Facing Fire Lessons from the Ashes  Patty Limerick Originally published on February 16, 2001

Note: Do not cite individuals within this report without confirming quotations with them. All of the text, outside of material within quotation marks, can be attributed to Patty Limerick.

or the Trans-Mississippi West, the Summer of 2000 added up to a prolonged reminder of the untamed power of fire. Money, public

attention, and firefighters were directed to a number of serious and severe fires in the region. With the archaeological sites at Mesa Verde and the nuclear labs at Los Alamos at risk, fires at “celebrity places” played their part in focusing public concern on the accumulated fuel load of forests in which fire suppression had been the reigning policy for decades. Nearly everyone recognized that recent history had left the West with a very big fire problem; not everyone agreed on the proper response to this dilemma.

In its mission to be helpful in understanding Western issues, the Center of the American West convened a group of experts from many disciplines to pool their understandings of wildlands fire. The purpose of this event was threefold:

1. to examine and reappraise current understandings of the relationship between wildlands fire and human society;

2. to continue to identify and introduce to each other University of Colorado faculty whose expertise intersects on Western issues, and to identify and explore unexpected opportunities for collaboration; and

3. to see if an interdisciplinary conversation might produce new understandings of and new strategies for fire management.

While a few presenters came from elsewhere, the majority of the participants represented “local talent”-University of Colorado professors with a

shared interest in fire, and, given the fragmentation and specialization of academic life, few opportunities to learn about each other’s work. Each presenter was asked to think about the “orthodox” understanding of fire in her or his discipline, and to consider whether that established understanding is entirely satisfactory, or whether it could benefit from the rethinking of old assumptions and the asking of new questions. In a two-day session of roundtable discussions, each presenter spoke for twenty to thirty minutes, followed by lively discussion with the other presenters. In the afternoon of the second day, a panel presentation summed up the proceedings for a public audience.

John Daily, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Joint Center for Combustion and Environmental Research, gave the first presentation titled “How Fires Behave.” Fire is “the combustion, or rapid oxidation, of carbonaceous organic matter.” Wildfires have “a phenomenal economic impact,” said Daily, “and yet despite their importance we are still limited in our predictive capabilities.”

Fire can occur when a heat source causes a fuel source, such as grass, brush, or trees, to pyrolize, releasing combustible cases that are free to mix and react with the surrounding air. “The essential ingredients of fuel, heat, and oxygen are described by the well known ‘firefighter’s triangle.’” The important phases of combustion are:

1. Pre-ignition, in which fuel is heated, dried, and pyrolized.

2. Ignition, in which gaseous fuels ignite, producing heat release and flame, and thus

F

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driving more pre-ignition in surrounding terrain.

3. Flame propagation, the spread of fire over the areas where fuel is available.

4. Extinction, which occurs when gaseous fuels are no longer available and only char remains.

Important variables in the spread of fire involve the density of the fuel, and the effect of wind and slope. Wind strongly enhances the rate of spread by forcing the plume of hot combustion gases to bend over and more rapidly heat the territory in advance. Likewise, when fire moves up-slope, the flame is closer to the ground and thus more effective at pre-ignition. “Fire loves to run with the wind and go uphill,” Daily said, “and most fire blow-ups occur because of wind and/or slope.” “In addition, fire can create its own local winds that can speed things up substantially.”

Firefighters work to control fire by removing one of the essential elements. The reason firefighters use water is that the crucial phase of pre-ignition is drying the fuel. Fire retardants slow the rate of chemical reaction and thus slow the rate of spread. Digging fire lines and setting back fires removes fuel. (While not practical in fighting wild fires, removing oxygen works, too. The famous Red Adair put out oil well fires by using explosives to deplete the oxygen near the well.)

Daily then explored the great variation in the rate of spread of fires, relating the fire’s speed to human locomotion. For example, a brush fire in strong wind might spread at 250 feet per minute; a human in flight from it would have to walk briskly. Chapparal burning in a Santa Ana wind in Southern California might go 800 feet per minute, a marathon pace. Dry, short grass burning in a strong wind can travel at1200 feet per minute, the human equivalent of a four-minute mile. Blow-ups, when fire moves at this fearsome pace, cannot be predicted, and here Daily used the examples of the fatal Mann Gulch and South Canyon fires.

Daily presented a table on the number of fires and acres burned over the past eighty years; while the number of acres burned has been contracting, the number of fires has become a little greater. “The vast majority of fires are set by humans,” Daily

said, “so Smokey the Bear isn’t all wrong.” Daily then presented his own observations of controlled burns in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and screened compelling videos of fires in progress. Wildland fires are “very large-scale, non-linear turbulent events,” Daily remarked, “which is why they are difficult to predict,” an observation borne out by the images on the screen.

Explicating the mechanics of wildfire, Daily had provided the group with a clear and memorable framework for the following discussions.

Carl Bock, Professor of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, began his presentation on “Fire and Grasslands” with the declaration that fire is a “determinant of grasslands.” In the most arid (desert) and the most moist (tall grass) grasslands, fire has its greatest consequences. If you don’t burn tall grass sites, trees grow, as one can see in woody invasions along foothills. Management sometimes tries to reverse the incursion of pines with fire. Because of the value to livestock of grass, fire is now of reduced frequency; grazing is a kind of fuel reduction. The fragmentation of grasslands by housing developments may well change the dynamics of this situation.

