The onset of winter has ended the fire season in Yellowstone. The fire fighting crews borrowed from as far away as California have gone home. The controversies engendered by the National Park Service’s so-called “let it burn” policy have cooled for the time being. They will heat up again when the new Congress convenes after the election. Hearings are promised. Various members of the Wyoming and Montana congressional delegations are hotter than the flames that almost incinerated the Old Faithful Lodge, and they will doubtless be looking for a chance to make headlines back home by skewering some bureaucrats.
We need to realize how difficult it is to put out a forest fire. One fire ecologist I talked to, Carlton Britton of Texas Tech, claimed that he had only seen one fire in his career that was unequivocally extinguished by human effort. That one was a blaze that broke out in the middle of a logging operation in Arizona. Within seconds, 11 bulldozers were at the scene to cut firebreaks, and a few minutes later, converted B-17s began making passes–one every three minutes–to drop fire retardant chemicals on the flames. “Usually,” Britton said, “they go out because the weather changes. It starts to rain, or the wind shifts.”
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Those effects appear to be wholly beneficial. In fact, my conversations with a number of fire ecologists, scientists who have devoted their careers to studying the effects of fire on natural systems, produced only one criticism of park policy. And that was a suggestion that the Park Service should have set fires in previous years in order to consume the fuel in old lodgepole pine stands–most of what burned this summer was lodgepole pine–and thus provide natural firebreaks. However, other ecologists thought that prescribed burning of this kind would not have worked in Yellowstone. To get some sense of the situation, we need to look at how lodgepole pine forests work.
Fires can renew the lodgepole pine woods, but their effects vary with the intensity of the blaze. Weak ground fires that burn at night or in wet conditions consume some of the duff–the mat of decaying pine needles and other stuff that covers the ground–but kill few standing trees. They may thin a pine stand somewhat, but otherwise they have little ecological effect.
Ecological processes like these, have been sustaining life in Yellowstone for thousands of years and allowing them to continue, encouraging them to continue when necessary, is the only way to keep the park in its natural state.
We can learn much from what happened in Yellowstone this summer. A forest is a living thing that is born, grows old, and dies just like we do. Imagining that you can pickle a forest, freeze it in time, is as absurd as imagining that you can stay 25 forever. A wilderness like Yellowstone can show us the rhythms of nature, the long cycles of death and rebirth that endlessly renew life. We should be patient. As one ecologist told me, “I never saw a burn that looked good the next year, and I never saw one that looked bad a year later.”
