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…
Cliff White leads. He does so not by any rank but by the sheer bustle of his enthusiasm, and that is how he has led the Banff fire program. He had grown up in Banff-knew its marvels and mishaps firsthand, relished its outdoor sports and its wildlife, knew its personalities and politics. After high school, he spent a year at the University of Calgary, then dropped out and spent much of his time skiing, particularly in the U.S. In December, 1974, while in Missoula, he heard a lecture by Bob Mutch, then a researcher with the Intermountains Fire Sciences Lab. The Forest Service was slowly rousing itself into a new era of fire-had, as of two years earlier, experimented with allowing natural fires to burn freely in the White Cap Wilderness. Mutch’s ardor proved infectious. Cliff enrolled at the University of Montana and cobbled together a major that combined wildlife with fire. He then headed to Colorado State University, at that time one of the few schools that offered graduate courses in fire, and worked through a master’s, a fire history of Banff.
He had his mission; and his timing was impeccable. In 1979, as he returned to Banff with an appointment as a warden, Parks Canada was restating fire policies. While Banff’s aboriginal inhabitants had used fire, its park protectors sought to abolish it as environmental wreckage and human intrusion, and to a remarkable degree had succeeded. They had done so with such thoroughness that Banff’s once-vaunted fire suppression organization had withered into insignificance, staffed, if at all, by temporaries. Fire management seemed an archaic practice, like branding and blacksmithing a craft of largely antiquarian interest.
But thinking changed. Preservationist philosophy argued for encouraging natural processes like lightning-kindled fire, and ecologists began to tally the ways fire’s removal had inflicted its own damages on the land. The argument was not simply that fire suppression had allowed fuels to pile up into conflagration-stoking horrors, that controlled burning was needed to thin out that wild woodpile to make fire protection easier. Rather, the core thesis was that fire belonged biologically, as much as bighorns and marmots. Trying to abolish fire was akin to abolishing snowstorms. It simply made no ecological sense.
So Parks Canada resolved to allow fire to return. That meant Banff needed a dedicated fire program, one that could fight fires the park didn’t want and light those it did. What this meant in practice was unclear. Cliff White told them. “Cliffie” sparked Banff’s moribund program back to life. By 1983 Banff boasted a first-rate initial attack crew. A year later it was staging its first prescribed burn. Two years later, the park’s centennial, Cliff published a historical survey of fire in Banff, a model for assessing fire’s place. Parks Canada acknowledged Banff as a national prototype. That founding fire crew became the nucleus for the crack fire command teams that the agency dispatches to major wildfires-bad burns it wants extinguished that required talent beyond what an individual park has in-house. More permanently, the Banff brotherhood dispersed throughout the system. Wherever they landed, they kindled modern fire programs…
Year by year, Banff underwent its institutional chrysalis. Cliffie did it with sheer personality; with unbounded zest, a high tolerance for controversy, a remarkable capacity to absorb information and ply it in the field. His impact was less charismatic than catalytic. He is the behavioral incarnation of mixed metaphors. His wiry frame is as restless as a gerbil; ideas fly from him like sparks. He speaks rapidly, in a clipped vernacular. He “talks” in the same way a hummingbird “flies.” He bustles from one project to the next, from one idea to another, the way a hungry omnivore might prowl through a landscape. Fire man¬agement, like life, was an experiment that never replicated itself. When he learned that a large burn was succeeding, he famously replied, Well that worked. Let’s try something different…
We cross the park boundary and enter a burned forest. The valley narrows here, before widening again. We ride on the north side of river, trekking across the south-facing slopes, those most easily burned, and which were in fact fired in the autumn of 1994. Planning for that burn had begun seriously in 1991, barely a decade after the park’s fire program had been rechartered. It required that Banff’s fire crew do something unusual and difficult: it required they refit skills developed for suppressing fires into starting them…
It was a bold act. If the fire had bolted beyond the border, it would have devoured outfitting camps, threatened the Ya Ha Tinda, and perhaps provoked Alberta’s fire authorities into a ruthless retaliation. Yet it was deemed not merely useful but necessary. Parks Canada policy stipulates that its units burn at least 50% of the acreage known historically to have burned. What appeared extensive was roughly Banff’s required annual tithe. But there were other sites less tricky than the steep valley of the Red Deer where one could have satisfied bureaucratic quotas. The Red Deer burn had other purposes.