At Wind Cave in South Dakota, Bock watched a group of bison react to a controlled-burn fire. They were, he said, “really relaxed.” A small group was caught on a knoll; they waited calmly until a lead cow chose a route and ran flat-out toward and through the fire. They all rushed through the fire, and, on the other side, started licking the burnt ground. It was Bock’s “untestable hypothesis” that the fact that bison do not shed, seasonally, their front hair might be a fire adaptation. One animal had collided with the animal ahead of him, and, thus disabled, had been burned by the fire: he was “barbecued” on his back, and only singed in front.

Bock then shifted his discussion to his research site in Arizona, showing the recovery of grasslands after a fire in 1987. “How long do fire effects last?” he asked. “Who wins and who loses?” The effects do not last long, he said; they are often ephemeral. With two growing seasons in this particular area, the grass cover will come back very fast. Liberated by the temporary suppression of grass, other vegetation-herbs, forbs-will take advantage of the opportunity. The responses of

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birds are very species-specific, depending on their nesting and foraging requirements, and their preference for open landscapes or relatively closed-in landscapes. How much “direct mortality of animals” did grasslands fire cause? “Relatively little.” Lots of them succeed in escaping the fire, and soil proves to be a good insulator. Snakes are the main “victims,” lost to suffocation.

Fires sustain grasslands, keeping them as grasslands. The response of organisms varies by their habitat need. Given these variations, it would be just as bad an idea, Bock concluded, to burn all grasslands at the same time, as it would be to burn none. Grasslands should not all be managed in the same way. Particularly difficult decisions will have to be made on the managing of fire in landscape remnants, where a whole flora and fauna are dependent on a bounded ecosystem in a particular condition. With human development fragmenting so many Western landscapes, there is often “too much risk” in letting wildfires go. “Do it when you think you can control it,” Bock declared.

Professor Jane Bock, from Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, then gave a presentation on “Vegetation, Fire, and Custer’s Last Stand.” In 1984, Bock was called upon by the National Park Service to assess the impact of a fire that burned the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Park officials wanted Bock to figure out what the battlefield had looked like at the time of the battle, in the hope that they could restore it to its “original” state. Bock was able to draw on a rich photographic archive, including previously unprinted negatives. At the time of the battle, Bock concluded, there was some grass, and lots of sagebrush. The significant presence of both bison and Indian horses, in the mid-nineteenth century, had played a big role in producing this distribution of plants; thus, one way to restore the place to its condition in the 1870s would be to have Indian people graze horses on the site. In other words, landscape conditions and fire regimes from the seemingly distant past were already much shaped by human activity.

Taking off from the military history of this site, the discussion following Jane Bock’s presentation anticipated some of the presentations from the next day, exploring the ways in which firefighting customs resemble and even replicate military customs. The discussion also took up the particular

qualities of sagebrush fires, which are distinctively hot and intense.

Professor Yan Linhart, from Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology then gave a presentation on “Forests and Fire: Early History and Policy.” Linhart, it turned out, had been trained as a forester, and dreamed of being a smoke-jumper. He recognized fire as a recurrent event that had taken place for many millennia. Drawing on biological evidence, it was clear that many plants (organisms which “can’t run away and hide from fire”) had adapted with mechanisms to complete their life cycle and reproduce” And yet the first Euro-American settlers saw “fire as the enemy of orderly economic development,” and therefore a force that had to be fought. The campaign to control fire was remarkably successful, leading to a build-up of fuel. A shift in policy in response to this changed set of circumstances “is still in the making.”

From its origins, the Forest Service saw its primary mission as saving forests from fire, with many of its leaders trained in Europe, where natural fires were uncommon except in the Mediterranean region. Setting fires carried the association of “banditry, and loose morals.” The influential explorer John Wesley Powell had thought that fire took out too much timber; since Indians were often users of fire as a way of modifying landscapes, the removal of Indians, Powell thought, would benefit the forests. Celebrating the triumph of the policy of suppression, the first Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, had made the famous declaration: “Today we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of man.”

Still, not everyone bought into this way of thinking. In California in the 1880s, some settlers continued to recognize light burning as a land management tool. Elsewhere in the West, strong anti-government attitudes inspired “defiant calls to fire-setting. Nonetheless, the Forest Service was very successful in getting its ideas across, with slogans like “One tree can make a million matches; one match can kill a million trees.” Lectures, films, and paintings (one called “Demon Fire,” for instance) reinforced the point. A speaker named H. M. Wheeler presented a sort of gospel of “pyrophobic fundamentalism.” The Forest Service sought the advice of psychologists and anthropologists, particularly to get the anti-fire

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message into the schools. In the 1930s, big ad agencies made the case that forest protection equaled national defense. Walt Disney’s Bambi made fire into the cruel enemy of cuddly wildlife. Smokey the Bear capped this crusade, declaring in the mid-1940s that “Only you can prevent forest fires.” He was a “manly bear, not too cuddly,” a design that made him into the most popular national symbol.

Before fire suppression, Western ponderosa pine, growing in a belt from Eastern Washington to New Mexico, appeared in open stands. Now ponderosa pine forests are characterized by dense in-growth. What can we do with such forests? Treat them with fire? This would be a problem in some places, where the trees are simply too dense, and air quality would be too much affected. Allow logging, particularly the cutting of small trees? This is not economical, since the small trees have little market value. There is no easy solution for the dilemma we have created.

