The fire this time

This industrial approach to tree management, which only raises the risk of major fires, has not served the forests well. But fire is the least of a tree's worries, and the dry forests of the West are doomed to burn under any circumstances. As they should, for fire is a reality of the natural world, an integral part of the natural order. Heartless though it may seem to a homeowner whose mountaintop getaway has just burned to the ground, the young Apache firefighter was right: Fire is not a bad thing. It is essential to the health of a forest, something akin to a snake's shedding its skin. It is in recognition of this fact that progressive foresters advocate a program of controlled burning, so that when a forest becomes too choked with brushy undergrowth, portions are cleared through fire, that most natural and ultimately least intrusive of agents. Where the Forest Service has put this approach into practice -- notably, again, in Yellowstone National Park -- it has proved to be highly effective.

The truly surprising thing about the fire now burning in the Arizona highlands is that it did not come much sooner. For, if there is a single underlying cause for that fire, it is this: Fire follows humans, goes wherever we go. When the Rodeo and Chediski fires first sparked, separately and distantly, there was not a cloud, not a flash of lightning, in the sky. This strongly suggests that the origin of those conflagrations lies in the usual cause for the natural world's woes: human stupidity, or, more generously, human carelessness, or even the mere presence of humans. A thoughtlessly discarded cigarette, a dragging muffler shooting sparks off asphalt, a campfire gone out of control: any one of those things might have touched off the fires. All that presumes accident, of course, and sets aside a more likely if unsettling possibility: that the fires were deliberately set, as was apparently the case in the concurrent Hayman fire southwest of Denver.

More and more humans are coming to the fast-developing Mogollon Rim, building log condominiums, shopping centers and luxury homes atop strata of bone-dry ponderosa pine needles, among arid forests that see only a couple dozen inches of rain in a year. Some of those humans smoke. Some of them drive. Some of them build campfires. Some of them are easily distracted.

And as more humans come, more fires will come, a consequence of the awful Promethean power we wield. Those fires are inevitable. For even if many find it surprising, this law of nature obtains: Should you build your home in a forest, it will someday burn.

Fire is to forest as hurricane is to beach, as tornado is to prairie, as drought is to desert. This is a reality of the natural world. But modern Americans, it seems, do not like to hear the word "no," do not like to contemplate worst-case scenarios at the expense of cherished dreams, do not like to admit the possibility that nature cannot be controlled. It is much easier to blame what is an inescapable consequence of progress on supposed enemies of progress than it is to do the hard work of being attentive, of taking preventive measures, of building out of harm's way rather than wherever the weather is nice and the prospect pleasing. It is much easier to throw blame than it is to develop forest-management policies that take the ways of the forest into account -- and to admit the possibility, on the other side, that forests can be logged sustainably without throwing off the fabled balance of nature.

All that work is necessary if we are to continue to make our home in the woods. At least it gives us something to do.

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