first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Usually, we
imagine those cogs and wheels as species to be
kept from going extinct, but we can also think of
them as the abiotic forces, like fire, that keep our
forests ticking even while we tinker.
Applied to the Yellowstone area, though, this
policy starts to get tricky, and the difficulties
of western forest management become clear.
There’s a general sense here that all fuel reduction is good and all fuel buildup is bad, and a lot of
resources are spent thinning the forest to prevent
fires. But there is huge variation in forest type
here, meaning that a blanket fire-management
system is no better than blanket fire suppression. In dry, low, arid pine forests, fire is driven
by fuel build-up, with climatic conditions such as
temperature and humidity playing relatively small
roles. In these forests, reducing the fuel load is
essential to reducing forest fires. However, in
the high altitude, fir-dominated, wetter parts of
the western landscape – the subalpine canyons
of the Tetons, for example – fire is driven not by
fuel load but by climate. Reducing the fuel load in
these forests does nothing to mitigate forest fires,
and yet, at least here in Jackson, forest management for fire has come to mean fuel reduction,
everywhere, and nothing else.
Complicating matters is that it’s getting harder
to determine what baseline fire cycle is “natural”
in a place where climate, water supply, economy,
and human population have been changing for
decades. Data from 1974 to 2004 show that as
spring and summer temperatures increase above
average, so does the number of large (greater than
500-acre) forest fires. Since the 1970s, more acre-Left: 2015 was a bad year for forest fires. Here, the Wolverine Creek Fire, northwest of Lucerne, Washington. Above:
For those in the West, forest fire is a part of life. A reminder on a hike near Fourth of July Lake in the White Clouds
Mountains, Idaho. Bottom: The infamous 1988 Yellowstone fire, near Old Faithful.
N
AO
M
I
H
EI
N
D
EL
age has burned each decade – to the extent that in
the 2000s large fires were over 480 percent more
frequent and burned 930 percent more area than
in the 1970s. While changes in fire-management
policy have contributed to this trend, these numbers
also correlate to increases in average temperature.
Some scientists predict that fires the size of the
1988 Yellowstone fire – which, at the time, was an
anomaly in terms of size – will become the norm
for forests of the Intermountain West by 2050. The
Greater Yellowstone ecosystem could shift from a
fire cycle of 120 years to one of less than 10 years
by the end of this century. Can the cottonwood
trees along the Snake River withstand a 10-year
fire cycle? What about the stands of lodgepole
pines covering the glacial moraines in the valley?
Or the massive Douglas firs on the Tetons’ lower
ridges? Should fire management work to protect
and maintain those trees? Or should it shift as
the baseline fire cycle shifts to recognize a new
reality? Western forests may face massive changes
in composition over the next few decades, and
western communities and economies that depend
on those forests will have to respond.
I love living in these forests. Elk walk through
my backyard. Moose come during the night to
eat the willows outside my bedroom window. I
can hear owls hoot, and I observe the daily flight
patterns of hawks without leaving my deck. These
western forests hold an expansiveness and wildness that is unique to the region. Wildfire, though,
is our reality check. Today’s forest fires are not the
fires of the past, and they are taking us, and our
forests, into a different future.
Naomi Heindel
about wildfire, and the answer will largely be
theoretical, and maybe not even linked to forests.
Ask anyone in the West, and the answer is going
to be based on lived experience and closely linked
to forests, whether from hiking through a stand of
snags, clearing “defensible space” around a home,
or watching a local mountainside go up in smoke.
Out here, land management has evolved along-
side the understanding of fire. We’ve come a long
way from thinking of wildfire as “a great obstacle in
the way of the practice of forestry,” to quote Henry
Graves, an early U.S. Forest Service chief. Some
of the smoke we experienced this past summer in
Jackson, for example, was from prescribed burns
in Grand Teton National Park, where fire is used to
encourage native plants to return to what used to
be ranchland. In a nutshell, fire management in
western forests has gone from a doctrine of com-
plete suppression everywhere to “let burn” policies
in wilderness areas, coupled with gigantic firefight-
ing efforts around population centers. (Fighting the
fires of 2015 cost the government $2.6 billion.) The
goal – at least since the 1990s, when ecosystem
management became the official policy of the U.S.
Forest Service – has been to manage wildfires in
ways that maintain or mimic a forest’s natural fire
cycle. I think of this as adhering to Aldo Leopold’s
warning that “to keep every cog and wheel is the
U
.S.F
O
R
ES
T
SE
R
V
IC
E