By the 1970s, enough large fires had occurred to get people to pay attention to what the landscapes were telling us. One particular leader in this cause was Dr. Harold Biswell of the University of California, Berkeley, nicknamed “Harry the Torch” or “Dr. Burnwell.” Mocked for a long time, Biswell has emerged as the prophet of a crucial recognition of the need to permit and incorporate fire in forests.

The discussion then focused on questions of remedy. Is there an economical way to thin overgrown forests? Can we develop a market for cutting small trees? Perhaps it is time to promote whittling as a pleasant social custom, one participant suggested; if Americans could develop a widespread desire to have small chunks of wood on hand for this artistic expression, this would create the market for these small-diameter trees.

Participants turned to appraise the opposition presented by many environmentalists to any kind of forest-thinning, which they see only as a justification for logging. It was time, one participant observed, for “professional biologists to educate their conservationist brethren.” This led to a discussion of how on earth anyone could identify the baseline for restoration: if one goal was to recreate forests as they were, then the follow-up question was surely, “As they were when?” While

Clements’ idea of a climax stage of ecological evolution was no longer in good repute, still, Jane Bock observed, we can “understand the internally driven direction a biological community is going in,” and design management strategies that will be compatible with that direction.

What can we do to reverse the impact of Smokey the Bear? “Not fight all fires at all cost,” Linhart answered. Undertake an education campaign, with the conservation agencies as a particular focus. “Get out of the reactive mode,” John Daily advised; “manage pro-actively.” This was hard to do, he acknowledged, as exurban residents got mad and protested the thinning of forests: “You’re cutting our trees!” Chemistry professor Bob Sievers encouraged us to think “more holistically,” of the health of the planet, a goal that “we’re all coming at from our own warm, fuzzy cause.” A participant concluded this discussion with reflections on how difficult it is to extend the time-scale in our thinking: we are talking about a process that has run for millennia, but we are stuck thinking in terms of the last one hundred years of management. It is very difficult to get the federal agencies (or anyone else, for that matter) to think in the long term.

Professor Thomas Veblen, from Geography, spoke next on “Changes in Fire Regimes in the Colorado Front Range Since 1700 A.D.” (Professor Veblen, it turns out, had heard Professor Biswell lecture in the late 1960s.) Veblen remarked on how “amazing” the change in attitudes had been over recent times, in terms of recognition of the undesirable consequences of fire suppression. And yet unpredictability remained very high in the case of any actual landscape. Veblen made this attention-grabbing announcement: “We don’t have sufficient knowledge to manage most sites, even if we agreed on the goal.”

To respond to the question, “how does the fire regime change along a steep environmental gradient?” Veblen presented results from 41 sample sites. Fire scars, on trees for which the fire was non-lethal, can be quite precise in revealing the past. Of course, the absence of fire scars does not mean the absence of fires; it’s only an index or indicator, a kind of proxy evidence. Moreover, fire scars don’t reveal the cause of fires; while Indians may have set a number of the historic fires, Veblen doesn’t believe that their activity was the dominant

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cause. During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was evidently an increase in fires. In the early 1900s, at low elevations, fire suppression went into action. Meadows became forests; the stands behind Chautauqua Park in Boulder, could give us an immediate sense of how very filled in these sites could become. The idea of restoring forests to conditions of 150 years ago, with scattered trees and open land, makes its best fit to these foothill sites. At higher elevations, however, with a combination of ponderosa, Douglas fir, and lodgepole, there might well have been a different pattern.

Veblen’s studies had not shown “evidence of frequent fire in upper montane areas.” These were mixed fire regimes, where stand-replacing or partially stand-replacing fires mainly shaped forest structure, and surface fires played a relatively minor role. The record disclosed that many decades had passed between fires at upper elevations-which was “not,” Veblen said emphatically, “what we expected.” The clear moral to this story was that we need site-specific information, and not the attempted application of the same paradigm from one site to another.

In the years 1786 and 1859, there were fires in lots of Front Range forests; “more than 50% of the area was burning.” And this example of two very heavy fire seasons from the past should, Veblen said, leave us “very concerned.” The development of dense stands about the same age meant a synchroncity in outbreaks of budworm infestations, and that, in turn, left dead trees and a greater regional fire hazard. More information on the patterns of spruce budworm outbreaks would thus be very useful to understanding fire regimes.

We need specific information on a particular site to provide a basis for management, Veblen said. While the recent mandate for fire suppression has had a clear effect, we can’t interpret all change in those terms. Climate variability-namely, drought-is “extremely important” in the conditions for fire. What happens in the spring will be crucial for ponderosa forests; if a drought follows a wet year, then conditions will be similar to those in 1786 and 1859.

In current times, houses present a major fire hazard, putting more pressure on human ability to manage and predict fire. Many mountain

homeowners seem to think that experts have a “crystal ball,” but experts can’t precisely predict future fire hazard. In the meantime, assumptions about our “ability to reduce fire risk may be creating a false sense of security.” In the political world, one participant observed, far more than an enlightened understanding of ecosystem needs, concern for these exurban houses is at the core of support for prescribed burns. As one astute commentator said, “Influential people live in those places,” including city council members. Still, “we have a responsibility to tell people it’s an extremely hazardous environment.” In such politically charged matters, the lack of site-specific scientific knowledge about the history of fire limits our capacity to plan for the future.

