A Burning Issue

We just got notice that this event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled.

Back in 2009, author Timothy Egan published his award-winning history/biography, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. It tells the story of a catastrophic fire that blazed across three million acres in eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana in 1910, leveling five towns and leaving at least 85 people dead.

The fire leveled an area about the size of Connecticut in one weekend and stunned the American people. Paradoxically it also saved the struggling National Park Service. But it was only a foretaste of what was to come. Over the past several decades wildfires and the damage attributed to them have increased substantially in the United States, focusing attention on the perils created by both public policy and climate change.

November 6th at 4 PM, Egan, a Washington state native, will return to the story he began to tell more than a decade ago when he presents a virtual program for Scoville Library titled Once Were Giants: The New Fire Threat in the West.

And what a story it is. While the average number of fires in the United States has declined by approximately 780 per year between 1991 and 2020, the annual area burned by forest fires increased 1,200 percent between the 1970s and 2000s. Three of the top five years for forest fires since 1960 have occurred since 2015.

In his program Egan will explore factors such as climate change, drought and procedural missteps that have elevated the danger. Fire suppression, for instance, has allowed a build-up of combustible fuel in forests while more human habitation in wild lands has increased the danger of property loss and human fatalities.

According to Egan, the story begins with two powerful Eastern politicians who prioritized conservation as their goal. In 1905 Gifford Pinchot, a founder of the conservation movement, was drafted by his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, to lead the fledgling United States Forest Service. Although enthusiastically embraced by the two politicians, the public lands Roosevelt was busy creating were far from popular in the Western states, where big business interests such as railroads and loggers clashed with the sequestration of land for the people.

Characters such as Sen. William A. Clark of Montana, an “openly, joyously corrupt” copper baron according to the author, did his best to stop the national forests. He was joined by other Gilded Age magnates who thought setting aside public land was antithetical to the American ideal and, more importantly, antithetical to their interests.

Funding for the program was being stripped away by a hostile Congress when, rashly, Pinchot vowed that his agency could control fire in the newly designated national forests.

The vow was both rash and stupid. Pinchot, son of a Pennsylvania logging baron, knew fire to be a part of the natural cycle, a cleansing agent that cleaned the forest floor and prevented woodlands from becoming periodic infernos. Ironically, he was a founder of the Yale School of Forestry, which, to this day, studies forest ecology here in Northwest Connecticut. But in 1910, he needed a dramatic promise to save his forest service.

Culturally, the new forest rangers, mostly idealistic Yale graduates, had proven a poor fit in a Western landscape just emerging from its wildest days. “The Yale-trained foresters could not have been more out of place,” Egan said in a 2010 NPR interview. He said the idealistic young men, enthused by the idea of conservation, were nonplussed to find towns filled with brothels and saloons.

“One town, Taft, Montana, at that time had three prostitutes for every man,” Egan told NPR. “The rangers were horrified and one cabled East that ‘Two undesirable prostitutes are setting up business on public land. What do I do?’ Some smartass got ahold of it and fired back, ‘Find some desirable ones.’”

The National Park Service was reviled and resisted by the locals but it was soon to be more severely tested. The summer of 1910 was very dry, according to Egan “By June there were already spot fires. By August there was the feel of death on the land,” he told NPR. “Then a freak wind storm came out of Washington.”

Everyone had known something would happen and some preparations had been made. “They had done some recruiting in advance,” he reported. “There were all these little fires and they knew that big towns would soon be endangered. They found people who were willing to fight fires for 25 cents an hour.”

It was a bad deal for the firefighters. The jails were opened and Italian immigrants were swept up to become firefighters. “They had no clue what they were up against. They were all in terrible shape, with poor shoes and clothing and all they had were shovels to scrape away a little dirt. They were just fuel. And suddenly attitudes change. The Rangers are heroes.”

The 1910 fire salvaged the reputation of the politically threatened Park Ranger system, but, ironically, it put in place some practices that helped worsen some of today’s dangers.

“Every young ranger had 1910 on the brain,” Egan said. “It became the fire service which was not what it was set up to do. Their mission was to put out fires. Even today, when you see huge armies of firefighters and machinery going up a hillside, they are resisting nature allowing fuel to build up that nature needs to burn. By putting out every fire, they put nature in a box.”

Timothy Egan is a lifelong journalist, a columnist for the New York Times and the author of nine books, most recently A Pilgrimage to Eternity. He won the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time and was awarded a Pulitzer for his coverage of race in America.

To register for the program please click on the link below.