INTRODUCTION

Twenty years ago, I was hired by the U.S. Forest Service to come out west and fight forest fires. Growing up in southwestern Michigan farm country, I had little knowledge of or experience with forest fires. Indeed, my only work experience that had some remote connection to the job of wildland firefighting was my college workstudy job: I helped build and maintain outdoor ice skating rinks using fire hoses.

Still, with vim and vigor I ventured out West to serve my country waging war on wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. And even though at the time I was first hired I considered myself an anti-war pacifist, I was totally enamored with the militaristic culture and psychology of firefighting. I also considered myself an environmentalist, and my youthful idealism led me to believe that as a wildland firefighter, I was an "eco-warrior" saving the forest from fiery destruction.

My attitude and idealism changed over time based on a couple pivotal experiences on some infamous fire dispatches. First, when I returned to some of the places I had worked for weeks dry-mopping the smoldering cat-faces of giant old-growth trees , putting out smokes with my shovel, dirt, and bare hands during the Silver Fire of 1987, I came back to find giant stumps. I had never even heard about "salvage logging" before, but I remembered that those fires were put out and those trees were still alive when I had left them. Why would someone want to cut down the "survivors" of wildfire, I wondered?

Then, on the White Mountain Complex Fire of 1988, my crew was ordered to light a backfire at the summit of scenic Sherman Pass. We knew at the time that the winds weren’t right, the conditions weren’t right, and we all had a bad feeling about that decision, but orders were orders and being good soldiers we dutifully did the deed. The firestorm we ignited never did meet up with the main fire; instead, it leaped the highway and raged in the opposite direction, becoming an entirely new wildfire they called the Sherman Fire. The next morning, exhausted after hot-lining for hours and horrified by the sight of that once-beautiful forest we had incinerated with our backfire, I was nearly in tears. One of the fire bosses, trying to cheer me up, gave me a strong slap on the back and said, "Don’t worry son, this will just be next year’s salvage sale!"

That new wildfire we ignited was named the Sherman Fire not only because it was started at Sherman Pass, but also, perhaps, because it mimicked the tactics of General Sherman’s march to the sea.

My final season as a firefighter partially redeemed these and other bad experiences. I was assigned as a resource advisor to several of the Pacific Northwest’s elite Hotshot crews, training and supervising firefighters in "light-hand" or minimal-impact firefighting techniques in order to limit the damage caused by firefighting. I witnessed for the first time that, given the managerial direction and opportunity to do things the right way, firefighters would go to heroic lengths to limit the impacts of firefighting. I realized for the first time the breadth of environmental impacts caused by aggressive firefighting—and that there were alternatives to making warfare on wildfire. That is my principal message to you all today: there are alternatives to fighting fire, alternatives to fire management framed by a militarist paradigm, and the time is urgent for the fire community to develop and articulate those alternatives to the public, elected officials, and fellow resource management professionals.

FIREFIGHTING TECHNIQUES AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

There are some people in this room with decades of firefighting experience, and some who have never even seen a fire in the wild outside of a campfire ring. For the vast majority of the public and our elected officials, there is widespread ignorance about the techniques of firefighting and their associated environmental impacts. Even seasoned veterans tend to ignore these effects. I dare say that along with fire suppression comes a psychological repression of the damage we inflict upon the land when we fight fires. Let me briefly discuss some of these firefighting techniques and their environmental effects:

FIRELINE CONSTRUCTION

Cutting firelines by handcrews or bulldozers causes soil disturbance, displacement, compaction, and erosion which, on a human scale of time, is a permanent and irreversible loss. Some firelines are carved into steep slopes and run straight downslope, creating gulleys that dump the soil right into streams, causing siltation and sedimentation. Only the final perimeter firelines are ever moderately "rehabbed" with waterbars or such; the interior firelines that are cut and then burned over are simply abandoned, and left to erode.

Firelines cut by bulldozers vastly increase the amount of soil compaction and soil erosion. When dozerlines are cut into roadless areas they create long-term visual scars that can ruin the "wilderness" experience of roadless area recreationists. In some cases, dozerlines became essentially new roads into roadless areas, inviting unauthorized, illegal off-road vehicle users to drive into the roadless areas. These OHVs create further soil and noise disturbance, and can spread garbage and invasive weeds, and increase the risk of accidental human-caused fire.

CHEMICAL USE

A host of chemicals are used during fire suppression operations, beginning with the idol of the newsmedia, fire retardant. Dumped from a low-flying air-tanker, the red-dyed mixture of chemicals and water makes dramatic photos and video footage for the news. If it is dumped in the right places at the right times under the right conditions, retardant can cool down and slow down fire spread, helping ground crews contain blazes. However, if retardant is dumped at the wrong place, time, or conditions it makes it an expensive photo-op that is futile for fire containment objectives.