During lunch, two participants, one from the National Park Service and the other from National Forest Service, offered their commentary on our proceedings. “The timing of this forum,” the Park Service official said, couldn’t be better.” After “one hundred years of denial,” it was clear that “fire will happen, controlled and regulated or uncontrolled and unregulated.” Was the year 2000 an “indicator of what’s to come,” “the beginning of a disastrous couple of decades?” Questions like these were nearly impossible to answer, since we’re “still learning” about “the complexities of forests.” Even when science is at its strongest, the political system, all the participants agreed, often “interferes with the logical, scientific way to handle the problem.” In the federal agencies, there is a real “generational aspect” to this topic; senior people were trained in the “Smokey the Bear School,” but now there was a new breed of managers, some of whom had been taught that “Smokey the Bear should have been shot.” (He’s well-intentioned, and “he shows up for picnics,” another participant responded in Smokey’s defense.) The Parks have been trying to “get back to ecosystems with a natural fire regime,” but this meant catching up with over eighty years of suppression.” President Clinton’s National Fire Plan was telling all agencies to double the acreage of prescribed burns, and yet “most of the easy acres have already been burned,” and there were big Clean Air Act implications for permitting any sort of fire to burn.

The National Forest Service participant observed the agency’s fire plan office has become “like Santa’s workshop,” a frenzy of activity. In the

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Rockies, 110,000 acres would be subject this year to “vegetation management,” through mechanical means, chemical treatment, or fire. The challenge of “building a good scientific basis for doing the right thing,” while also trying for actions that will be “socially acceptable,” was a big burden. The Forest Service had to get the “ecological complexity sorted out,” so they could “do the right thing in the right place.” A likely point of collision would be between the goal of fuel mitigation and the goal of maintenance of wildlife habitat and species viability; prescribed fire, for instance, produced sedimentation in aquatic systems, which meant a decline in habitat for a number of species. The Forest Service does seem to get sued much more than the Park Service, so the battles for social acceptability might well come to a focus with this agency-hence, its an even greater need for help on the social science side.

Professor Robert Sievers, of the Chemistry Department and the Environmental Program, spoke next on “The Imperative for Holistic Impact Assessment of Prescribed Burns and Fire Policy.” Sievers declared himself to be something of a “spoilsport” in the workshop, countering the appreciation of fire with a discussion of some of its “less positive features.” Calling our attention to the impact on air quality of fire (whether natural or prescribed) in a time in which “the increase of carbonaceous compounds constitutes a global problem.” Industrialization has put massive amounts of carbon into the air, and fundamentally changed the atmosphere. Sequestering carbon in biomass is an alternative to having it in the air. In those terms, a burning forest is surrendering carbon to the atmosphere, and releasing many other chemicals and particulates. Benzene, for instance, is the same carcinogen whether it is released into the atmosphere by a tailpipe or a burning log. A chemist’s perception of burning could be compared to a biologist’s perception of cancer: both are out-of-control processes, unleashing a “proliferation of products.” Of course, a prescribed burn could produce less air pollution than a delayed bigger fire. Still, it is obvious good sense to explore the political and social acceptability of thinning forests by other means than fire, even though this looks as if it will require a great change in the mindset of environmentalists. In the meantime, we should keep in mind that the benefits of natural and prescribed fire come with some less agreeable

atmospheric impacts. In the discussion, the dangers of smoke inhalation for firefighters brought this big picture to a poignant, human focus, since “acute exposures to smoke inhalation” can be difficult to mitigate, even with respirators.

The final speaker for Friday’s workshop was Professor Philip Omi, director of the Western Forest Fire Research Center, founded after the Yellowstone fires, at Colorado State University. In a talk called “From the Ashes of 2000,” Omi reviewed the outcomes and consequences of the summer 2000 fire season. The lessons, he said, were “in many ways unresolved.” Omi began with an overview of the many sites of fires in 2000-comparatively few in California, Oregon, and Washington, but a concentration in the interior West, with the largest and most costly at Clear Creek, Idaho. The last century on this continent has been an era of suppression, with the number of fires picking up in the 1980s and 1990s. The connection between timber harvesting and fire was a difficult one to ascertain, though it did seem safe to say that “removing biomass in a judicious way would reduce fuel.”

The revelations from Y2K were many. It was impossible to miss “the futility of fire exclusion.” It was equally impossible not to face up to the “subsidies for people living in fire-prone environments, who expect government to provide them with fire protection.” And prescribed fire came in for questioning; before the Cerro Grande/Los Alamos fire, it was easy to take prescribed burning as a panacea, a way to restore fire to its natural role.

Institutionally, the outcome of the 2000 fire season was a Presidential Initiative assigning $1.6 billion in federal money to address the problem. The National Fire Plan would 1) upgrade firefighting resources (many skilled veterans are close to retirement); 2) restore and rebuild damaged landscapes and communities; 3) reduce fire risk through fuel hazard reduction, and 4) provide community assistance. As is sometimes the case with a major allocation of federal money, this Plan has inspired some to “retool as fire scientists in order to take part in the bonanza.”

With his longterm work on the issue (he got his start as a firefighter), Omi sees several risks in the terms of the Plan. The hiring of more firefighters,

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by the Clinton initiative, risks “reinforcing the fire exclusionary mentality,” and “treating symptoms not causes.” Unaddressed by the initiative, the most fundamental problems lie in the “wildland/urban interface.” “Most of the West is wildland fire territory,” and this interface is dispersed throughout the region. “What can we really do about this?” Omi asked. “Do we need to do something about it? Should we simply accept the prospect that we’ll have years like 2000 every five or ten years?” Whatever our answer to these questions, the answer would be improved if knowledge of soils, hydrology, botany, etc. could be joined with knowledge of policy, law, and zoning. At the present, Omi said, those two dimensions of knowledge “are not integrated.”

