Who Needs Science When the Gods Are Managing Your Forests?
Fire Gods and Federal Policy, an essay by Dr. Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Ph.D. published in American Forests in 1989, was controversial then and remains so. It is also an honest and accurate assessment of the a-scientific, mythology-based management philosophy of the National Park Service, and is as true today as it was in 1989.
The full text of Thomas M. Bonnicksen. 1989. Fire Gods and Federal Policy. American Forests 95(7 & 8): 14-16, 66-68 is now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].
Some excerpts:
… The wildfires that swept through Yellowstone and surrounding wilderness areas during the summer of 1988 were not a natural event. Unlike the eruption of Mount St. Helens (which could not be controlled) the number, size and destructiveness of the Yellowstone wildfires could have been substantially reduced. The changes that took place in the vegetation mosaic and fuels in Yellowstone during nearly a century of fire suppression were preventable and reversible. The Park Service was aware of the risks of letting lightning fires burn, especially during a drought. … Thus the Yellowstone wildfires were caused by a combination of decades of neglect and incredibly poor judgment. …
[I]t is likely that the wildfires would not have reached the mammoth size of 1.4 million acres if only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars used to fight the Yellowstone wildfires had been spent on scientific management that utilized prescribed burning, especially if vigorous suppression efforts had been undertaken by the Park Service when each fire began.
The Yellowstone wildfires were only the symptom of a far more serious problem. That problem is the profound deterioration in vegetation and wildlife that is taking place throughout the national park and wilderness systems because of the lack of scientific management. The widespread damage caused by the Yellowstone wildfires, especially the destruction of the historic vegetation mosaic and its replacement with a monoculture of lodgepole pine, is a conspicuous example of deterioration. …
In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and Crater Lake National Park, no effort is being made by the Park Service to adjust burning prescriptions even though the fires are killing hundreds of ancient ponderosa and sugar pine trees. Dr. Edward C. Stone, from the University of California-Berkeley, and I warned the Park Service twelve years ago that these fires were killing unusually large numbers of large trees. We recommended that action be taken to reduce the mortality, but the warning was ignored. A study conducted by the Forest Service last summer proved that we were correct. The study showed that burning heavy litter that accumulated during the past century due to fire suppression is producing lethal temperatures deep within the soil that are cooking the tree roots. Numerous other examples could be cited, but the main point is that irreplaceable resources are deteriorating over millions of acres of land because the Park Service rejects scientific management. …
The deterioration of precious park and wilderness resources can be traced to an anti-scientific management philosophy in the Park Service, and to a lesser extent in the Forest Service, that is known as “letting nature take its course.” This philosophy embodies the view that national park and wilderness areas are quasi-religious sanctuaries where “Mother Nature” resides and rules. People may enter these sanctuaries to see the forces of nature at work but they must not interfere with those forces. Adherents to this philosophy naively assume, without a shred of scientific evidence, that “Mother Nature” (i.e., lightning fires) will restore an undefined state of “naturalness” to park and wilderness areas. …
The philosophy of “letting nature take its course” has turned the clock back thousands of years to a time when people placed their fate in the hands of mythical gods. You may think that this is silly, and it is, but it is also true. Decades of research have brought us to the point where scientific management is feasible, yet today the Park Service is relying instead on “Mother Nature” or God. Park and wilderness mangers no longer need a degree in science to manage resources, they need a degree in mythology. In the future, managing a park or wilderness will only require that rangers stand on mountaintops making incantations to the Greek god Zeus asking him to send thunderbolts to earth and fashion a new forest with fire. Who needs science when you believe that the gods are managing your forest?
