We’re not sure if it made the cover of Rolling Stone, but the August 15, 2013 issue has an interesting article titled “The Great Burning — How Wildfires Are Threatening the West: Terrifying blazes are the new normal in the West, where a mix of climate change and Tea Party politics has put an entire region at risk.”
The piece written by free-lancer Osha Gray Davidson of Phoenix, uses the tragic Yarnell Hill Fire as an anchor, but primarily covers the current state of wildfire management and suppression. He mentions several examples of how politicians are using that fire and the deaths of 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots as leverage to criticize existing federal forest management and to introduce legislation to increase logging on national forests, in spite of the fact that the Yarnell Hill Fire was not on federal land and there were virtually no trees in the area.
Mr. Davidson ends the article by writing about the Granite Mountain Hotshots:
“Granite Mountain was the only hotshot crew in the nation that was attached to a city fire department. [Rick Heron, part of another Arizona crew that worked on the Yarnell Hill fire], says that may be why the Granite Mountain Hotshots had a unique reputation. “They were the most family-oriented crew I’ve ever met,” he says. Perhaps, Heron speculates, those very ties caused them to continue battling the blaze when bad weather was moving in. “If you’re talking about houses that belong to your neighbors or cousins or to your Uncle Jimmy,” he says, “it makes it harder to leave.”
If that is what happened, then the saddest irony of the tragedy on Yarnell Hill may be that the Granite Mountain Hotshots lived their lives and met their deaths out of a sense of communal responsibility – the very opposite of the culture that has gotten us into such a fatal situation in the first place. It seems reasonable to wonder: If America behaved more like the Granite Mountain crew, perhaps our fire problem wouldn’t be so intractable.”
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