Our Trial By Fire

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I like fire best because it overrules us. George Weldon told me something in our recent conversation that I have never heard from a public official. To paraphrase: I'm from the federal government and I'm here to tell you I can't help you. He says global warming has pushed us past the point where firefighters or even politicians can decide whether to protect badly placed homes and towns.

"I think it is disrespectful to tell people we are going to protect their structures when we don't have the capability," he says. "What's different is that the environment we are living in and working in is going to demand that we look at it differently. I don't think we have a choice."

Weldon says that firefighters misdirected resources in two ways this past summer. They spent too much energy protecting structures, and they put too much effort into "initial attack," which means extinguishing freshly started fires before they get big. In fact, 98 percent of all fires that started this year in the northern Rockies were extinguished within a few hours. This record would have conferred bragging rights two decades ago, but Weldon believes this approach is not sustainable; firefighters should have let more fires burn.

According to Weldon, his agency's goal is restoring fire to the ecosystem, and firefighters can't meet that goal as long as they spend most of their funds and energies fighting fires at the edges of towns, steering them away from buildings. He'd like to spend more time steering fires toward something, toward areas that need to burn, areas choked with fuel, areas that, if burned now, will become strategic firebreaks against future fires. In other words, global warming is going to force something that looks very much like the wilderness fire policy--but outside of wilderness too. The combination of fire suppression and global warming has pushed us past the point of control. We no longer have all that much influence; now fire will write its own policy.

"If people don't like smoke or they are nervous with fires burning from June until the end of September, they are in the wrong place," says Weldon.

Canyon Creek burned in 1988, but it was really in 1989 that I became a convert to the creative power of fire. That year I joined a group of biologists on a walk through the fire site, and nothing I had seen before prepared me for the scene. It was a time of Forest Service videos and pamphlets telling us how forest fire would burn in a "mosaic," burning here and there, skipping patches and ridges, all to restore diversity to the system. The result would be fewer trees, but healthier and larger ones. Some of us had begun thinking about fire as no more menacing than Bambi.

Canyon Creek corrected our thinking by leaving a moonscape of total and fierce destruction. We walked ankle-deep in ash, seeing not a living thing for miles on end, a landscape of still-standing black ghost trees. Then some of those same biologists dug up something called the Ayres map, the result of a timber survey of what is now the Bob Marshall, drafted in 1899. It showed enormous prairies, burned areas, and very little forest--only about 5 percent of the landscape. That is, a great sprawl of wilderness whole generations have regarded as forest primeval wasn't forest at all. The forest was man-made by fire suppression.

Savannah, not forest, was probably the normal state of affairs in the Bob Marshall before white settlement, a fact of considerable import to ecologists. Presettlement conditions are generally regarded as baseline, which is to say, the last time an ecosystem has been healthy. The fact that Canyon Creek has regrown vegetation--much of it shrubs and brush, approximating the Ayres map--and in the process has become excellent habitat for such as elk and grizzly bear tells us this is where the land wants to go and ought to go.

Given the enormity of Canyon Creek and the evidence of the Ayres map, ecologists began looking back beyond the puny fires of recent history for a more sweeping precedent. They began wondering if there were lessons to be learned from 1910, the very fire that spawned the policy of fire suppression.

That year two days of 75-mile-an-hour winds blew up a fire in northern Idaho on August 20 and 21, sending it sprawling across those three million acres and killing 85 people, most of them firefighters. It's still the biggest fire on record in the country, but probably only because records don't go back very far. Such fires may have been relatively normal--every century or so--before. No one knows for sure. But the fear is that global warming will make them a lot more normal.

The fires of 2007 could in fact have been a lot worse than they were here in the northern Rockies; firefighters got some lucky breaks. Late August brought a shift toward cooler weather, a little rain, and none of the howling winds that can haunt that month. Wind could have written a very different story.

Four times in the past 10 years I have expected to wake up not to fires around the edge of Missoula, my town of 100,000 people, but to a firestorm the equal of 1910. So I asked Weldon if he could imagine such a thing occurring, if conditions aligned.

"Absolutely," he says. "We lined up in 2000. We lined up in 2003. Even a little bit we were lined up in 2006. We were definitely lined up in 2007. It's not a question of if; it is a question of when."

The example of 1910 says such a fire could happen without global warming, even could be a good thing for modern, fuel-choked forests. But with global warming we don't get fire; we get fire squared. We now have an idea what this fiercer fire means for the humans of the place; we are only guessing what it means for flora and fauna. This ecosystem thrived on and recovered from normal fire, but all bets are off on how it will do facing year on year of escalating, sweltering desiccation. Global warming could well deprive fire of its creativity and leave us facing a single-minded, angry god.