“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.
