Michelle Nijhuis interviewed Stephen Pyne about wildland fire management in the United States and his book that was recently released. Below is an excerpt from the article in National Geographic in which the term “pyrophobia” is used.
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…In his new book Between Two Fires, Pyne examines the roots of the U.S. wildfire crisis. He finds that while the Forest Service and other agencies have long recognized that frequent, relatively small fires can reduce the risk of large, catastrophic burns, they have been unable to restore a natural cycle of fire to the forest.
Speaking from his home office in Arizona, Pyne reflected on this impasse. “If we keep fighting a war with fire, three things are going to happen,” he says. “We’re going to spend a lot of money, we’re going to take a lot of casualties, and we’re going to lose.”
Question: In the first half of the 20th century, you write, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from “pyrophobia”—it tried to suppress all wildfires. Where did that policy come from?
Pyne: The science of forestry grew up in temperate Europe—France and Germany particularly—and there, unlike most parts of the world, there’s no natural basis for fire. Fire was seen as a human problem, caused by people, and that attitude was exported to foresters in the United States.
In 1910, when the Forest Service was just a fledgling agency, a fire called the Big Blowup, or the Big Burn, blew over the Northern Rockies. It burned more than three million acres, and killed 78 firefighters in one afternoon. It traumatized the agency, scarring a whole generation of personnel. The Forest Service became convinced that if only it had the resources, it could control all fires…
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Last week at Wildfire Today we had an excerpt from the book, Between Two Fires.