I remember sharing the concerns of young firefighters about the chance of getting hit on the ground with a retardant drop. If we survived the impact of the liquid ripping down through the tree canopy overhead, would we then have to fear contamination by the chemicals? We were assured that it was simply harmless red dye mixed with fertilizer, and thus, was doubly good for the forest because it stopped the fire and gave the recovering vegetation a healthy boost of nutrients.

But what is the effect of that fertilizer in aquatic habitats? In concentrated doses, it can poison and kill fish. In still bodies of water, it can lead to algae blooms, which kills fish more slowly. On the ground, post-fire monitors are discovering that the fertilizer in retardant gives a special boost to invasive weeds which may have traveled into remote sites on the tractors or trousers of fire crews. Indeed, on the 1999 Kirk Fire area in the Los Padres National Forest in California, you can retrace the precise points where retardant was dropped on the ridgelines because they are now hotspots of invasive weeds deep in the interior of the Ventana Wilderness Area.

But it has also been discovered that a chemical in one of the most popular retardants, Fire-Trol, degrades into cyanide at levels highly toxic to aquatic species, especially frogs. Like the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, this chemical effect of Fire-Trol and sunlight has been known by laboratory scientists since the 1950s, but information was kept from the public and kept from consideration because the assumption was, as always, that the effects of wildfire was more deadly and damaging than the effects of toxic chemicals. If we could pose the question to our amphibian friends, which agent would they most fear: flames or cyanide? I, for one, have never seen a frog "croak" from a wildfire.

Finally, an undeterminable but not insignificant amount of chemical dumping occurs from oil and gasoline spilled while refueling everything from helicopters, to chainsaws, to port-a-pumps. When this chemical enters waterways it can be a significant impact, too.

It is time for the fire community to challenge our assumptions about the tradeoffs in the effects of fire versus the impacts of firefighting.

WATER USE

A seemingly more benign method is to simply use water without chemical additives to help extinguish flames. If you’ve ever been a firefighter stuck doing endless hours of tedious "dry-mopping," (physically extinguishing all smoldering embers with just hand tools but no water) then you really can appreciate what a little water can do to shorten your labors, get that fire under control, so you can move on to the next fire dispatch.

But what is the effect on aquatic habitats and species from water getting pumped out of small streams and ponds from port-a-pumps and hoselays, or scooped out of creeks and lakes from helicopter buckets, at critical drought periods of summer? How many salmon smolts get sucked up or scooped up in a hoselay system or helicopter bucket?

You’ve probably heard the "urban legend" amongst firefighters, the case of the firefighters who stumbled upon the body of a man in the middle of a fire area who was dressed in a wetsuit with mask, snorkle, and fins? The legend goes that he was scooped out of a lake miles away and then dumped on the fire by a helicopter bucket.

During the 2001 fire season, however, another urban legend was fast making the rounds within the "Wise Use" Movement and its Congressional allies. The charge has been made that the Endangered Species Act delayed a helicopter from dipping its bucket from the Chewash River on the Thirtymile Fire in the Okanogan National Forest. The allegation has been made that this delay led to a blow-up of the fire that resulted in the deaths of four firefighters and several more firefighters injured when they were burned over. The recently released fire investigation did reveal that there was some concerns and confusion about ESA restrictions of helicopter dipping, but the report assured the public that "there are no constraints by the ESA if firefighters are in danger." Rightly so.

The Thirtymile Fire was a horrible human tragedy, and fundamental questions remain unanswered--and largely unasked--as to whether or not there should have been people fighting fire inside that Research Natural Area in the first place, and whether or not the few hundred gallons of water that could have been dropped from a helicopter would have really mattered given the fuel and weather conditions. I grieve for the victims and their families and loved ones, and hope a similar event never happens again.

But with all due respect, I would like to suggest that in a more systematic rather than haphazard fashion we need to start thinking about the fish and frogs before we attempt to drown wildfires with their habitat. We need to start considering the effects of fire versus impacts of firefighting on aquatic species and habitats.

