Focus 580; Tending Fire: Coping With Americas Wildland Fires

Good morning and welcome back to the second hour focus 580 our morning talk program Money's David Inge. Glad to have you with us producing the show Harriet Williamson Martha Diehl and Jason Croft is at the controls. In this hour the show will be talking about the fire and its place in the natural environment and how it is we think about it and how it is we cope with fires in wild lands and our guest for the show in this hour Stephen Pyne a man who has been called the world's leading historian of fire. He is the author of a number of books that deal with the matter just among them fire a brief history. The year of the fires the story of the great fires of 1910 and the other books that have to do with the end. Including how the canyon be game grand short history. He is the author of a new book that is just out in fact I'm really not quite sure that it's out on the in the bookstores yet. A book titled tending fire the subtitle coping with America's wild land fires in which he makes the argument that there are some problems. With how it is we cope with wild land

fires and talks about how it is maybe we should be thinking differently about it doing things a little bit differently. He is professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. And in addition to being an academic and a writer he's also a former firefighter for 15 seasons on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. He is joining us by telephone as we talk. Of course questions are welcome. The only thing we ask of people who call in is that they try to be brief so that we can keep the program moving along and to get in as many different people as possible. Questions welcomed 0 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line and that when you get anywhere that you can hear us. And that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Professor Pyne Hello. How are you. I'm good thanks in yourself. Thanks for talking with us again. We certainly appreciate it. My pleasure. I think that it's the case. And I think that you know when you point out in the book is that you know if if we go back I don't think we have to go back probably too many years before we find that probably

most for most Americans they don't. Their awareness of wildfires not not going to be very high unless of course they happen to live in a place that we're aware they're prone to fires. But now within the past year certainly we're used to seeing news coverage of fires and we're used to seeing those aerial shots of fires and we're seeing those old shots of planes and helicopters taking off with this whatever it is they dump to dump on the fire and you know shots of people all suited up to go do it so it's become now every summer now. That's it's a fairly regular standard news story and it really wasn't. If you don't have to go back too far. That it really wasn't my guess as that might be one place we could start and why it is that suddenly now it's fire is a story. Well that's a good question. I think there are several responses to that one is the. Well we might go back again you don't have to go very far in the past. Western fires and large eruptions of the sort were

treated roughly in the category of a grizzly bear attack they were just sort of some freak of Western violence. They had very little to do with the rest of the country. Now they have become part of a regular with an annual media cycle. I think the explanations are several one is the impact of the Yellowstone fires in 1988 which went on for weeks and sort of educated the national media particularly television about fire and that started it. Process than that faded out and then beginning 10 years ago with the 1994 season had tremendous impact in the fire community but also in the national media and I think the connection there was that Norman McClain had published posthumously a best selling book young men and fire and the 94 fire season particularly the south Canyon fire that overran a group of firefighters recapitulated the accounts of young men and fire with with the eerie facsimile and

suddenly alerted people to the fact that there might be some larger issues here and it might be interesting. And then the big fire seasons have come with national election years they've come every two years. 94 96 98 2000 2000 to this year would be the exception. But that caused a fire to get build into an electoral cycle as well. So I think there are a number of reasons why. There's also the fact that over the last decade most of the West the fire prone areas of the country have been in drought. And this has made the fires more prominent and we're also dealing with the legacy of our own misguided fire practices. For more than a century and that has created in many places a build up of combustibles of fuels that is aggravating the fire scene. And I think there is just a sense that it isn't working for all the drama

of what we've been doing isn't really making progress to getting the land and the kinds of fires we want. And that has entered a larger discussion and in a way it's left the guild to the fire community and becoming an object for for a broader conversation. Well it certainly it seems that for a long time that the thinking about wild land fires was closely parallel the way we think about an urban fire you know as the fire starts you put it out. And that's. That yeah but it seems that there probably always were people who are questioning that but it seems like in recent years there has come to be questions much more. Well that that's that's I mean that in some way is the fundamental question of what we do with fire particularly on the public lands. When we set these lands aside the idea was that they would be they would be spared the kind of logging land clearing sort of scalping that had gone on in much of the country

and fires would go away because most of the bad fires people saw at the time at the end of the 19th century were caused by people they were associated with railroads and land clearing and so forth and that turned out not to be the case. So when they realised that fires weren't going away on their own but they were a part of that natural system then they would have to devise practices institution's policies and partly because of the name of firefighting. They looked at the urban model and thought that that would be it so you want to control all the fires and the way to do that is to get there as rapidly as possible to find it and hit it this quickly as you can. And so for 50 years or so that was the driving mechanism and I think you're correct that that the public. It has only really over the last decade or maybe since the Yellowstone fires become aware of the fallacies and liabilities of that approach. Just basically a

