Photo © Shearwater Books

TENDING FIRE: COPING WITH AMERICA’S WILDLAND FIRES BY STEPHEN J. PYNE

I read Stephen Pyne’s previous books illuminating various strands of our world’s wildland fire legacy, because I felt that I ought to, although I confess to having skimmed parts. However his newest work inspired me.

In Tending Fire (Shearwater Books, 2004), Pyne first grounds his ideas in the historical context that he is famous for, then paints a portrait of today’s complex wildland fire scene, explaining how current policy dictates three choices for handling fires: let them burn, suppress them or light them ourselves. Finally he unabashedly lays out what he would do if he were in charge of charting the fire management future for the United States. Pyne’s tone speaks to intelligent firefighters and an intelligent public—both of which too often get underestimated in bureaucratic debates. It helps that his dust jacket photo shows him in the fire veteran’s faded yellow Nomex. We read knowing that Pyne has engaged his hands as well as his head in his scholarship, the same way that he encourages front line firefighters, as well as our nation’s “intelligentsia,” to do.

My own life as a firefighter began in July 1997, after three years in graduate school, when my crew hacked and sawed a loop around seven acres of flaming juniper torches, and I fell in love with fire. The following summer I became a hotshot and in 2000, a Missoula smokejumper, which remains my current job. (We do a lot of good work, in spite of Pyne’s reference to us as “sentimental relics,” but I’ll save that defense for another story.)

While Pyne urges the fire community to continue the scientific research that is teaching us how flame can best be used to create and maintain a variety of healthy ecosystems, he also poses that we must attend to culture. He criticizes that we “insist on ‘science-based’ solutions even though the crux of most disputes—the bottlenecks in moving plans into the field—lies in a politics charged by disputes over ethics, economics and esthetics, with uncertainties over the proper place of humanity in nature, over nature’s rights and humanity’s responsibilities.” Alongside the scientists, we need poets and artists to bring fire’s philosophical issues—of which there are many—to the forefront of the public imagination. Pyne takes his own advice, and there are moments when Tending Fire achieves the poetry he prescribes.

Lately I have worried my career choice the way a dull axe hammers against fire-hardened logs. In fact, like many who join our wildland fire forces, I didn’t consider my job a career in the beginning. Season by season I have returned, and gradually I am deciding that this work may be interesting enough to sustain me another fifteen years, at least. Tending Fire shows that wildland firefighting, for all its past mistakes and current quagmires, has achieved the status of a profession.

This past spring, five months after the birth of my first child, I helped light a fire in the Bitterroot Mountains’ foothills; then a wind churned up and sent flames spinning over our control lines like a cattle herd spooked by thunder. For two days we chased the unruly blaze, until a snowstorm enfolded us. We went home to our families early that night. My co-workers and I talk a lot about how muddled our mission has become in the current decade. Pyne relates how we can no longer be viewed as the white-hatted heroes—somewhere between cowboys and soldiers—that the U.S. Forest Service first advertised us to be. No one thinks anymore that saving trees is worth human deaths.

Still, it is our job to do something, and there are too many people snuggled up against and inside the edges of our wild places to ignore. Pyne observes that, “Other creatures knock over trees, dig holes in the ground, eat plants, hunt: we do fire. This is who we are as ecological agents.”

Ultimately, if we do not accept the responsibility to manage flames—including those from burning fossil fuels—in a sustainable way, then we may not get another chance. In spite of the confusion wrought by rapidly changing policy, firefighters accept that our mission is to take care of public land in the best way that we can figure out. Toward that end, we believe in each other. We respect the creative as well as the destructive power of fire and just plain enjoy the challenges of pressing our bodies and brains to the task.