TREE CUTTING

One of the prevailing myths about firefighting is that it is about saving trees. For a number of reasons, this simply is not true, but more on that later. Again, most of the public is completely ignorant about the strategies and tactics used to fight fires. One of these is tree cutting. Many, many trees big and small are felled during suppression incidents. Usually, the cutting occurs in a sequence: first it is the small and young ones who are cut for fireline construction; larger trees are cut to construct helispots and safety zones during extended attack; later it is the big old ones who are cut during mop-up. The large, decayed, cavity-ridden snags can be a real headache to firefighters, both literally and figuratively. They could fall on firefighters with horrible consequences (and I’ve been witness to such incidents) and snags also spew embers that cause spotfires and pose containment problems. But paradoxically, the large soft snags provide prime habitat structures for wildlife. Indeed, of all the trees in the forest, these snags are some of the most valuable to the ecosystem, and if any tree should be saved from fire, these are the ones that firefighters should try to prevent from burning.

I have seen fallers sweep whole drainages clean of large snags. Indeed, the orders of the day are often to drop all snags from areas where firefighters might be working. Increasingly, the sawyers are not professional government firefighters, but are private loggers hired as contract firefighters. These logger-turned-firefighters get major personal enjoyment from falling trees of a size or species that may be off-limits from cutting for the sake of timber. But during firefighting incidents, there is no diameter cap or volume limit on tree cutting. Sadly, much of the large-diameter tree cutting occurs during mop-up, often out of sheer boredom by saw crews.

While a fire provides a big pulse of new snags, depending on the site and its legacy of past timber management, these new fire-killed snags may not provide much habitat value. There may be a deficit of high-quality habitat snags after firefighters have felled the large-diameter soft snags. In my home bioregion it takes about 250 years for the ecosystem to begin producing old-growth snags. The effect of systematic snag removal and other tree cutting during suppression incidents is thus another long-term adverse effect that runs directly contrary to the public’s support for fighting fire: to save trees.

FIRING OPERATIONS

I believe that firefighters have been wrongly singled out for their role in excluding fire from the landscape. First, other factors have been involved, notably livestock grazing in the Southwest. But secondly, firefighters always use fire in the attempt to suppress wildfire. The old adage, "fight fire with fire," is a routine procedure. Thus, we have a great paradox: fire reintroduction has been occurring in the midst of fire suppression actions.

The most routine form of firefighter burning is called "burn-out," in which firefighters reinforce firelines by burning the adjacent vegetation. Nearly every linear foot of perimeter fireline is burned by firefighters, and this can add up to a lot of acreage given the total amount of fireline constructed.

Another common form of burning is called "backfiring," in which firefighters do not necessarily have a containment line established before they ignite a backfire in front of an oncoming uncontrolled headfire. When the conditions are right, a backfire is effectively sucked up into the main flame front, and because it consumes the surface fuels in front of the headfire, the main fire cannot spread rapidly or with high intensity, and is more amenable to containment.

Backfires are supposed to be a fairly desperate act when other methods fail to slow or stop a wildfire. Increasingly, however, backfires are becoming more common. This is especially true in roadless areas characterized by steep, rugged terrain that is not suitable for direct attack strategies. There appears to be a greater preference for indirect attack these days, often igniting backfires and burnout miles away from the main fire front.

Backfires and burnout are also used to eliminate "green islands" of unburned vegetation deep in the interior of large wildfires that might pose threats of reburn and blow-ups following containment.

The two kinds of burning conducted by firefighters are now fusing into a hybrid that has been called by Forest Service public affairs officers, "backburning." On two large wildfires that I have analyzed in-depth, the 1991 Warner Creek Fire on the Willamette National Forest, and the 1999 Megram Fire on the Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers National Forests, so-called backburning accounted for over 30% of the total burned acreage on these large fires. This came to an excess of 30,000 acres backburned on the Megram fire alone.

So, beyond the increase in burned acreage, what are the effects of burnout and backfiring? Burnout is intended to be a low intensity fire, because firefighters do not want it to spot over firelines. But they can function to homogenize the effects of a fire. By eliminating those stringers and islands of unburned fuel this reduces the diversity of fire effects--known as the "fire mosaic." As well, in pockets of unburned soil and vegetation are the wellsprings of natural fire recovery, especially the soil microflora and fauna.

Alternately, backfires are commonly intended to be high-intensity and have severe fire effects; the goal is often complete consumption of fine fuels from ground to crown. Backfires thus add to the size and severity of wildfires. It is hypothesized, too, that backfires can cause excessive mortality of wildlife through cutting off their escape routes and entrapping them between two hot burning flame fronts.

Thus, fire reintroduction is occurring under the smokescreen of wildfire suppression; however, there is a detrimental double-standard at play. On one hand, it is deemed socially acceptable to start backfires in the worst of conditions without regard for their effects on flora and fauna as long as they are ignited during unplanned emergency suppression actions. But on the other hand, it is socially unacceptable to start prescribed fires in the best of conditions most amenable to control if they are ignited during carefully planned restoration or hazard reduction projects-- and they accidentally burn out of control.

