The Perfect Firestorm

By Lance Morrow/Boise

Nature sometimes has suicidal impulses. This year in the American West, it has set itself on fire--fire's version of The Perfect Storm, a convergence of dry summer lightning, blast-furnace air and millions of acres of tinder. The worst is yet to come.

And in the midst of the superfire rages a culture war, a revival of old American arguments: Who owns the land? How should it be used? How can it be saved?

The war has mobilized experts and extremists. It is in part a familiar religious struggle--Earth Firster vs. logger, environmentalist vs. entrepreneur. The argument is also about the dynamics of land and trees and weather and man, about forestry and wildlife habitat and flames and money and reverence and recreation. It is about what has gone wrong (if anything) to allow such a conflagration, about whether the fault lies with nature or with man, and about how to manage the nation's patrimony of forests in the longer term.

Forest fires come and go. But this year's may be the worst in a half-century; they could prove to be the worst ever recorded. Some 6.5 million acres have already burned, and by the end of last week, 68 large fires were burning in 10 states. Almost everyone agrees the fires are not normal, not part of the harmonious burn-and-regenerate cycle of nature in business for itself. Brittlely dry heat and lightning without moisture, abetted sometimes by man-made sparks, started the fires. Could past human errors, activating a law of unintended consequences, be to blame for spreading them? And if so, which errors?

Experts focus on a paradox: too much effective, overzealous fire fighting in years past unwisely extinguished the natural, smaller, healthy burns that any forest needs--fires that clear the lesser undergrowth but spare the big trees. Most foresters agree that small, "prescribed" burns, carefully controlled, are essential to prevent the larger apocalypse.

Now comes the war: logging managers say this year's fires are in some ways the result of insufficient logging, which led to the buildup of dense "fuel loads" that, given this summer's conditions (drought and dry heat) produce fires so hot they create their own fierce weather systems: fire winds and exploding trees.

Galen Hamilton, a tall, fourth-generation logger, contemplates the timbered mountains (ponderosa pine, Douglas fir) where he grew up around Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. He points to vast, unregenerated bald patches burned off in earlier fires he blames on Forest Service fecklessness, and speaks bitterly about Washington's clueless authoritarianism (so he thinks of it) in shutting down logging operations--in letting the forest become a rank, dangerous tinderbox. The sticker on his pickup reads: ARE YOU AN ENVIRONMENTALIST? OR DO YOU WORK FOR A LIVING?

Historian Stephen Ambrose looks feelingly at the Missouri Breaks, a stretch of the Missouri River that winds for 150 miles in north-central Montana. He sees it, he believes, pretty much as Lewis and Clark did almost 200 years ago. "This is the least inhabited, most precious part of the Lower 48," he says. "It's ours to preserve for our progeny. It would be sacrilegious not to." Note the vocabulary.

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, a prince of the Environmentalist Church, brawls on Sunday television shows with Montana Governor Marc Racicot, a captain of the Responsible Logging Entrepreneurs. Who is right? Who can be trusted with the land?

The fact that an argument is self-serving does not make it wrong. And the loggers' history of sometimes villainous clear cutting should not necessarily exclude them from the woods now. "This is the worst time not to manage our forests," judges Hamilton. "Management," in the modern loggers' definition, means intelligent logging, culling out dead and dying trees and regenerating the forest. It means, they say, attacking bark beetle and spruce budworm and other diseases.

Environmentalists respond that this is a sort of Vietnam logic--we have to destroy the forest in order to save it. They reason that too much logging over the years removed the big trees that are most resistant to fire and left the woods more vulnerable to a hot general burn. Logging the large trees destroys the forest canopy, so that the forest floor dries out, underbrush flourishes and smaller trees start up, creating what is called a "fuel ladder." But last week the bipartisan Congressional Research Service said it found no connection between reduced logging in the past decade and the current wildfires.

The fires have brought new urgency and anger to the argument that has been raging around the country over Bill Clinton's roadless-lands proposal. His plan--an eleventh-hour legacy builder that would make Clinton, on paper, the greatest conservationist President since Teddy Roosevelt--would ban further road building on 43 million acres of national forest located around the country, mostly in the West. The Clinton scheme would not exactly seal off all that forest (an area roughly the size of North Dakota). But it would make access for logging and mining, hunting, fishing and other forms of recreation much more difficult.

The roadless plan does not entirely please anyone. Environmentalists think it does not go far enough (and they are outraged that it exempts Alaska's 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest). The plan, says Andrew George of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, "is political theater, political cover to ignore the public's wish to preserve the forests." In the meantime, loggers, mining interests and many locals consider the initiative ham-fisted interference by a distant, authoritarian Federal Government--of a piece with what they see as Clinton's high-handed use of the 1906 Antiquities Act, creating "national monuments" to set aside 3.1 million acres of land for preservation.

The Clinton road plan might have profound consequences in terms of future forest fires. Some forests in the most flammable condition, says Boise Cascade forest manager Dave van de Graaff, are in roadless areas, and if the additional 43 million acres are made roadless, the thinning needed will never get done; fires there, says Van de Graaff, will endanger other forests.

Take your pick of scenarios: either 1) the failure to build more roads into wilderness will make it harder for loggers to thin the woods and result in future fires even harder to fight; or 2) roadlessness will begin to allow forests to return to natural self-policing cycles, to a pre-Paleface Eden.