kind of paramilitary approach that we will literally fight fire we will mass an army of counterforce and and and attack it become aware of that but the fire community itself recognized this several decades ago. I mean policy began changing in the 1960s and for some of agencies like the National Park Service have actually had a more varied Torr pluralistic fire policy for a longer period of time than they had a really aggressive fire suppression policy. So the policy business has been going on that debate been going on internally for a long time and the question is not that we need to change the policy but why hasn't the policy produced more results on the ground. Something that I would expect a lot of people would would have a hard time with they would say that this was sort of counter-intuitive the idea that fighting fighting fires aggressively fighting fires wildfires

would. A lot over the long term. And you know maybe in some cases depending on the conditions it would have to take that long but over a period of time that aggressively aggressively fighting them would lead to conditions that would make things worse as time goes along. That is you know create conditions that that would would just have everything right in place so that you get the right condition then you then over time you get even a bigger and bigger problem maybe you could talk about how how that works. Well first of all we can say again now now it's the historians speaking that that this is really a very old debate and in some ways it's the founding debate. There was a question when these lands were set up. Should we found our protection of the forest on fighting fires that is trying to exclude them or should we found it on lighting fires. And there was a large group and a rather vigorous group that argued that we should emulate the American Indian.

We should emulate many of the people living on the land who regularly burned many of these landscapes not all of them. And by doing so they kept sort of the woody scrub. All the combustibles that would grow and pile up on the forest floor they kept that under control so regular burning was a kind of spring cleaning if you will it was like a small flood that would that would clean out a watershed regularly as opposed to sort of giant floods that would melt would scour it out. And the argument was very vigorously debated even a century ago and it was hard fought. It became politicized. And for a variety of reasons we adopted sort of the aggressive suppression approach but we were warned that critics actually said you know if you do this you're going to build up combustibles you're going to have fires you can't control you're going to have diseased insect ridden forests. They're going to be overgrown they're

going to be starved. They're going to be in miserable shape you'll regret it. And in fact all those forecasts were in fact correct. So this is an old debate. And the fact I mean there are several things you can say why why how does this work one thing is that you know it's a living system it's not like a city. It's not. Stuff doesn't burn because we build it there it grows it. It's constantly changing and in the air it or semi-arid West. There is very little biological decomposition of this material it's not like a tropical rain forest were very little survives on the floor because there are organisms to to decompose it. It's going to sit there it's going to sit there for a long time. So that stuff is something you have to get rid of it at some point. And there's a biological argument that so many of the nutrients for half so critical nutrients like phosphorous in the system get locked up in in this large would be debris. And something has to break

it out and recycle it it's as though nature's economy people are putting all their money in stocks and sticking it in mattresses it needs to get into circulation it needs to flow and fire is part of what keeps it flowing. Well I think what we've learned is that fire can be just as powerful removed as applied. And that systems which are used to a regular pattern of fire or some pattern of fire if you change that pattern they become upset that's a disturbance that can be as profound a disturbance as putting fire into a system that. Is it used to it. If I could. One last point on this that I think is important. It's not we tend to argue well fire or not fire. That's really a misstatement. What we should be talking about is the pattern of fire or fires regime because it's saying that something is adapted to fire is like saying it's adept at the water. It's adapted to a particular pattern of rainfall of

summer and winter snow and rain. And it matters whether the rain comes the same every month or whether it's all in two months. So the same thing with the fire the system is has accommodated itself to certain rhythms and organizations. A fire on the land if you change that pattern then they are no longer adapted. So it's not just whether you have fire or not it's the kind of fire. Our guest in this part of focus 580 is STEVEN PYNE. He's professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and has written a lot about fire. Nature and has a new book out it's titled tending fire coping with America's wild land fires and published by Island Press and has written a number of others about the deal with things like fire in the history of the world a particular book that we talked about when it came out a couple of years ago about one year in American history. It was a big year of fire and how that contributed to the way people think about fire

and also has written a book about the Grand Canyon which is titled How the canyon became grand and a number of others so if you're interested you can certainly head out to head at the library or to the bookstore and look for some of his writing. And of course questions are welcome to 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 and we have a couple people here with questions we'll go to Belgium Illinois nearby. Line number four toll free line hello. Working on start off with that was thinking a part of his making a save in the filesystem. I remember being there and I think the support was 87 some revision 7 but that's another story. The question I was going to ask you about is you were talking about historical fires the grandson of the namesake of the small town near here called Danville wrote stories historical facts about the prairie fires that used to run across the

