Waves of Change
A few years back, I had the pleasure of reading an early proof of Steve Pyne's Tending Fire, and some of my comments made it onto the book jacket. One portion of the book that I kept returning to was Pyne's breakdown of the major historical developments of U.S. wildland fire policy into 20- and 30-year cycles. He suggested that a roughly 30-year wave tracked the deepest currents in the goals of U.S. fire management and the role society asks of public lands.
The first wave, from 1910 to 1940, implemented a program of systematic fire protection for wildlands beginning roughly with the 1905 Transfer Act and the 1910 fires in Idaho and Montana. The second wave, from 1940 to 1970, promulgated a doctrine of universal, unconditional fire suppression characterized by the U.S. Forest Service's 10 a.m. policy, which stated that any fire that broke out was to be under control by 10 a.m. the following day. The third wave, from 1970 to 2000, promoted restoration largely through the use of prescribed burning. Occurring now, Pyne thought the fourth wave appeared destined to focus on modifying landscape fuel.
I remember discussing that possible fourth wave long before 2000, in the break room of the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab in the early to mid 1980s. There appeared to be increasing fuel on the landscape in some timber types except where we had established timber harvest programs. There also was a gradually but steadily increasing population near established communities, the development of a few seasonally earlier fires, and some increasing difficulty in fire suppression that was resulting in larger burned acreages on a few individual fires. At that time, the wildland firefighting community also was emphasizing educating the public about fuel mitigation around their homes in the forest.
Looking back from 2007, those observations were fairly accurate; our smoky crystal ball was just some magnitudes off. Those topics now are being defined in much larger terms: changing world demographics, and the hand-in-glove trends of changing global climate and large climate-driven landscape fires.
The subjects and their affects have been addressed in various meetings I've been attending regarding U.S. concerns, because these really transcend international boundaries. An individual from one federal land-management agency said that our landscape fuels continue to increase, and we are not catching up. Climatologists agreed that we will continue to experience increasingly warm annual temperatures and that future precipitation patterns are the big unknown, with high levels of local variability of drought and flood likely to occur. The best estimates show U.S. population levels continuing to increase rapidly, with more people living in formerly sparsely settled areas. This is what we now face: more fuel, more people, and climate-inducing increases in burned acreage in areas where fire was previously uncommon.
I'm now beginning to think of Pyne's sequence of U.S. fire management policy waves as building on each other rather than as individual events following each other on the ocean of fire management. It is probably still too early to envision the depth of Pyne's fourth wave of managing landscapes of fuel, which nature may just do for us. The three trends of changing climate, demographics and large fire growth may be merging into that perfect wave that overwhelms our attempts at landscape management and carries more than just U.S. fire management policies into the foreseeable future. This may be a tsunami that crashes down and changes our societal landscapes — again — and will eventually define that nebulous fifth wave.
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