Forty million acres in the West is in need of fuel hazard reduction. Prescribed fire is not suitable for all areas; therefore mechanical thinning is of undeniable value. Forest reduction would be a possible solution for our current problems, if we could find uses for small-diameter tree materials. In treated areas, where forest has been mechanically thinned, fire severity is notably lower, as the Cerro Grande fire showed. Omi also pointed out the gap in communication between those on the ground who risk losing their lives in blow-ups caused by 50 years of unburned wood fuel, and the advocates (including environmentalists) who remain loyal to the policies of fire suppression.

Designing community assistance and participation offers its own challenges. While we have lots of ecological and technological information available, an understanding of social attitudes is in short supply. The year 2000 was not the worst case scenario; the National Fire Plan was well-intentioned, but likely to produce complicated consequences; fuel management remained the key to reducing fire impacts. Changing the attitudes of environmentalists (so that, in some situations, they would agree that it is OK to use trees for profits) and of residents in fire-prone environments will be crucial to any meaningful improvements. In the project of citizen education and of making possible a collaboration between forest users (residents and visitors) and managers of forests, universities can play a useful role (unfortunately, universities were not involved in designing the National Fire Plan). |

Much of the discussion focused on the dilemmas posed by the urban/wildlands interface. “We can’t turn back the clock,” Omi responded. It would be great if homeowners and agencies could get together on plans, and agree that it is OK to thin trees, and do some prescribed fires. Omi could not, however, summon sufficient optimism to declare that this was likely to happen. The vexing matter of the lag in research in the social aspects of fire came up again; Omi observed that in his time in school at Berkeley, there was one forest sociologist who lived in frustration, since he “couldn’t get forestry students into his classes.” In this state of affairs, the campaign to help managers understand residents and residents understand managers remains a vital and important one.

The second day of the workshop opened with Tom Lyons, from the English Department, speaking on “Representations of Fire in the Bible.” The Bible is, of course, “one of the Western world’s seminal sources of ideas, shaping the way we think and feel about a topic.” In reviewing scriptural references, Lyons had realized that only in rare episodes did people in the Bible purposefully use fire to warm themselves (inauspiciously, one of those occasions involved Peter warming himself during the night of his betrayal of Christ). Over all, “there is nothing natural or spontaneous about fire in the Bible.” Fire is a “vehicle for judgment and punishment”; as it responds to human sin and “tests and purifies,” it symbolizes God. Sometimes God appears in fire, as a comforting and reassuring presence, as in Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. More often, fire embodies a consuming God, a jealous God. Malachi says that God is “like a refiner’s fire”; John the Baptist declares, “I baptize you with water; He shall baptize with you with fire.” Fire is “elevated by having God represented by it.” Fire is “naturally awe-inspiring,” and thus gains the ability to symbolize the Godhead.

Fire in the Bible often has the function of purification and punishment; it is so consistently purposeful that “combustion cannot be spontaneous.” Fire can reveal weaknesses in character, but it can also consume impurities and refine unworthiness into worthiness. Fire will be the reward of corrupt leaders, for instance. With the patterns of Scripture installed in our minds, Lyons argued, we are “very likely to associate fire with some transgression or evil.” From the Bible, the consuming anger of God and fire as a natural

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element became fused. The Bible creates this expectation: “There must be a reason for fire, and there must be a tie between this reason and guilt.” Hence, when we see people building exurban residences in fire zones, it is easy and almost comfortable for us to say, “They’ll pay for that!” The scriptural patterns “reverberate in our heads,” even in scientific discussions, and Lyons concluded his talk with several examples from the workshop presentations to support his observation.

During the discussion, Philip Omi raised the interesting question: given the over-all negative connotations of fire in the Bible, would attention to Eastern religions lead to different ways of thinking about fire? A biologist raised the equally interesting question of why, if fire is understood to be a key component of Mediterranean ecosystems, the Bible’s representation of it would not be more positive. With reflections on why fire appears so often matched with “brimstone” (how much molten sulphur could there be in the Middle East?), and how is it that losing one’s job came to be called “getting fired,” the workshop participants vindicated the proposition that humanities perspectives have unexpected powers to help us look at our familiar and taken-for-granted assumptions.

The next presenter was Lincoln Bramwell, an experienced hotshot, and a graduate student in History at the University of New Mexico. His talk was called “Far Beyond Driven: The Policy and Culture of Aggressive Fire Suppression.” Hotshots are the “backbone of fire fighting,” and appropriately proud of their training and their physical condition. The system in which they work has been one of “Aggressive Fire Suppression.” Hotshots push themselves to “maintain their reputations,” and this can put them at risk of “over-confidence.” After the South Canyon fire in 1994, it was increasingly recognized that these crews can develop a dangerous subculture of excessive risk-taking. This attitude can equal fire in the danger it poses to crew members’ lives.