How could such ancient ideas reemerge on the threshold of the 21st century? How could the Park Service adopt such ancient ideas when some of its own managers are active participants in a new and rapidly growing professional organization called the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) — an organization committed to using scientific management to restore and maintain biotic communities? The answer is simple: zealots within the agencies, encouraged by some preservation groups and ideologues in universities, have taken over our national park and wilderness areas and converted them into their own quasi-religious temples. Thus national parks no longer serve their original purpose of providing for “the enjoyment of the people,” as stated in the inscription on the stone gate to Yellowstone National Park, instead they satisfy the spiritual needs of a small but influential subculture. …
Parks Canada has moved aggressively forward with socially responsible scientific management of their national parks while we have moved backward. Unlike the U.S. Park Service’s decision to let Yellowstone burn, Parks Canada is using prescribed fires based on scientific research to return the forests to a more natural condition. Cliff White, the Canadian fire management coordinator, stated in the March 1989 issue of Discover magazine that Canadians can not accept the notion about fire that “as long as lightning started it, it’s God’s way.” “We can’t use that here,” he said,” because God’s way is too rough.” The Yellowstone wildfires of 1988 demonstrate that relying on the gods to manage park and wilderness areas is “too rough.”
There are two principal reasons why it is convenient to rely on “Mother Nature” or the gods to manage national park and wilderness areas. First, the gods relieve the agencies of the demanding responsibility of dealing with the complexity of biotic communities. The gods also relieve them of the distinction between success and failure; the success or failure is God’s, not the agencies.
For instance, even though the Park Service initially let some of the Yellowstone fires burn, officials argue that they are blameless because they ultimately did what they could to stop the fires; or so they would like you to believe. …
Some environmental groups that support the Park Service also use the mystique of “letting nature take its course” as a political weapon to justify a host of anti-management, anti-people and anti-development positions. This philosophy is also a convenient way for them to attract new members who respond to romantic images more than scientific evidence. … park.
Inevitably, adherence to the “let nature take its course” philosophy compromises the objectivity of science. Those who subscribe to this philosophy reject in advance any existing knowledge, or proposed research, that questions park and wilderness policy. Thus, the Park Service ignores a large body of scientific knowledge, and it often spends precious research dollars to fend off criticism rather than to answer critical management questions. …
The “let nature take its course” philosophy, which led to the Yellowstone wildfires, is founded on a false premise — that national park and wilderness areas were pristine or untouched by humans when they were set aside. They were not pristine! By the time that European explorers arrived, much of the vegetation and wildlife in park and wilderness areas was profoundly altered due to thousands of years of Indian use. The “let nature take its course” philosophy denies the widespread and important role of Indians in managing vegetation and wildlife, demeans their cultures and intelligence, and creates a false separation between people and nature. It places modern people in the position of being victims rather than responsible participants in nature. People do not cease to be part of nature when they enter a national park or wilderness area. More than ever it is important that people play an active and constructive part in managing their environment.
The “let nature take its course” philosophy will eventually destroy the very values national park and wilderness areas were set aside to preserve. The historically unprecedented wildfires in Yellowstone are just a conspicuous example of the potential magnitude of these man-made changes. National park and wilderness areas were not set aside to preserve fire or abstractions such as “letting nature take its course,” they were set aside for a host of values that fire may or may not have had a role in creating. The Park Service and the Forest Service must ultimately be held accountable for what fire or the lack of fire leaves behind, not the presence or absence of fire. …
We must accept the truth that chance lightning fires alone cannot restore vegetation mosaics in park and wilderness areas to their natural or presettlement scale and diversity. … The vegetation mosaic that resulted from the interaction of Indian set fires and lightning fires worked for thousands of years to produce safe and attractive forests that supported a wide variety of wildlife. Scientific management could work for thousands of years into the future to produce the same benefits for us and our children. …
[National Park] resource managers must cease to act as if they know best and accept their responsibility to listen to all of the people, and not just a few groups. The Park Service and the Forest Service can no longer justify asking visitors or people living on the boundary of park and wilderness areas to place their livelihood, their property, and their lives at risk to agency policies over which they have no control. Such important decisions should not be made without public participation and full disclosure of all of the scientific facts.
The Yellowstone wildfires of 1988 have served an important purpose, unfortunately at great cost. They have stimulated a long overdue discussion among resource professionals and the public about the objectives and management of our national park and wilderness areas. I hope that these discussions will result in a clear sense of direction for resource management in the 21st century. This may be our last chance to stop the deterioration of our national park and wilderness areas. I believe that such discussions will eventually show that scientific management is our best hope for the future.