Charlotte Wiggins, who works for the U.S. Forest Service in Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, offers a succinct summary of the state of play: "The environmentalists want to see the land untouched by humans, whereas those who live on the land want to use it. There is no common ground, no way to compromise."

Black helicopters flicker at the edge of the mind. In Missouri, Marge Welch, a field director for the antiroadless organization People for the USA, sees the proposal as a small but evil step "on the way to total federal control over the land for elitist uses. First they will block timber, then mining and then agriculture. Then the land will be worthless and people would be forced to leave. They are more concerned with wildlife than with people."

Al Gore is in favor of the President's roadless-lands plan. He would take it a step further, forbidding all logging on the lands and including the Tongass National Forest in the ban. George W. Bush is against it. He vows "to put the national forests back to work." In the West, politicians argue the issue bitterly. When Clinton visited Idaho in August, Republican Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage's spokeswoman was unmoved. "President Clinton came to Idaho to watch Idaho burn and tell us he felt our pain," she said. "Clinton felt our pain because he caused it"--in her mind, with earlier Administration policies that cut logging by more than 85%, chiefly for environmental reasons, to protect the spotted owl and other endangered species.

Irreconcilable differences, two incompatible American faiths.

On one side is a vigorous entrepreneurialism that regards the natural bounty of America as a resource to be enjoyed in a robustly material way--to be organized, exploited, developed and tamed with chain saws and hotels and jet skis and snowmobiles. It is a proprietary faith: no one better tell me what to do with my own land.

On the other side is the conservationist faith, an essentially spiritual longing that comes to the sacred American landscape as to a paradise that can only be dirtied by the enterprise of man. Of this faith there was no greater prophet than John Muir, the Scottish-born bard of American grandeurs and of what he called "the Godful wilderness."

To follow Muir in his western travels is to see America with the dew still on it--and to understand the environmentalist longing, almost a Jungian nostalgia for what the world was...before. Muir writes in the Yosemite, "And so the beauty of the lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroys these gardens." Muir is the American mystic of trees, the rhapsodist of the intention behind the idea of roadless forests. Muir writes, "The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted...broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful and most beautiful trees in the world."

Contemporary writers on the American environment, Rick Bass, for example, worship in the church of Muir: "Must we break everything that is special to us, or sacred--unknown, and holy--into halves, and then fourths, and then eighths? What happens to us when all the sacred, all the whole, is gone--when there is no more whole?" Montana evokes for Thomas McGuane "a terrific evangelical silence." Faith is by definition irrational--it is, in fact, a little like fire.

The war is not fought only in the West. David Govus owns 250 acres in the mountains of North Georgia, next to the 750,000-acre Chattahoochee National Forest, a haven for migratory pitted warblers, oven birds and other species that flourish amid the May apples and jack-in-the-pulpits, rare mountain orchids and yellow lady slippers. In the late 1800s, despite decades of heavy logging, there remained thousands of acres of unbroken forest thick with giant hardwoods. "Some of it could be like that again," says Govus. "It might take 400 to 500 years, but look at what we could leave to our descendants."

The argument over roadless lands is thus framed in vastly different perspectives of time. Opponents--off-road-vehicle enthusiasts, hunters, fishermen, loggers, miners and organized labor (which cites the loss of jobs)--do not speculate centuries in advance. They want use of the land now. In the American Southeast, debate focuses on more than 5 million acres of national forests--625,000 acres designated as roadless--that harbor some of the last vestiges of America's primeval woodlands, including some of the oldest forests in the world.

And there is the Mark Twain National Forest, which spreads over 1.5 million acres in Missouri. Unlike other national forests, Mark Twain is a maze of public and privately held lands cobbled together in the 1930s after Missouri was virtually clear cut to make ties for the transcontinental railroad. Hidden in Mark Twain's hills and hollows are more methamphetamine labs than anywhere else in the nation and an immense acreage of cultivated marijuana. The forest also harbors more specialized hate groups than anyplace else in America. Its denizens, who proudly call themselves hillbillies, are among the most independent, suspicious and stubborn in the nation.

So when Clinton proposed to ban future road construction on 43 million acres of national forests, the locals took it as a declaration of war. For the past several years, rural groups have managed to halt virtually all environmental initiatives, including a master plan for the Ozarks devised by the Missouri Department of Conservation. The situation became so tense that workers were ordered not to wear uniforms; one was found gagged, with a Sierra Club video tape in her mouth. Says Ray Cunio, of Citizens for Private Property Rights: "No one is talking black helicopters or U.N. troops anymore. What we are seeing today is a federal land grab, done incrementally, by bureaucratic means, that will give the Federal Government de facto control over all land uses and a complete no-use policy on federal lands. This is just a first step."

Late last week, rain fell over Montana and Idaho. But the worst of the fire season lies ahead. It's going to be a long September. The flames will go out only when the rains and snows come in October. Millions of acres of the West will lie blackened for a long time, and in some places will never regenerate. The sight of all that devastation will make the culture war even more intense. But nature is resilient. Life eventually reclaimed even the devastated moonscape left behind by the explosion of Mount St. Helens.

--With reporting by Ed Barnes/Rolla, Mo., Ann Blackman/Washington, Todd Murphy/Salmon, Idaho, Richard Woodbury/Great Falls, Mont., and David Nordan/Ellijay, Ga.

With reporting by Ed Barnes/Rolla, Mo., Ann Blackman/Washington, Todd Murphy/Salmon, Idaho, Richard Woodbury/Great Falls, Mont., and David Nordan/Ellijay, Ga.