After the Fires

Who says we don't need a strong, active federal government? Federal firefighters have played a significant—nay, vital—role in this summer's record-breaking Western forest fires. Turns out the fires in Arizona and Colorado were both started by federal employees. Arizona's Leonard Gregg was a part-time seasonal employee on a Bureau of Indian Affairs firefighting crew. Colorado's Terry Lynn Barton was a full-time Forest Service employee.

But the federal role in these massively destructive forest fires goes beyond the individual perfidy of deranged employees. (Though there is an old saying in politics, "personnel is policy.") Federal management policy toward the forests under its control seems almost designed to ignite such horrific blazes.

As Texas A & M Professor of Forest Science Thomas M. Bonnicksen has explained, thanks to federal policy, "More than a century ago, we began protecting forests from fire. We did not know that lightning fires kept them thin. More recently, we adopted an anti-management philosophy that protects forests from people. This ignores 12,000 years of history in which Native Americans doubled the number of fires by using them as a tool to keep forests open and productive. Now logs and branches clutter the ground and trees grow so thick that it is difficult to walk through many forests. It is not surprising that the gentle fires of the past have become the destructive monsters of the present."

The feds have become slightly more aggressive in the past decade at setting the necessary "managed fires" that keep eventual burns from becoming too drastic. But because of decades of trees-at-any-cost policy, even those managed ones can slip dangerously out of control. The tangled undergrowth of bad policy becomes hard to clear, and environmentalist activism and lawsuits that see any attempt to allow timber harvesting in federal forests as a sinister logging industry scheme aren't helping. Despite constant attempts to increase its hold on American land, the government has shown that it is not a fit steward for what it already has.