Midwest here that were very much affect the environment in other words the prairie needed to burn and in the process when it burned across it start forest fires and also start house fires and whatever other kind of fires you could start. I was wondering if you discussed that because that that's when a lot of these thoughts about fire were changing you know in the late eighteen thousand nine hundred eighteen eighty eight thousand seventy. They had huge fires that would run across the prairie for long periods of time. A couple good questions there one. One it was 1988 for Yellowstone and that was also the year that the world became alerted to large fires. And in the Amazon. And so there was a sense of the whole world is somehow about to be consumed by flame. The prairie fire situation is a great story perhaps not as well-known as it might be. What eliminated the prairie fires. Fundamentally was simply the act of

settlement that you began putting in roads. You began plowing fields. You began protecting your your wheat and and you know your harvest of crops from from fires coming out from elsewhere. And the simple act of converting the land from wild prairie to domesticated farmland pretty much strangled fire out of the landscape. But during that transition period could be it could be very dangerous and there are lots of wonderful accounts of the stuff during that period. What's particularly interesting is in places like Illinois the prairie Peninsula the tall grass Prarie is if the fire did not burn there. Then in relatively short order woody vegetation began moving and the system began converting shifting into a kind of forest or woodland. So you had to have a lot of fire regular fire but it's also naturally divided up by

lots of stray MM's and broken terrain. And so you would have had to have a lot of fires in each one of these patches to keep that amount going in the only way you can do that is if people were doing it. So at that point we're not simply dealing with a quote natural system and the star is not simply one of. Our having intervened taken fires that nature put in taken those fires out there and now pay facing the penalty. It's very likely that many of these systems have adapted to a period of human burning. The patterns of burning that have been laid down for hundreds if not thousands of years and removing those fires could be just as upsetting. The system is not and this is something the fire community is still grappling with because they have been dazzled by the sort of wilderness vision that fire is natural and so we need to restore it. They're having a harder time coping with the idea that maybe much of what we set out to preserve and the fires the pattern of fires the

regime that these landscapes require is one that people were responsible for. So there's a philosophical argument there that translates into practical questions of what do you do. If I might point out one thing you didn't mention that really stopped the prairie fires was Bob. What put the original prairie settlers would do is they would build themselves up some sort of a house and the first thing they would do is they'd put a large fence around the outside and have the cattle keep the prairie and then they would increase the fence bigger. Start priming the inside and allow the cattle to the outside try the rock keeping the grass farther away from not the valuable property. It was kind of an interesting technique how they did that. And also in various discussions they would talk how these fires would come across the come across the prairie and just light the entire sky. But in the process they would consume like you say entire words three four hundred acres of woods and just bingo no time whatsoever.

Thank you very much sir. Well thank you. Let's go to another caller here this is Indiana. Line one little fellow. This is one of those programs that I know next to know about in terms of fire so I hope this question isn't particularly off the record to stupid but the first thing that came to my mind when I was mentioning what was going to be on was that an illogically here in the Midwest particularly the Mississippi there's been a great great pressure to try to get people off of the low lands so that we don't have to be too much concerned about human life. When the Mississippi decides to flood and I remember some times in the past I've seen firefighters dropping in places that you know seem to me from the you know the in the Western movies you know way out in the boondocks to save people who are on the sides of mountains who had built a home and that you would have to go several miles to find another group of people that were building in those

places and not too much knowledgeable about the parts of California of words. And they seemed to you know wipe out. Small section I guess it's suburban in some sense but I just wondered about the part of human life plays in responding to whether we let er burn or whether we jump in with a thousand guys and put them at risk to save a couple of homes. Thank you. Well that's that's a great question the dominant question of the fire community for the last say fifteen years or so has been exactly the problem you're pointing to which is to say this proliferation of houses and developments in kind of wild land settings and it's known locally as the wild land urban interface I find that an awkward quite awkward expression. But I also think it's limiting because it doesn't capture how much is going on in the east and south Florida and the rest or it's not