The park-specifically, Cliff-would like to reintroduce its vanished bison. The reasoning is both simple and subtle. The bison were once here-the evidence is everywhere. Almost certainly the beasts filtered into, or were driven deeper into, the interior of Banff, and the valley of the Red Deer is an obvious corridor. Heavy snows would then seal them from escape back to the plains, like a fishtrap. With the bison caught inside their mountain corrals, natives could hunt them throughout the winter. Relict bison bones litter the old route like those of oxen along the Oregon Trail…
For a couple of days we will be joined by two backpackers, one of whom is Mark Heathcott, formerly of the Banff fire program, now on a working holiday from his Calgary post as Western Fire Coordinator for Parks Canada. We round a bend and ford the river and find them electric with excitement, a small fire burning on the trail. Not 15 minutes earlier, Mark blurts out, they saw an elk dash across the trail, followed by a calf, followed by a grizzly in full gallop. The calf swerved, the bear matched it in stride, and they watched it overtake the calf, and with its paw on the fallen head stare at them to see if they wished to contest him for the kill. They didn’t.
Banff has what few fire-rival reserves do: a multi-stranded conceptual rope that knots combustion with creatures. Big fires and big animals, that is what justifies the risks and expense of its fire program. Its animals need fire, but it is equally true that its fires need those animals. An abstract argument that fire belongs for reasons of ecological purity has almost no constituency. But if fire is linked to the survival of charismatic creatures, it can rally supporters. They may not like fire as fire, but they will accept it as a necessary shaper of habitat for the animals they wish to preserve.
Theories of nature’s economy and how to manage always tack closely to the wind of cultural perceptions. Banff follows what Cliff White calls a predator model of ecology. In this perspective, the big animals do not simply scrape off a surplus crust of biomass: they shape the entire structure of the biota. It’s a top-down paradigm, not particularly in academic favor over the past few decades in which bottom-up models have struck a more socially responsive chord…
But the academy’s model of the world became increasingly out of sync with political reality. In an era of predatory plutocracy, when a single rogue trader can topple a world bank, when a pack of currency speculators red in tooth and claw can unhinge exchange rates, when carnivorous CEOs can destroy a trillion dollars of stock market value, plunge huge corporations into bankruptcy, and throw the toiling minions into unemployment lines, a predator model seems more plausible. Cliffie believes Banff has ample evidence within its own microcosm. Its big creatures have shaped the world for its small. It needs its megafauna, and those megafauna need fire, the ecological equivalent of Schumpeter’s concept of capitalism as creative destruction…
In 1987, having resuscitated the Banff fire program, Cliff White was seconded to Ottawa to help defibrillate Parks Canada’s Directive 2.44. That policy reflected some of the best minds in Canadian fire. From the start, policy thinking had diverged from American models. It avoided wilderness, which the Canadians regarded as too culturally ambiguous to guide practical field operations, and it shunned a doctrine of natural regulation, a laissez-faire theory that insisted that administrators needed only stand aside and let nature run its course. Instead, the Canadian Park Service tried to craft a third way, a roughly science-based program that would aim to keep the biota intact and accept human intercession as needed. It looked a bit like corporatist Canada-eager for the trappings of a welfare state yet one that kept the predators intact. The doctrine of ecological integrity received its fire mandate when Cliff compiled a survey of park needs, Keepers of the Flame. Unlike the 1979 directive, the revision would argue for actively setting, not simply tolerating, fire.
The words were easy: the devil was in the doing. Cliff campaigned to get the ideas written into new directives, then to get them approved, and, no less critically, to get them funded. All that happened, much of it through the able bureaucratic hands of Stephen Woodley, who succeeded him in Ottawa, when Cliff returned to Banff as chief for conservation biology. Ask Cliff about his contribution, and he urgently explains that lots of others made critical decisions; the director-general, chief wardens, superintendents. But ask others, Cliffie’s friends and foes alike, and they will admit that Cliff White was the indispensable man. He never wearied, he never faltered. Even tinder, well prepared, requires a spark. Cliffie showered sparks. If one trial failed, he would try another. If one succeeded, he might try another as well…
They burned, and they learned. They discovered which variables dominated in what seasons and for what fuels. They burned some slopes in the fall, others in the spring. They underburned when the moisture in the canopies was high; they kindled for crown fires when the surface litter and canopies were as parched as kiln-dried lumber. They burned south-facing slopes first because they had the longest windows of opportunity. They ignited some slopes at the top, some at the bottom. They kindled some fires with spot ignitions, like drips of acid on a board. They kindled others in long streamers. They observed that some scree slopes were worthless as firebreaks because the rocks covered wood and organics that carried fire, like a smoking fuse, under the stone and into open forest. They confirmed that mostly the striking topography of the Rockies drove fires upslope, that terrain could override other considerations. Over and over, they relearned the obvious: that it was easier to start a fire than to hold one. They learned that things could easily go wrong, and Ian [Pengelly] soon devised the distinction between a zone of ignition and a zone of containment, between what they intended to burn and what, in truth, they did burn and could accept…
Trails tend to become passages for fire; our route to Flint’s Cabin is no exception. The evidence of the 1936 fires abounds everywhere in the texture of the forest-its even-aged blotches, its stringers, its sentinel snags. At Cuthead Creek the peculiar patchiness of the conifers tells of the 1914 and 1929 fire seasons. Along the Cascade Valley the land still testifies to the 1868 and 1889 complexes. Cliff notes that today’s trails all follow routes that appear on the first maps of Banff. All derive from aboriginal trails, which almost certainly coincided with animal paths. All track along south- and west-facing slopes, those that are the warmest and driest, that shed snow the earliest. They are the slopes most readily burned.
