The Big Burn was a giant forest fire in August, 2010, that ended up consuming three million acres in Idaho and Montana. Upward of ten thousand men fought the fire, 78 of whom died during the fight.
The devastating fire caused the US Forest Service to change the way they fought fire. You see, the Big Burn started out as dozens of small fires that converged into the destructive force it became. The thinking went, we are going to put out the small fires as soon as we can so they can’t join other fires. So when a fire was spotted it was put out as soon as possible.
That’s great except fire isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fire does a lot of good. It clears out and thins the forest. Fire is needed to grow some trees. For example lodgepole pine trees have serotinous pine cones which means they need high temperature to open up and disperse their seeds. (My dad was a forest ranger and this was his favorite lesson to tell people about why fires are not necessarily bad.)
So after decades of such policy allowed the amount of fuel in our forests to grow. You couple this with global warming (yep it’s a thing) and the fires of today are nothing like the fires my father and his coworkers fought fifty years ago. This is having an effect on people’s lives. For example, one place where we used to live years ago was in the White Mountains of Arizona. I try and keep up with things and the fire situation has gotten so bad that insurance companies are not renewing policies for people who moved out to the woods to be by themselves. The risks are too high.
The Big Burn is a great book with a compelling story. It is mainly about the birth of the Forest Service and how the Big Burn helped solidify their start. It is also about Theodore Roosevelt and he is always fun to read about.
