Bud Moore, a former Director of Fire and Aviation for the U. S. Forest Service’s Northern Region passed away on Friday at the age of 93. He was one of the founders of the current wilderness fire management policy and in the 1960s and 1970s was a leader in the concept of ecosystem management.
I ran across an excellent article in Smithsonian Magazine written in 2003 that details how he and several others developed the first prescribed natural fire program and saw it implemented in 1972 in Montana. Here is an excerpt.
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…Not every forester has embraced the idea of fighting every fire. In 1972, in the Wilderness Area of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, a handful of Forest Service heretics intentionally let a lightning strike burn—the first time the agency had done that. One of the maverick foresters, Bob Mutch, then a young researcher at the Forest Service Sciences Fire Laboratory, in Missoula, Montana, had had the idea that forest health might actually depend on fire. To be sure, a few foresters had previously argued that forests evolved with fire and were adapted to it, but they had been proverbial voices in the wilderness.
Mutch and the others are now retired, but in the midst of the destructive fire season of 2002—and only six weeks after the Rodeo-Chediski Fire scorched Arizona—they journeyed to the Bitterroot Mountains to assess the experiment they had begun three decades earlier. The Forest Service, whose orthodoxy they once challenged, now wanted their advice on preventing catastrophes from occurring in national forests.
In the Bitterroot Mountains, it’s only a short way from Paradise to Hell’s Half Acre. The ranger outpost at Paradise, where the veterans initially gathered, is a place of deep silence, sparkling water and tall ponderosa pines. The men were eager to look at “the scene of the crime,” as they called it. They hardly looked like rebels. Among them was Bud Moore, in his mid-80s, who had grown up in a family of woodcutters and trappers in these mountains, and was hired as a Forest Service smoke chaser in 1935. There was Bill Worf, just a few years younger, who today is almost blind and last summer hiked the wilderness trail with black glasses and a white cane while someone ahead warned of fallen logs across the path. Orville Daniels, now 68, was the supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest back in 1970. And there were Bob Mutch and Dave Aldrich, who now looked a bit like members of the Monkey Wrench Gang (as author Edward Abbey called a bunch of radical environmentalists in his 1975 novel of the same name). Aldrich, a muscular 63-year-old, had always looked at fire as the enemy until he joined the group. Mutch, 69, an intellectual and a researcher with a passion for ecology, had once been a smoke jumper, a Forest Service firefighter who parachutes from planes.
The only member of the group still employed at that time by the Forest Service was David Bunnell, 59. He was a firefighter before falling in with the Bitterroot bunch in the 1970s, and he remembers well his first encounter with them. “Renegades! Heretics!” he recalls thinking. “I’m surprised they weren’t all fired.”
As the group hiked a nine-mile trail from the Paradise guard station to a clearing called Cooper’s Flat, every step took them through country they’d once watched burn. They pitched tents and talked late into the night over a campfire, reminiscing, and discussing what their experiment had told them about how best to manage America’s national forests.
It was Bud Moore who had ignited their conspiracy. In 1969, he was transferred from Washington, D.C. to Missoula as regional director of what was then called Fire Control and Air Operations. As a Bitterroot native, he knew these woods deeply and sensed that fire was a part of their ecology. “When we were starting this program,” he says, “we got tremendous support from the environmental community. The biggest resistance we had was in the Forest Service. We had that big culture of firefighters, and I was one of them.”
Worf was one of them also. The idea that fire might belong in the wilderness didn’t come easily to him. He’d spent years managing timber sales and fighting fires. In 1964, he landed on a task force in Washington, D.C. that was looking at how the Forest Service could implement the recently passed Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Worf says, “They weren’t talking about a pretty place to backpack!” He read Leopold, who had proposed that the United States set aside wilderness areas and watch nature without getting in its way. In 1969, Worf took a job as regional director of Recreation, Wilderness and Lands in Missoula, where he and Moore got together and agreed that managing wilderness meant leaving some natural fires alone.
“ ‘We’re thinking about a pilot project on fire use in wilderness,’ ” Daniels recalls Moore telling him in a phone call. “It just flashed through my mind, ‘Of course this is what we should do.’ ” Mutch and Aldrich, who had recently joined Daniels’ staff, began making inventories of trees and other vegetation, searching for clues to the history of fire in the forests. They cut into fire scars on ponderosa pine, revealing charred tree rings going back as far as the 1720s, showing that fires had burned there every 10 to 20 years. Those blazes evidently were ground fires that periodically cleared away flammable debris, stimulated regeneration of shrubs and grasses and, in general, did not kill large, healthy trees. “We were trying to re-create in our minds how fires had burned on these lands,” Aldrich says, “and then write prescriptions for trying to bring fire back.”
Their main concern was to keep wildfires from escaping beyond the wilderness, and they developed criteria for letting a fire burn and provisions for fighting the blaze if things went wrong. Aldrich remembers refining his ideas with Mutch late into many a night at Cooper’s Flat. Finally, in August 1972, Daniels and Mutch flew to Washington and presented a plan to the agency’s top brass to form what would become the Wilderness Prescribed Natural Fire Program. The plan was approved. Now all they needed was a fire.
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Read the rest at the Smithsonianmag.com
HERE is a link to an article in the Missoulian written on November 29, 2010 about Bud Moore.
Thanks Dick
In 1974 I was taking a forestry class at Colorado State University and an aged professor was going on about the foolishness of some rebels,(Bud and company) in Montana in allowing natural, along with any other fires to burn. He said the FS should fire the lot.
How lucky we are he was not fired.
We need to learn to respect and live with nature, not against it.
I agree, BMorgan. I have some major concerns about how natural fire has been used…at times. Occasionally they are allowed to occur in places and during times when they can escape, which is extremely detrimental to the program. I strongly believe we need to allow natural fire, but only when there is less than a 2% chance it will turn into a suppression fire that will cost millions of dollars and destroy private property.
We need smart people managing them, who have lots of common sense and experience. People who have spent days and days sitting on hilltops observing how fire spreads. NOT people that are trying to meet a target number of black acres. And not people with hubris.
Yes, EXPERIENCE does count and I have found some of the best prescribed fire managers have that wonderful combination of what you put down.
This is why I read Wildfiretoday. Love reading about Bud et all and their role in USFS policy.
I think the Park Service at Sequoia Kings Canyon managed the first NPS “Prescribed Natural Fire” in 1968 on Kennedy Ridge. Bruce Kilgore and Harry Schmike played a major role there.
From Hal K. Rothmans “A Test of adversity and Strength: Wildland Fire in the National Park System”
Thanks, AZ. I was thrilled when I discovered that article from 2003. I love the Internet.
R.I.P. Bud, long live the “Heretics”!