In the 1930s, agencies recognized the “lack of explicit action guidelines” for firefighting, as well as a “lack of aggressive attitude” in firefighters. Set up in 1935, the 10 a.m. rule defined the standard response: “attack any reported fire, have it out by 10 a.m.” This was expected to be cost-effective, since it would be “easier to fight lots of

little fires” than several big ones. Forty-men crews were organized, with the members marked by their woodsmanship, physical process, and motivation. Crew members were to be male, between 21 and 40, and preferably unmarried. World War Two brought manpower shortages, and crews shrank to twenty-five.

Hotshot crews had high morale, with a spirit summed up in this aphorism: “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little bit longer.” “Stretching themselves beyond their limits” was a matter of ego and pride. Although fatalities sometimes occurred, no one drew the connection between this attitude and the heightened risk of injury or death. Meanwhile, scientific research began to reveal the “beneficial role of fire in ecosystems,” and to question the policy of suppression. However, more and more people were enjoying outdoor recreation and building dispersed houses, and so there were more calls for protection from fire.

On July 6, 1994, at the South Canyon Fire in Colorado, the deaths of young women and men brought hotshots and their ways to national attention. Altogether in 1994, 23 firefighters lost their lives, earning OSHA citations for agencies. It was now difficult to ignore the fact that the bending of safety rules had become common. This merged with the growing recognition that “not all fires can be suppressed.” It was, at last, time to face up to the “cultural problems” of firefighting. As the demand for hotshots increases, along with the number of people playing and living in non-urban areas, a combination of a heavy forest fuel load and young crews eager to prove their worth could result in further tragedy, if fire management and fighting strategies are not reevaluated.

In the discussion, further dimensions of the topic came in for exploration. Joining hotshot crews, women had proven to be just as susceptible to the pride that drove over-confidence. Nonetheless, old attitudes persisted with “lots of men” continuing to think that women shouldn’t be on crews. The allure of making money, fast, and the pressure to get assignments, received further discussion.

In the first day of the workshop, we had explored the natural conditions of fire, as well as fire policies. With Bramwell’s talk, we were now shifting our attention to the workers whose lives

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and deaths rest on these conditions and policies. This shift in direction continued with Justin Dombrowski’s talk on “The Reality of Wildland Fire.” Dombrowski is the supervisor of wildlife management for the Boulder Fire Department, and he is often detailed to fires throughout the state, work that places him “totally at the eye of the storm.” Dombrowski spoke of a fire from the summer of 2000 that hit too close to home for Boulder County residents: the Walker Ranch\Eldorado Fire southwest of Boulder. He used his experience with this local fire to illustrate the greater issues and difficulties involved in fighting the summer 2000 fires in the West. Recounting the fire from beginning to end, Dombrowski detailed how the fire began at the bottom of a bowl (“a tough place to send people,” which led to the dropping of retardant, which seems to land on firefighters as much as it does on trees), how it spread, and what efforts were made by local, state, and national firefighters and supervisors to control it. He spoke of the difficulties of communications between jurisdictions, and between professionals and volunteers, as well as of chronic problems of underfunding in emergency services. Dombrowski noted the uncanny nature of this fire. Rather than dying down at night, the fire actually gained heat and intensity because of the abundance of fuel, and the dryness both in air and fuel. He spoke strongly for prescribed burning, noting that once the fire leapt into a meadow where a prescribed burn had occurred, the fire died down and was finally extinguished by the fire crews.

It was time, Dombrowski concluded, to “shift Smokey’s message.” In turns out that Dombrowski has a particular authority in saying this; he has sometimes gone out dressed up as Smokey, and thus has discovered the affection Smokey holds in the public’s heart, with many wanting to hug him. We must anticipate hazards, and make evacuation plans. We have to make our peace with cutting and thinning, even if we think these actions “make things look bad.” There is plenty of need for Smokey’s leadership in these matters. In the discussion, Dombrowksi spoke about the “huge percentage” of firefighters who are Indian people, a very important part of this story. Questions of broader patterns of weather and climate came up: years seem to alternate between wet and dry, producing very different fire patterns. So there is

no necessary likelihood of the summer of 2001 repeating the pattern of frequent fire of 2000 .

In the next presentation, “The Catastrophic Wildfires of the Future Will Be of Our Own Making: The View from the Ground,” Terry Tompkins, a fire crew leader with the U.S. Forest Service in the Black Hills of South Dakota, addressed the consequences of fire suppression and the increasing interface between public lands and private development on the borders (his father, Professor Phil Tompkins of the Department of Communications, was his co-author). In 1910, a blow-up fire in Idaho consumed three million acres of forest in two days; episodes of this sort turned the U.S. Forest Service “into an institution dedicated to suppressing wildfire.” With this zero-tolerance stand on fire, an unprecedented amount of fuel has accumulated. With this “unnatural build-up,” fires have been “getting bigger, faster, meaner.” Another danger emerged with the growing interface between forests and homes. Owned by people with “unrealistic expectations” for their safety, these homes made it far more difficult to deal with fire as a reincorporated part of forest management. Moreover, federal budgets are “unstable,” with wildly varying amounts allocated each year to fuels reduction. Under these circumstances, firefighting might well be evolving into a more life-threatening line of work than ever before. Terry Tompkins cited his experience with the Jasper Fire in the Black Hills, in 2000, as an example to support prescribed burning, and thereby protect the lives of future firefighters. His personal story gave scholars a vivid sense of what on-the-ground fire fighting means: with a roar like a freight train, the fire “came right at us,” Tompkins said; they used a back fire which (thank heavens) worked quit well. And when this fierce fire hit the prescribed burn at Jewel Cave, it “stopped dead in its tracks.”