The most dramatic example of this vicious double standard was the Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico. Contrary to newsmedia accounts and statements by public officials, it was not the Park Service’s prescribed fire, but rather, it was the Forest Service’s backfire that escaped control and destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Alamos and other communities.

To add further insult to injury, there have been some cases in which the Forest Service proposed salvage logging in the very areas where backfires were ignited. This poses some disturbing ethical problems, particularly when salvage sales are proposed in areas normally off-limits to commercial logging. Some conservationists consider this "light it and log it" management scheme a form of institutional "arson-for-salvage."

Now, to be clear, I am not condemning firefighters for these acts. Most of them are "grunts" who simply implement orders from their superiors. And I’m not even condemning fire bosses for ordering what may seem to be excessive backburning ignited several miles away from fires, apparently for safety’s sake. But to critics who are prone to seeing conspiracy in the decisions and actions of the Forest Service, it can appear that timber managers who double as fire bosses are opportunistically using wildfires as a means of boosting timber sales, essentially using firefighters to mark out timber sales with fuzees and driptorches instead of ribbons and spraypaint,

SUMMARY: THE ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS OF FIREFIGHTING

The issue that needs to be addressed, and to date, I have failed to get the federal government to even acknowledge, is that "there is no free lunch" when it comes to wildland fire suppression. "Fighting" fires causes adverse environmental impacts, impacts that are rarely analyzed or disclosed to the public. The cursory analyses of impacts for Burned Area Emergency Rehab (BAER) Reports may disclose some of the locations of impacts, but describe them only in general terms. The BAER Reports never provide quantitative data on, for example, the amount of topsoil that has been eroded, the location and amounts of chemicals dumped, the number of large habitat trees that were felled, or amount of acres that were severely backburned. The impacts of firefighting have not been seriously addressed yet because the assumption has always been that against the background effects of the fire itself, the effects of firefighting are insignificant, miniscule, almost meaningless.

I would like the fire research community to start challenging that assumption. I would like to see some Graduate students from U.C. Berkeley’s Wildland Fire Research Group start proposing theses to analyze fire suppression actions and impacts, with site-specific data and actual case studies to measure and assess the effects and effectiveness of firefighting.

I would like to see federal agencies subject fire suppression policies and practices to a programmatic NEPA analysis, and analyze the cumulative effects of fire suppression actions in every fire suppression-related timber sale (e.g. logging for fuelbreak construction). The point of a NEPA analysis would be that, if the public were to learn the effects of unplanned, reactive fire suppression actions, it might make it more socially acceptable to promote carefully planned, proactive fire management projects instead. The purpose and need for these fire management projects would be to restore ecosystems altered by past fire exclusion, mitigate the effects of future severe wildfires, and above all, to avoid future aggressive firefighting.

THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF FIREFIGHTING

The cultural perception that posits wildland firefighting is the "moral equivalent of fire" had its origins in William James’ essay in 1910, the same year of the Big Blowup in the northern Rockies. James, a pacifist, suggested that we redirect the energy of young men away from wasteful, destructive wars against humanity into the useful, socially-productive war against Nature. Firefighting fit the bill as a form of military adventurism with socially redeeming values. In fact, the fledgling Forest Service first explained to the public what forest conservation and protection meant by using the example of firefighting.

In his day, James did not realize, nor 90 years later have we as a society really questioned, the environmental and ecological effects of making war on burning wildlands. Yet, James’ essay and the Forest Service’s fire protection mission struck a deep cultural chord because it plays right into the "conquest of Nature" theme that is an enduring legacy of the Western Enlightenment. And the quest to extinguish all wildfires was another facet of the quest to exterminate all large carnivores and smaller "varmints," to dam all wild flowing rivers, to control Nature for human wants and needs.

Firefighting is symbolic of a modern paradigm. According to Kuhn’s "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," so-called paradigm shifts lead to new interpretations and discoveries, but also a forgetting of prior knowledge and old ways of knowing. Thus, for the majority of the public it seems that it is normal, natural, almost "instinctual" for humans to fight wildland fires. Moreover, they have largely forgotten the cultural legacy of settler burning, rancher and farmer burning, and the millenial-long practices of indigenous light-burning. There are alternatives to aggressive suppression and systematic fire exclusion that we as a society will have to "rediscover," as part and parcel of a wider paradigm shift in our society’s relationship with Nature.