The Banff fire program has tried to replicate that heritage, particularly where the valley narrows against the Palliser Range and thickening trees threaten to strangle what should be a major wildlife corridor. The hillsides are pocked with the strips and splotches of prescribed fires, among the earliest big burns the program attempted. They sprayed the slopes with ping-pong-ball incendiaries. The fires, however, skipped and splashed, and proved less devouring than the program expected…
Cliff, Ian, and I hike to a campsite a bit up the valley. The park burned a small side-valley last fall. We search for aspen suckers and elk pellets, and Cliff and Ian recall how, on this same site, a few years previous, a handful of scientists had faced off in what became mockingly known as The Battle of the Stoney Creek Outhouse Meadow and argued, as only academics can, about whether the fire regimes of Banff were anthropogenic or natural. The brouhaha knotted several themes together, some scientific, some cultural.
The science thesis was that Canada’s grand fire history obeyed climatic forces and that humans could no more alter fire’s outcomes than they could the ebb and flow of ice ages. Fire management had no fundamental impact on fire’s geography. There was no point in fighting fires, there was no point in lighting them, there was no point in fussing over fuels. The statistical outcome would be identical. There was no point in having a fire program at all except to save buildings from wildfire. This bold claim, backed by graphs, merged with biocentric beliefs to argue that nature, and nature alone, should be left to run its affairs. Whatever people did was either irrelevant or meddlesome.
The cultural argument, while unstated, ran in parallel. The political entity called Canada is itself an institutional response to outside forces beyond its control, of which the first and mightiest is climate. Climate change, moreover, is an apt model for other exogenous forces-imperial, political, economic, cultural-which Canada has to endlessly accommodate. It was possible to imagine Canada as a confederation of convenience arrayed to protect its population against global or continental powers over which it has little direct influence. The institutional turmoil that so characterizes its bureaucracies and its ever looser union is, in this sense, only a token of Canadian adaptations against what it cannot change.
Banff saw matters differently. In particular, Cliff and his colleagues saw the hand of humanity widely sculpting Banff’s historic landscapes and they believed that removing that not-so-invisible hand from nature’s economy could unravel Banff’s biota, like a sloppy diamond hitch ready to dump boxes along a trail. The Banff model suggested that Canada was not merely a shelter for survival but a positive act of human imagination and social will…
We are traveling along Banff’s greatest corridor. Everything else in the park bends to its flow. It is, not incidentally, a route of fire-of internal fire and fossil fuel, yes; but still a passage shaped by controlled combustion in the hands of humans. We have crossed the threshold into the world of industrial fire. Not far from Banff townsite, but well within the park boundaries to the east, are the remains of Anthracite, a coal-mining town, a reminder that the coal and steam in the form of the Canadian Pacific initially created the park, Canada’s first…
What Cliff and Ian and Parks Canada en masse have realized, moreover, is that these circumstances did not begin with the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Banff Springs Hotel. Rather, humanity has, since the retreat of the ice, structured the park’s fire landscape as fully as wolves have influenced its dynamics of elk and aspen.
It is the ultimate top-down model of ecology. Among the many megafauna of Banff, one shapes its surroundings not simply by digging or hunting or chewing trees but by burning or not burning. Hominids are the fire creatures: they are, through fire, the keystone species that will, for good or ill, wisely or idiotically, intentionally or accidentally, catalyze a world that the other creatures must inhabit. Wolves, grizzlies, cougars, elk, mountain goats, bighorn sheep-each has unique qualities, but to some degree another can substitute. If a niche opens, some other animals will enter it. But not with fire. There is no other biological source of ignition than humanity. Life created oxygen, life created fuel. What life could not do is kindle, or it could not until Homo arrived, and allowed the biosphere to very nearly close the cycle of burning. If humans fail, there is no other creature to do it for them…
Along the Red Deer aboriginal North Americans walked, hunted, foraged, and burned. Along the Bow today, contemporary Canadians drive, observe wildlife, snap photos, and burn-or not. They must decide whether to apply or withhold fire and in what forms and to what ends.
They remain the predator of predators. They have, as part of their genetic inheritance, a capacity beyond fangs, talons, claws, and smell, a power greater than the tireless lope of a wolf or the brute strength of a grizzly. They can start and stop fire. If Cliff White and his cohorts are anywhere near correct in their reading of that land and its history, fire is the keystone catalyst for its future, whatever they and nature decide that future might be…