wild land it's sort of former agricultural land. And you can think of it I think of it now as an aqua recolonize in what had been rural America we're doing it with houses. So it's like the old frontier except converting it to farms or converting it to subdivisions. And in the process we're coming into creating a whole new fire problems which we didn't think we would have to deal with again. At what point do we decide the houses are indefensible that the hazards are too great. Those are questions that are not simply limited to fire we can look at floods as you pointed out but there are hazards all over the place. Look at the hurricane hazards more recently. Look at coastal construction I mean there seem to be no way to stop people from building where they want to do. And those constructions those developments will interbreed with whatever natural hazards are out

there and in the West. Fire is a major natural hazard so we see it and it's dramatic. But it seems to me this is really a national problem and in that point it's almost not even a fire problem it's a problem with how we are going to settle or recolonize our landscape. But that has been a driving issue for say the last 15 years or so and a lot of effort and good effort has gone into trying to cope with that. Well again we're here at our midpoint. We have time for other calls that people have questions. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 4 Champaign-Urbana toll free 800 to 2 2 9. Four five five so that's good for anybody anywhere that can hear us. Or if you're listening on the Internet you can do that as long as you're in the United States you can use that number. And again our guest is Stephen Pyne. He's a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. You're talking a little earlier Professor Pine about about fire and its place in the environment and the fact that it has a role always has

added that maybe one of the mistakes that we have made is we have eliminated its natural role. At the same time I can imagine there are some people who would say that you know you can talk about controlled burning. Well but it's maybe easier said than done and it's a dangerous and unpredictable thing and it will point to examples where a fire was intentionally set. I'm undocking to talk about arson but it was said in a way to achieve some of this kind of controlled burning. It got out of hand and then suddenly we had a big problem in do do we really understand fire enough well enough and do we have the means to to actually have a controlled burn and make sure that it doesn't get out of control and suddenly. We have a huge fire forehands that something that's way bigger than we can possibly control. Well you know when when the fire community and in the late 60s began to realize that fire exclusion had been a mistake. And I use that not simply fire suppression suppression it's not just that nature set fires and we put them out it's

that we quit lighting fires the fire disappeared from the landscape. And they realized that was a problem. The solution seemed to be simply to put fire back in and then it would all would all become good again. And we discovered that that that's a lot more difficult than we thought and particularly where landscapes have changed over several decades. Fire will synthesize whatever its surroundings are. And if those surroundings have changed you're going to get a different kind of fire. And it's not going to be easy to control as you thought say based on historical evidence. In many ways it's more like reintroducing a lost species in the sense you have to create a habitat so that fire will do what you want it where I live. We used to have Mexican gray walls you know have them anymore they're being reintroduced and some of the remote mountains but introducing them into say Arrowhead mall would probably not be a good idea they're not going to behave as if they were.

Before. And that's that's what we've learned with fire. It will take on its character from from from that context so you're right we've had some spectacular failures. We've had some successes but we've had a lot of failures. Probably the best known being the one that escaped and burned into Los Alamos in 2000. But we ought to remember that the National Park Service which had set that fire also set a fire on the north from the Grand Canyon which blew up at the same time and forced the evacuation of that area and that that that episode's been overshadowed by the Los Alamos fiasco. But suddenly you've got two incidents and it begins to look not like a single act of carelessness or misjudgment but something systemic that we're determined to put fire back in. Whether the conditions are right or not there are many areas where putting fire back in can work but there are many areas where it's going to be necessary.

In effect we can restore fire but our fire not just whatever arson or nature allows but it's going to be expensive and difficult. And I think we're learning it's dangerous as well. We have some other folks here with or at least want to call here to talk with. Here in Urbana where we are. Line 1 an excellent program. I want the speaker to talk a little bit about the distinction between chaparral fires and such as the famous Cedar fire about a year ago in the San Diego and forest fires because it turns out that apparently all the spilling over of people into the chaparral San Diego County have created lots of problems both in terms of starting fires but also in suppressing them because the firefighters have to spend a lot of time defending property instead of managing the few with the fire and the fires and several apparently convert to share Pereiro from chaparral to

aggressively and which further extirpate a lot of species in San Diego County there's a lot of threatened endangered species that are threatened by the management if you would have fires in the area where they were normally very frequent. No. A couple points that they're worth emphasizing one is we need to we're calling all this wild land fire. You can have fire and tall grass Prarie you can have it in chaparral you can have it in Ponderosa pine you can have an illogical the typical kinds of fires or the fire regime that each of those has is different. And so they require different responses we need to think differently about them. And some areas where fire is necessary. The typical fire may be a stand replacing that is one that simply kills everything above ground as a lodgepole pine so there's no way we can