There is no single solution to our current dilemmas, but a range of alternatives:

1. the continued suppression of all fires (the “orthodoxy that failed”);

2. let fires burn (not very acceptable, too much at stake);

3. prescribed burns (even with careful planning, prescribed burns remain risky);

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4. the mechanical treatments of thinning and chipping.

At the end of Terry’s presentation, Phil Tompkins added his own comments. He acknowledged that the new Fire Plan would spend money to communicate with the public, especially on the matter of where people shouldn’t build. But that hardly addressed the more compelling problem: “What to do with existing houses?” “We need a born-again Smokey the Bear,” Phil Tompkins declared, “to tell people what they need to do. This is an urgent matter.” “Terry tells me,” Phil went on to say, with Terry nodding in agreement, “that it is the consensus of the fire establishment that the Front Range is a disaster waiting to happen.” The amount of the interface between human habitation and forest here is simply “amazing.”

Speaking on “Chasing Smoke: Toward an Understanding of the Social Dynamics of Wildfire Fighting,” Professor Daniel Cress of the Sociology Department focused on the lives and behavior of the men and women who fight fires. Unlike mining, cattle-grazing, railroad-building, or even timber-cutting, Western fire-fighting has been strikingly understudied, even though it was and is dramatically important to the region. “Many more fought fires than punched cows,” Cress said, picking up on an observation by the writer Michael Thoele. He noted that the lives of firefighters were often only remembered by their deaths; less was known about their day-to-day lives, or their motivation to fight fire. Echoing a sentiment expressed by other presenters, Cress declared that the “understanding of the social aspects of fire was one hundred times behind the scientific understanding of fire.” Most of the existing literature-memoirs, or accounts of disasters-”emphasize the elite or exceptional,” not the “everyday, routine, typical.” Cress has recently begun a study that will document this important aspect of Western life, a study that may well “inform those who engage in this enterprise,” and also “tell us about other enterprises in risk-taking,” especially in terms of the patterns of “group solidarity” that such enterprises call into being.

Danger gives the meaning to this adrenaline-driven line of work. A love of the out of doors also figures in the appeal. But careers tend to be short-lived: these jobs are temporary, seasonal, migratory, dead-end; they are uncertain in pay-off

(overtime is lucrative, but fickle); and they are a “young person’s game,” in both physical and relational terms. A job in firefighting, Cress noted, is “notoriously a relationship-killer.”

Those who persist in the enterprise enter a subculture, with its values aimed at “overcoming the fear intrinsic to high-risk work.” “To burn to death is one of the worst fates to imagine,” and the development of some personal strategy to deal with that fact is a necessity of the job. But the resulting attitude can be problematic, and “lead people to over-extend.” “The need for courage and fearlessness must find a balance” with appropriate “caution and fear.”

Solidarity is a key element of firefighting. Before the 1930s, firefighters were largely conscripted individuals, and not organized into lasting teams. There are, of course, “downsides to solidarity,” and one must always ask the question, “When do shared norms kill people, or at least put people in harm’s way?” When do firefighters “stick together, when they should have bolted?” At South Canyon, they wouldn’t drop their tools, and with that determination, they were holding on to their own identities and to a norm turned fatal.

The introduction of women into this subculture, beginning in the 1970s (though, as Cress noted, surely women played a part in nineteenth century communities responding to fire) was “fiercely resisted and resented.” There are many questions still to be answered in this terrain: Do women adopt the same values? Does their presence produce any significant change? Is there a risk that males will be tempted to be “protective” and lose sight of the main project? Is there a “glass canopy”-how many incident commanders have been women? In a final remark, Cress referred to the complexity of the agencies who need to work with each other in response to any individual fire, and to the “turf wars” that complicate this task enormously. He had also raised an intriguing question about the future of this career: will a shift in fire policy reshape these jobs? Will a mandate for prescribed burns turn firefighters into fire-starters?

Craig Melville, a CU graduate student who works with Professor Tompkins, next presented ideas from his dissertation, in a talk called “Fighting the Mundane Fire, Smartly! Training for Smart Risk,

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Organizing for Effective Firefighting.” Melville, too, is a “veteran,” a former member of the Helena Hotshots. It is his goal to produce a study that will “help communications” over large areas in situations of fire. He, too, feels that research on human factors in fire situations is dramatically under-developed. He and Professor Tompkins both take their guidance from Paul Tillich’s invocation of Aristotle’s idea of a balance between courage and temerity (or fear). Unbalanced courage and unbalanced fear have equal power to kill a firefighter.

Most firefighting involves mundane fires, not dramatic blow-up fires. It is Melville’s goal to “change the way we train firefighters, beyond safety to smart risk.” (To help us understand what this will entail, Melville showed us the Incident Command structure, a very complicated chart of domains of operations, planning, logistics, finance, and administration, which gave us a proper respect for the complexity of the organizational arrangement of a fire event.) The idea of smart risk would “work with firefighters’ attitudes, rather than against them,” reconciling the conflict between the goals of effectiveness and safety. Melville’s premise is that these are organizational workers, and thinking of them as a collectivity, rather than focusing on individual decisions, might produce better strategies. The goal now would be to get them to internalize certain premises, and create attitudes of receptivity to safety. In fact, the first step would be to use the word “smart,” not the word “safe” (since “safe” seems to be too direct a challenge to the firefighter ethos of daring and toughness).

