My Climate Change News

Starting with the Big Blowup of 1910, the U.S. Forest Service's strategy mostly has been to put out fires as fast as possible. With climate change and shifting populations, weâ??re losing that war.

In the story of American wildfire, no year has proved more pivotal than 1910.

That August, what became known as the Big Blowup scorched three million acres and killed 78 firefighters in the Northern Rockies. Hundreds of other large fires erupted in forests from the Pacific Coast to the Great Lakes. Small towns in Idaho and Minnesota were reduced to smoldering ruins. Smoke from the Mountain West colored skies as far east as New England.

As momentous as the fires were on the ground, the struggle over how to respond to them proved even more consequential. Two starkly divergent proposals emerged: on the one hand, total fire suppression; on the other, â??light burningâ? to pre-empt the chances of a conflagration â?? what we now call prescribed fire.

The basic idea of prescribed fire â?? pre-empting huge, destructive fires with more modest, beneficial ones â?? had a counterintuitive subtlety that was no match for painting fire as the deadly foe of the nation's forests. Those who favored total fire suppression won the debate, and the nascent Forest Service began approaching fire as an enemy. That militaristic approach, which Iâ??ve seen up close in nearly 20 years as a Forest Service fire lookout, remains in place today.

The argument predated the big fires of 1910, but their scale lent it a special urgency. It played out in magazines and newspapers, and across the government land agencies in verbal tussles between former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot and Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger. Teddy Roosevelt's right-hand man in conservation matters, Pinchot put the fight against wildfire on a moral plane with the battle to abolish slavery. Ballinger, his bitter foe on this and other issues, would say soon after the great fires,...

Starting with the Big Blowup of 1910, the U.S. Forest Service's strategy mostly has been to put out fires as fast as possible. With climate change and shifting populations, weâ??re losing that war.

In the story of American wildfire, no year has proved more pivotal than 1910.

That August, what became known as the Big Blowup scorched three million acres and killed 78 firefighters in the Northern Rockies. Hundreds of other large fires erupted in forests from the Pacific Coast to the Great Lakes. Small towns in Idaho and Minnesota were reduced to smoldering ruins. Smoke from the Mountain West colored skies as far east as New England.

As momentous as the fires were on the ground, the struggle over how to respond to them proved even more consequential. Two starkly divergent proposals emerged: on the one hand, total fire suppression; on the other, â??light burningâ? to pre-empt the chances of a conflagration â?? what we now call prescribed fire.

The basic idea of prescribed fire â?? pre-empting huge, destructive fires with more modest, beneficial ones â?? had a counterintuitive subtlety that was no match for painting fire as the deadly foe of the nation's forests. Those who favored total fire suppression won the debate, and the nascent Forest Service began approaching fire as an enemy. That militaristic approach, which Iâ??ve seen up close in nearly 20 years as a Forest Service fire lookout, remains in place today.

The argument predated the big fires of 1910, but their scale lent it a special urgency. It played out in magazines and newspapers, and across the government land agencies in verbal tussles between former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot and Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger. Teddy Roosevelt's right-hand man in conservation matters, Pinchot put the fight against wildfire on a moral plane with the battle to abolish slavery. Ballinger, his bitter foe on this and other issues, would say soon after the great fires,...