Fire is an essential part of most forested ecosystems. Fire recycles forest nutrients, creates browse for native wildlife, deters unwanted noxious weeds, thins out thickets of trees, and rejuvenates forests. Fire creates standing dead trees essential for woodpeckers and the insects they eat and encourages the growth of native plants.

Fire was the forest management tool of choice for Native Americans for 10,000 years. Frequent burning kept wildlife and the forests they lived in healthy and sustainable. Europeans changed all of that. In many forest ecosystems, such as the dry Ponderosa pine forests, putting out fires has led only to even bigger fires burning when they get out of our control. The Forest Service must rethink its fire policies and we all must learn to live with and manage fire, not fight it.

Firefighting can be as destructive of the environment as the fire itself. Fire retardant dumped from bombers is toxic to fish if it reaches streams or lakes, just like fertilizer that runs off a farmer's field. Some retardants include cyanide, added to prevent corrosion of bomber tanks. The cyanide adds to the retardant's toxicity. Bulldozers used to clear fire trails disturb soil and increase erosion.

The Forest Service has refused to subject its firefighting activities to the same environmental standards as logging, livestock grazing, and mining. Even building a hiking trail gets more environmental consideration than bulldozing hundreds of miles of fireline. The Clean Water Act requires the Forest Service to get a permit before it dumps fire retardant into a stream. The Endangered Species Act requires the Forest Service to evaluate the effects fire retardant in streams will have on threatened fish. The Forest Service has not complied with either law. FSEEE seeks to ensure that it does.

Fighting fires now accounts for over half of the Forest Service's total budget. But many of these fires should be managed, not fought. Although every forester and ecologist knows that removing fire from forests devastates long-term forest health, the Forest Service still extinguishes over 99 percent of all fires. The Forest Service refuses to take a hard look at its fire fighting practices. The National Environmental Policy Act requires it does so. FSEEE will see to it the Forest Service follows this critical public involvement and disclosure law.

In FSEEE’s opinion, firefighters are sometimes sent where they don’t belong. In late July 2001, the Forest Service was combating a blaze in an area that should have been allowed to burn. Four young men and women died battling the Thirty Mile fire in the remote Chewuch River canyon of the Okanogan National Forest. Tom Craven, Karen Fitzpatrick, Devin Weaver, and Jessica Johnson were sent by the Forest Service to do a job. They died in the performance of that duty.

But was the job they were doing worth their lives? Did this fire, in a steep, remote canyon that threatened no houses or valuable resources, need to be battled? During its investigation into these tragic deaths, the U.S. Forest Service had better answer these questions.

The Thirty Mile fire started in roadless, backcountry land immediately adjacent to the remote Pasayten wilderness. The fire began in a designated Research Natural Area, at 6,000 acres, one of the largest RNA’s in the nation. This is important in what happened next: It appears fire managers did not even know the fire was in a Research Natural Area. Had they known, they would not have aggressively attacked the fire with aerial retardants and firelines, which are banned in RNA’s. Instead, they would have held back and taken a more cautious approach to fighting this fire -- an approach that sought to allow the fire to mimic natural processes within this fire-dependent ecosystem.

Admittedly, hindsight can be 20-20, but it is worth considering that a more cautious approach to fighting this fire might also have saved lives. The Thirty Mile fire exemplifies the need to take a hard look at our nation's approach to wildland fires. A century of aggressive fire suppression, combined with logging of the biggest and most fire-resistant trees, has damaged ecosystems throughout the West. Continuing to put out every fire in the remote backcountry makes little sense economically or environmentally. We must carefully restore fire to its prominent role as nature's cleansing agent in our public forests.

Last year the Congress allocated a record amount, $1.6 billion, to the Forest Service for its national fire plan. The first priority should be to help private homeowners who live near fire-prone national forests to manage the vegetation within several hundred feet of their houses. That's where the biggest difference is made between a home burning up in a forest fire and a home surviving. The next priority should be to return fire to its natural role in the environment.

Putting out all fires simply puts off the day of reckoning. Burn today or burn tomorrow, the West's forests have burned for thousands of years and will continue to do so. We must learn to live with fire just as we live with the weather. And we must stop sacrificing our best and brightest young people in this futile war against an implacable enemy.