the future is no simple task. The resources that are essential to sustain tribal cultures are coming under relentless attack from a variety of economic and political forces … To a great extent, these threats stem from the introduction of an invasive species several centuries ago … Europeans.
Back to the Rim: The Story of the Warm Fire
By Mike Dubrasich
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
The Grand Canyon is a national icon, a symbolic monument that echoes through American literature, art, and science. The Grand Canyon is a piece of our national identity.
It is thus ironic (or perhaps entirely appropriate) that the principal feature of the Grand Canyon is nothing. The GC is a big hole in the ground. The viewer’s startling revelation is in regards to what is not there (terra firma) rather than what is there (thin air)…
To be sure, the shape of the nothingness is also important. The sides of the empty space are spectacular cliffs, with domed and flat-topped pinnacles and spires. The enclosure of the void is colorful and sculpted with form and line, but what makes the terrain so amazing is its sheer verticality. From the top it’s a long ways to the bottom, and more or less straight down…
There is another feature of the Grand Canyon. If you stand at the northern edge and look away from the Canyon, that is, with your back to the Rim, you will see a forest. It’s not just any forest, either. It is the Kaibab Forest, the ponderosa pine forest of the Kaibab Plateau, one of the most magnificent forests in the world…
The Kaibab Forest has never captured the American imagination in the way the Canyon has. This is ironic (and tragically inappropriate in our opinion) because the Kaibab Forest has substance, while the Grand Canyon is, principally, nothing.
The Kaibab Forest is a ponderosa pine forest. About half the forest is nearly pure pine, and a third is mixed conifer (ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, Engelmann spruce, Colorado blue spruce, white fir, and subalpine fir). Pure spruce forests, aspen groves, and meadows make up the rest…
For at least the last 9,000 years people have been living in the Kaibab Forest. Thousands of archaeological sites have been found, indicating that the entire Forest has been almost continuously occupied by somebody or other since way back when. The residents were variously hunters, gatherers, farmers, and herders. They were human beings. They interacted with the landscape just like human beings everywhere: through the agency of fire.
People have been setting fire to the Kaibab Plateau for thousands of years. They set fires to clear land for farming, to remove hazards, to drive game, and for dozens of other practical reasons. They probably also set fires by accident, although the majority were likely by intent.
Lightning fires also occurred every year. However, the lightning fires encountered a pre-burned landscape and so they behaved like anthropogenic fires. Catastrophic fires that killed all the trees across vast tracts were rare, because fuels were never allowed to build up to catastrophic levels…
The early explorers widely attributed the open character of the Kaibab Forest to anthropogenic fire, although Indian burning was called “Paiute forestry” by detractors. John Wesley Powell, the greatest Grand Canyon explorer, was a supporter of anthropogenic fire as a forest management tool, and had a public political fight with Gifford Pinchot over the practice. Both men’s careers were crippled by the battle, but Pinchot’s ideas prevailed.
Over the last 100 years the US Forest Service has fought tooth and nail against Paiute forestry. The animus ran and runs deep, so deep that the USFS denies to this day the impact of Prehistoric Man and anthropogenic fire on American forests.
This Denial of the Obvious is a form of institutional intellectual schizophrenia. An odd mix of the precise detail, together with a romantic but false grand impression so characteristic of the eco-religious, suffuse the USFS oeuvre…
National Forests at a Crossroads
by John F. Marker
[John Marker is a retired Forest Service District Ranger, Fire Management, and Information Officer and a co-founder of Wildland Firefighter Magazine. This article was first published in National Forestry, (Sp ‘07, here), the magazine of the National Forestry Association, 374 Maple Ave East, Suite 310, Vienna, VA 22180.]
Reaffirmation of the mission of the National Forests
The Organic Act of 1897 was explicit in describing the reasons for establishing the National Forest System: to provide a sustainable supply of water and timber for the use of citizens, and to allow other uses that did not diminish the ability of the forests to provide the primary resources. However, legal and policy debates over management of the lands for the past 40 years or so have clouded the original intent of the Act. Today, in my opinion, few people understand the fundamental reason the National Forests were established, including some agency employees and too many political leaders.
It seems to me the future of the forests rests upon some form of new top-level federal process to clarify both the purpose of the forests and the direction that their management should be heading. A second component of the process must be a public awareness program to promote understanding of the National Forests’ essential natural resources role, which is essential before successful land management can be carried out. Clearly, a serious effort needs to be made to resolve the endless controversy surrounding the concept of scientific forest management, and a clarification of the mission.
Helms Testimony October 3, 2007
Testimony of Dr. John A Helms: Responses to Questions for the Record
Following Sept 24, 2007, Hearings by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Wildfires require a combination of fuel, temperature, and oxygen. Of these, the only factor that can be managed is the presence and distribution of fuels. Given that the most intense and catastrophic fires occur in dense forests, and since experience has shown that when wildfires encounter less dense and more open stands fire intensity commonly drops (USDA PSW 2007), it seems clear that increased efforts must be made to thin overly-dense stands. In doing so, irregular mosaics of stand density should be created that remove ladder fuels to reduce opportunities for fire to burn into tree crowns.
Since it is clearly impossible to rapidly treat all 180 million acres the Forest Service estimates are in hazardous condition, current efforts to create “Defensible Fuel Profile Zones” (DFPZs — Quincy Library Group/USDA FS, California), “shaded fuelbreaks” (Agee et al. 2000) and “Strategically Placed Landscape Area Treatments” (SPLATS or SPOTS in California’s Sierra Nevada — USDA FS) are all worthwhile exploring. These are areas 1/4 - 1/2 mile wide, usually along roads or strategically placed in which fuel loadings are reduced to reduce potential for crown fires, interrupt fire spread, and to provide defensible space to fight the fires.
Although not free from criticism, these efforts are initial steps in the right direction. More adaptive management and pilot studies (such as the Fuels Management National Pilot Project 2007 funded by the Forest Service) are needed to demonstrate efficacy and cost effectiveness and to communicate lessons learned from these and other projects and forest treatments (Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center 2007)…
James D. Petersen Speech, Nov. 18, 2003
What is the Forest Service doing right and what is it doing wrong? by James D. Petersen Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation and Publisher, Evergreen Magazine.
USDA Forest Service Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs Conference, Embassy Suites Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona, November 18, 2003.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
When Joe Walsh called to ask me if I would come to Phoenix to – in his words – “tell us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong” – I wasn’t entirely sure I should accept his invitation. The question tugs at the roots of problems that have been festering both within and beyond the Forest Service for at least 30 years. That I did accept his invitation – and am here this morning - attests to my own concerns about the future of our nation’s federal forests and the future of the Forest Service itself. I confess there are times when I think that the federal government should get the hell out of the land business. I raised this point in a roundabout way in a one-page essay in the August issue of Evergreen Magazine. Here is what I wrote: “Does anyone know what our federal government’s forest management objective is? I don’t – and I’ve been trying to figure it out since 1985. My friend Jack Ward Thomas, who was Chief of the Forest Service during the Clinton years, once told me he thought the objective was to conserve plant and animal species associated with old growth forests. That would be fine if we were doing it, but we’ve lost so much old growth to wildfires in recent years, without attacking the underlying causes of this calamity, that I am no longer sure what our objective is.” …
