Smokey's revenge - Smokey Bear; implications of the forest fire prevention campaign - Burning Issues

American Forests, May-June, 1993 by Charles Little

This amiable symbol of fire-as-evil-force has turned on his masters and helped to create today's "forests of torches."

It is impossible for environmentalists of a certain age, especially if they grew up in the West (such as I), to be anything but ambivalent about Smokey Bear. Let's face it--in many circles the bear is a pariah. Even at the National Zoo in Washington, which tends to be inclusive, the popular Smokey Bear exhibit was quietly dismantled in 1991--after having featured since 1950 a bear going by this name (involving two separate animals). The point is, Smokey's ecological correctness quotient is low, as an increasing number of forest ecologists have been pointing out in recent years. We anthropomorphize at our peril.

But if ever as a child you saw a roaring forest fire creeping down a mountainside toward your home, the night sky bright with the lurid reflection of flames against a towering curtain of rising smoke; and if etched in your memory is the picture of your father up on the roof, his dark figure limned against the advancing front while he frantically sprays the alighting embers with a garden hose--then your appreciation of Smokey is at a deeper level, and difficult to shake.

For me these fearful images (we escaped, but not all did) are especially meaningful, for during the very summer (1943) of the big fire in the Angeles National Forest, which our neighborhood abutted, my father got a job at an advertising agency called Foote, Cone & Belding. And among his early assignments was to help prepare a campaign to reduce the forest fires that were plaguing the West in those wartime years. He didn't invent Smokey Bear, and I suspect he had little or no direct responsibility for the advertising itself. But, of course, that is not what I told my friends at school. So far as I was concerned, the new Smokey poster on the bulletin board was my Dad's idea, and you'd better not say it wasn't. Or else.

Now that I have acquainted you with my biases, let me disabuse you of their implications.

Perversely, most people see the present-day forests, however modified by human intervention they may be, as "natural," while at the same time believing that fire--any fire--is unnatural. This is a misconception that forest ecologists have for years been at pains to correct, but to little avail. As we have learned, the misconception has had a profound effect on forest policy, wherein historically the harvesting of big trees has been encouraged while fire has been suppressed. The effect was a self-potentiating cycle of ecological change that altered the composition of forests in the western mountains so decisively--from widely spaced big trees to thickets of shade-tolerant species--that their vulnerability to drought and insect infestation, and therefore fire, is a virtually permanent condition.

The world was treated to an example of the results of our misconceptions about what is "natural" and what isn't in Yellowstone National Park in 1988 when nearly half the Park's 2.2 million acres, tucked into the far northwest corner of Wyoming, were burned over.

"Everything about the fires seemed exaggerated," wrote fire historian Stephen J. Pyne of the event in Natural History magazine. "Groves of old-growth lodgepole pine and aging spruce and fir exploded into flame like toothpicks before a blowtorch. Towering convective clouds rained down a hailstorm of ash, and firebrands even spanned the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Crown fires propagated at rates of up to two miles per hour, velocities unheard of for forest fuels. A smoke pall spread over the region like the prototype of a nuclear winter. Everything burned."

The official confusion over what to do about the Yellowstone fires--whether to let them burn or put them out--could in substantial part be laid to Smokey's account. For 50 years this admonitory cartoon animal, created by the U.S. Forest Service and my father's firm in 1944, had inculcated the belief in every schoolchild, every Campfire Girl, every Boy Scout, Girl Scout, Brownie, and Cub in the United States that forest fires are bad, and that they are the fault, usually, of a "careless smoker," of those who do not heed the gruff warning to "drown your campfires," or even perhaps those who are enemies of democracy.

One result of this propaganda has been that any effort to reduce the threat of fire by purposely burning off accumulated fuels in a place like Yellowstone was hamstrung by a popular belief that there was no such thing as a "good" fire. Accordingly, the fuel built upon itself, year after year, decade after decade. While forest fires regularly broke out, they were, through most of the Park's history, hurriedly extinguished in compliance with the popular horror of forest fire of any kind--a view preached since World War II by the amiable bear. In the end, this ursine cartoon animal may have done more to increase the risk of future mass fire in the West than to reduce it--simply by making forest fires unpatriotic.

Smokey's apologists have always insisted that the campaign is, and has been, directed at human-caused fires, that the message has never argued against prescribed burning or even natural fires. The bear's official "biographer," Ellen Earnhardt Morrison, is outraged at the idea that Smokey has been accused of having "brainwashed" people into thinking that all fires should be prevented. "To a bear who has been a hero for a whole generation," she writes in her charming history of the Smokey Bear campaign, The Guardian of the Forest (1989), "such criticism must come as a shock. What has happened in the last decade to make anyone question his motives? Why is he suddenly the object of scorn?"