Smoke-jumpers are much more individualistic than hotshots, and much less of a team. (At Mann Gulch, if the men had been hotshots and not smoke-jumpers, they would have “followed orders” and gone into the escape fire set by Dodge.) They work off a list, so they get equitable fire time; the next eight come up, and the first is designated as the lead jumper. Hotshots, by contrast, are together the whole season, though not all of the crew has to go to all fires. Here Melville offered one of his key propositions: “if smokejumpers had to work together like hotshots, all would be safer.” This change would “improve the balance of courage and fear.” And the idea has some practicality: there is now much more road access in forests, so it is easier to put in hotshots

instead of smoke-jumpers. Improvements in organization, cohesiveness, and interagency communication could be the foundation for “smarter” firefighting.

The last presenters were Professor Bill Travis, of the Geography Department, who gave a slide presentation on exurban development in the Rockies, and Mark Haggerty, of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, who recently received his M.A. in Geography from CU. Their joint presentation was entitled “Perspectives on Exurban Development and Fire in the Rockies.” Travis spoke of the recent rapid population growth in the West, much of it “exurban.” Why call it “exurban,” and not “rural”? Rural is generally understood to mean “agricultural,” and this is a really different ball game. Travis then showed a photograph of a suburb, identifying it as “the natural habitat of most Westerners.” Suburbs and exurbs are proliferating at the interface with wildlands; that is simply where people are landing. “Mountain towns were originally compact” (it was a rare miner who wanted much of a commute to the jobsite), but now “most development is outside of town and up against federal boundaries.” The federal land management agencies now find themselves with a “proliferation of neighbors.” In Summit County, the regulations have pushed owners to locate houses, not in meadows (where they would be too visible), but “hidden” in the trees! The push to settle in hazard zones has its own logic, structured by market subsidies, regulations, and incentives. “Money talks,” and political objectives accordingly shift to protecting people and their structures from fire. Communities in the Rockies may have standards for building construction, but they have “almost no restrictions on whether land gets developed.” The framework for development is one of “conflicting signals, cues, miscues, and blocked or distorted information.” Land use planning has “lots of potential,” but it is at present “universally ineffective.” And, when fire hits, “we help people rebuild,” which hardly furthers the cause of public education on fire danger.

Mark Haggerty followed up these somewhat disheartening, but energetically delivered remarks, with his observations of Montana’s situation, where lots of fires happened last summer. Environmentalists have an appropriate concern about having mitigation (by fuel reduction) applied

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uncritically. Similarly, they worry that the fire regime in Yellowstone National Park will be changed to accommodate its new exurban neighbors. “Exurbanization,” Haggerty said, “is one of the great threats to what we all want,” leading to disrupted views and fragmented wildlife habitats, as well as heavy expenditures in firefighting. An organization like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition is therefore committed to trying to “change behavior,” stressing the responsibilities of homeowners, as well as scientists. The fires of 2000 at least got local people thinking, and this has presented an opportunity “to have an impact on behavior in innovative ways.”

In the discussion, one observer pointed out the degree to which memory of a particular historical event can shape later thinking and policy. The Dust Bowl, for instance, became a kind of paradigm, or cognitive anchor. What is the governing historical reference for fire? The season of 1910? Mann Gulch? 1988 and Yellowstone? South Canyon? Which one would lead to the wisest policy? Shifting to the matter of warnings, whether delivered by a historical message or not, Bill Travis noted that “every at-risk message needs to come with a recommendation of a positive action.” Justin Dombrowski remarked that last year’s Walker Ranch fire may have delivered a message exactly the opposite from the desired one: since no homes were lost, it was possible for people to conclude, “The firefighters will take care of it.” Tom Veblen asked if zoning might be the only solution; was there any hope for that? “No,” Bill Travis responded. A change in land ownership, and in the ambitions and plans of the owners, struck him as the greater hope.

The workshop concluded with a brainstorming session on the group’s future actions, especially in making the results of this workshop available to

others. Phil Tompkins suggested that our over-arching goal be a rehabilitation of Smokey the Bear, this time with a message advocating prescribed burns and mitigation activities. Many felt that the presentations and discussions had been important and consequential, and the principal points should be made available to a wider audience, whether in print or on the Web. This report is the first step in that direction.

Later that afternoon, the group reconvened for a public program. Each presenter spoke for three to five minutes, summing up his or her conclusions. Phil Omi declared that we need to “find a better, less destructive way to talk about fire”; he made the thought-provoking observation that “vocabulary sets the tone for action.” Lincoln Bramwell said very explicitly that “the burden” of our shifting fire policies and our current exurban housing preferences “falls on young people working with simple hand tools.” Asking for people to think ahead, Justin Dombrowski said that, while working on fires, he has heard the sound of chainsaws: “people with chainsaws working at midnight-that is not the right time for mitigation.” Terry Tompkins said that “blow-up fires are inevitable,” and “we have not yet prepared people properly for this.” Mark Haggerty raised the the crucial question, What are we to do with people moving into rural areas and “moving into harm’s way?”

And Carl Bock told his story of the bison he had watched, surrounded by fire, and suddenly charging through the fire to safety. He drew this conclusion: “You can’t run away from fire; you have to turn and face it. And you have to be prepared.” For the bison, “being fuzzy in front” is the right preparation, an enviable situation that raises the question: “For humans, what is the equivalent of being fuzzy in front?”