The Fires Next Time

"Smokey the Bear has been lying for years."

--Park Biologist Lloyd Loope

Ever since 1945, ranger-hatted Smokey has led the U.S. Forest Service's campaign against the menace of forest fires, urging campers to douse their fires and extinguish matches and cigarettes with the greatest care. Now both the Forest Service and the National Park Service are coming around to the idea that a few naturally caused fires may actually be good for forests.

The shift was partly brought about by the mountain pine beetle, which is destroying lodgepole pines in unprecedented numbers in the Wyoming-Idaho-Montana area that includes Yellowstone National Park (now celebrating its 100th year), Grand Teton National Park, Teton National Forest and Targhee National Forest. In Targhee, the Forest Service waged a $9,000,000, six-year battle against the pest--and lost. Chemical sprays did kill the beetles, but at an estimated cost of $4 per tree the battle became uneconomical. In a forest that once contained 3 billion board feet of timber, only half now remains; the value of the timberstand has been cut by $30 million.

One major reason is that the park areas have been so carefully protected from fire that the pines have become aged and thus vulnerable. Now millions of them are turning bright red and then gray as they die. Says Yellowstone Biologist Doug Houston: "The longer you suppress fires, the more we set ourselves up for insect infestation and for unnatural catastrophic fires."

To counter the problem, park and forest officials this summer plan to allow a series of carefully controlled natural burns. Fires caused by lightning, for example, will be allowed to burn themselves out over 1,000 acres within Yellowstone in the hope of restoring environmental balance.

In Grand Teton, the Park Service plans a highly visible burn near Jackson Hole, Wyo., to test public reaction and begin the re-education process. Says Grand Teton Research Biologist Lloyd Loope: "We haven't so much an epidemic of mountain pine beetles as of overmature lodgepole pines." He warns that if the policy of putting out all fires is continued, there will be periodic insect infestations, like the endemic pine beetle problem, as well as a decrease in the diversity of p.ants, animals and birds. Loope believes that allowing natural fires to burn off 5% to 10% of the forest every ten years would "probably be sufficient" to put the great forests back into natural balance.

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