Blazing Heritage: A History of Wildland Fire in the National Parks

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Stine, Jeffrey K

Blazing Heritage: A History of Wildland Fire in the National Parks. By Hal K. Rothman. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. via 281 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $29.95.

Stewards of parks and forests have always been concerned about wildfires and, in the United States, fires large and small have marked turning points in the histories of many national parks. In recent years, bitter political controversy followed both the conflagration that charred a third of Yellowstone National Park in 1988 and the prescribed fire in Bandelier National Monument that escaped control to threaten the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2000. The resulting public questioning of National Park Service (NPS) fire management policy prompted the agency to commission a history of wildfire in the national parks to provide a fuller context for future deliberations. Hal Rothman, who had written several previous contract histories for the NPS, agreed to take on this assignment and his 2005 NPS report-A Test of Adversity and Strength: Wildland Fire in the National Park System-serves as the foundation for his splendid book, Blazing Heritage.

Rothman's narrative are traces the "revolution in thinking" which took place during the twentieth century in the national parks: from full suppression of fire in all cases to using fire as a land management tool; from the belief that fire threatened basic park values to the belief that fire helped maintain the parks' ecological and social values. The NPS initially adopted the doomedto-fail goal of "trying to control an uncontrollable natural phenomenon" in large part, Rothman argues, because "the people of the first half of the twentieth century had little choice. They had no viable intellectual mechanism through which to understand nature." That was no longer the case by the 19603, as "changes in science, technology, and ideology created a different set of ideals" (p. 5). With an influx of newly trained ecologists attuned to fire (paired with the gradual depletion of agency foresters), the NPS began experimenting with controlled burning in Yellowstone during the mid-1960s, largely in relation to wildlife management. In 1968, the agency put in place a new set of policies, under which "fires would be allowed to 'run their course' when they remained within preestablished boundaries and contributed to management objectives" (p. 101). The NPS thus became a leader among federal agencies (including the Forest Service) in advocating the use of fire as a management tool.

Rothman does an outstanding job in addressing "the constant tension" that informed NPS's policies and actions, a tension derived from the agency's twin missions "to preserve nature-which included fire-and to make nature available for the enjoyment of all Americans, which meant no less than fighting fire and often required excluding it" (p. 6). After decades of highly effective public educational campaigns denouncing wildland fires, bringing about popular acceptance of the NPS's new approach was no simple matter. As Rothman cogently explains: "If lightning fires that went loose posed one kind of public relations problem, nothing was more damaging to the idea of controlled burning than an intentionally set fire that exceeded its boundaries. Control remained an enormous issue; the public could barely understand letting wildfire alone, much less starting an intentional fire that eluded control. If such an endeavor went awry, the consequences could be enormous" (p. 113).

The 1988 Yellowstone fires provide a case in point. The television images of America's first and most iconic national park going up in flames were cathartic. Thanks to the heavy media coverage, the NPS's fire policy came to the attention of a great many people who had never considered it before, and the ensuing political uproar helped to set back fire management policy across the country.

Rothman contends that the national parks have served society well in many ways, not the least of which as an experimental site for fire management strategies. Those large-scale "experiments"-together with the inevitable complications arising from the fundamental tensions among science, emotion, and politics-will surely continue to play out as the nation grapples with this elemental force of nature. As Rothman's last major book before his untimely death in 2007, Blazing Heritage stands as a major contribution to helping citizens, scientists, and policymakers to understand the deep roots of this social and environmental puzzle.

Jeffrey K. Stine is curator for environmental history and chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.