To facilitate this emergent paradigm shift, to become a "fire-adapted society" rather than a fire-exclusionist society, we are going to have to end the War metaphor and the militarist discourse that pervades, even defines fire suppression. Such terms as "fighting" fire; initial, extended, direct, indirect "attack;" etc. should be declared obsolete and purged from the vocabulary of fire management.

I hope my overview of the environmental impacts of firefighting reveals that the term, fire fighting, is a misnomer. In truth, we don’t fight fires; we fight forests. We don’t make war on wildfire; we make war on wildlands. Setting aside the environmental impacts--the "collatoral damage" on ecosystems--I ask you to ponder for a moment, what are the cultural effects of a society that is eternally making "war" on Nature?

As the renowned fire historian, Stephen Pyne, argues, we need a new mythology, a new metaphor, a new model for fire management. This new metaphor must help shift the paradigm from war to peace, from harm to healing, from suppression to restoration. And a large part of this "new" metaphor and mindset will require rediscovering some ancient forms of Earth wisdom that formed the cultural and ecological legacy of our Native American ancestors.

THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF FIREFIGHTING

Well, if I have failed to convince you that there are adverse ecological and social impacts from firefighting, there is one final argument to make on behalf of ending the war on wildfire: we simply cannot afford as a society to pay for an ever-escalating and never-ending war against Nature.

Although precise figures vary according to different studies and data sets, by all accounts the cost of suppression in dollars is going up at an increasing rate. Last year a record $1.6 billion dollars was spent on suppression. A typical large or "project" fire costs about $1 million per day to suppress. The costs per acre of suppression far exceeds everything we do to the land. During the 2001 fire season, despite nearly $1.8 billion dollars invested in the fire program under the National Fire Plan, the U.S. Forest Service overspent its appropriated budget for suppression by over $200 million. Although the total acreage of wildfires is down compared to the ten year average, the current average cost of firefighting during the 2001 fire season is a record-breaking $2,216 per acre, according to figures compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

On average, approximately 94% of the total burned acreage results from just 2% of all fire starts, and these 2% of all fires account for over 97% of total nationwide suppression costs.

There is no real functioning system of economic oversight or accountability set up for federal fire suppression. Since 1908 when Congress first approved deficit spending for suppression, it has operated as a "carte blanche" program in which annual appropriated budgets for suppression can be exceeded with no consequences, and agencies are reimbursed either through raiding other accounts like the K-V fund, or by supplemental emergency appropriations by Congress.

The unprecedented funding for the National Fire Plan makes it appear that Congress is willing to spend the public’s money without limit to wage war on wildfires. But the days of unlimited tax dollars for fire suppression will one day come to an end, probably sooner than later, if anything because there is suddenly a new war we are going to wage, and the new war on terrorism promises to be a long and expensive campaign.

SOLUTIONS TO END THE WAR ON WILDFIRE

For environmental, ecological, social, and economic reasons, we need to make peace with our planet and end the war on wildfire. This does not mean we should simply stop doing fire suppression, for as long as there are human communities and values at risk of unwanted damage from wildland fires, there will likely always be a need for some kind of suppression. But I would argue that the very meaning and definition of suppression must change akin to a paradigm shift in order to reflect a new restorationist ethos, and conform to some system of public accountability.

Suppression should no longer be practiced as the attempt to aggressively contain and control and restrict fires to the least possible size or duration. Rather, suppression should be redefined to mean reducing the intensity and severity of fires, while permitting them to burn at the greatest spatial and temporal scale possible.

To get to this place, we are going to have to create a truly integrated fire shop that not only balances traditional prevention, suppression, and prescription programs, but perhaps combines these objectives on each and every fire incident.

Another part of this effort will involve ecological restoration at landscape scales to restore fire disturbance and recovery processes in fire-adapted ecosystems. Since this is fundamentally an experimental, and at present a controversial idea, we should begin conservatively but with intensive research and monitoring part of every management activity—part of every suppression effort—so we can be able to learn and grow with confidence that our efforts are truly restorative and not simply further altering and degrading already abused ecosystems.

We need a paradigm shift at a deep psychosocial level. We need to convert our socially-conditioned "pyrophobia" (the fear and hatred of fire) into our innate "pyrophilia" (the love of fire). Again, as long as we have been suppressing fire on the landscape, we have been repressing fire from our collective consciousness. Part of this paradigm shift can result from the wide public dissemination of fire ecology research and education, to teach people truths, not myths, about fire. But, as Stephen Pyne eloquently argues, we need a new myth and new narrative of fire. Let us begin with an end to the war metaphor and the militarist discourse of fire management.