eliminate fire there without destroying all the things that fire does. We're going to have to have a high intensity fire and some of the chaparral fires are going to burn in that way as well. I still think there are some things we can do about that but we need to be very careful that the techniques that may be suited for one environment aren't going to work in others. They work on the north facing side of the hill is it going to work in the south facing side of the same hill. You have to be very site specific that that that makes means is very tough to deal with. And as far as again going back to the houses and the rest you know we're having to divert lots of resources but I'm not trying to absolve the situation there but we're having to divert all kinds of resources for where we're building houses all over the country. In appropriately the shop the particular saying the Cedar Fire in San Diego I did have a chance to see that about a month after the fire and the striking thing there was the dramatic border

between the chaparral the sort of rolling hillsides the Santa Ana winds behind it a kind of storm surge of flame hitting hitting the housing development on the hills. But you know the only houses that went were those that had wooden roofs. And if you go right down afterwards along that storm surge front if it had a shake shingle roofs it burned if it didn't it survived to the right. I mean so it's not that suddenly this is so complicated we can't deal with it or even if we're going to put houses where perhaps we shouldn't. There are still fairly simple devices that have been known for a long time and we've known the combustible roofs burn houses we've known that for 10000 years. This is not new knowledge. It's just a case of making it stick. Yeah right. The problem is the planners don't have the political or financial clout to make the developers make fireproof roofs. Yeah and in fact there were there were. It was fascinating because there were rumors there that looked

very much like six in a litter actually tile right. So you can get the ascetic effect but it's not going to burn your house down. Yeah correct. This is a dumb problem to have by the way because it isn't technical solutions like changing roofing material. Thirdly what to do in Yellowstone or nature reserves. Who knows what the what the right solution is. Most of the mountain cabins probably should be fireproof in the sense that it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to keep the fire from burning them. Yeah. And and that's not being done either. Well I think that there are changes. I mean I think the new stuff people have got the word I am a believer and I've seen that the conversion going on. The real difficulty is that you've got say 25 or 30 years of bad construction and how are you going to retrofit it. You know that. And so what we're going to see I think is less the new housing being killed in the same way as the old house and being cleaned out by a

series of fires unless you can get ahead of that curve. That's a good example though is that houses are often really roofed every 10 to 20 years and simply requiring the new roof to be of a fireproof type wood over a period of time. Resolve that problem quite a bit. That's right. And then you just have to take your chances during that construction barrier and that seems to me not an unreasonable gamble. All right well thanks Hugo. Thanks very much. Next caller is in Ogden and our line to solo. Hi I'm enjoying your program very much. You may have covered the question I have just recently but my question is would you compare the nature and and role ecological role of fire in a western forest with say the role of fire in a in an east in this it was forest like the Ozarks for example and I'll just hang up and listen.

Well well fire fire those. Lots of different things in different places and there are many Eastern forests that are extremely fire prone in many ways fire dependent. Perhaps the most celebrate the poster child would be the long leaf pine on the coastal plain of the southeast. Many of the old deciduous forest maple hemlock and so forth in the Northeast the rest are not fire adapted. They do not have fire build into their system but if you look at the New England area what you see is that there is precipitation month by month is pretty much the same it may change from snow sleet rain but it's constant what you need for fire is a pattern of wetting and drying so it has to be wet enough to grow stuff and then dry enough. To allow that to burn in the West has that cycle so you have a natural basis

for fire that you don't have in the Northeast the Ozarks are interesting. There have been some studies actually by researchers in Missouri who have looked at some of the fire history there and it's interesting too because of the human element. And so the inextricable character of people being fired agents directly and indirectly in shaping that land and keeping fire in there were as in much of the West even though people did burn and so forth. There is generally enough lightning that sooner or later it will burn in one way or another. And there are some great stories from the Ozarks when areas were set aside as national forests and other places the local people were all furious at being denied fire and would go out surreptitiously and they would talk about lighting the smoking or up in gasoline lighting it and then galloping around with lit rope behind a horse to try to get get some fire back in before the whole landscape changed

into something that was uninhabitable for a little bit earlier noted the fact that there has been. Reporting on wild fire in the Amazon. Maybe not lately but there has. And I'm curious because it does seem to me that we do now that the Western fire stories when that we see fairly regularly in the American news of the last few years but I don't recall seeing a lot of reporting about wildfires anyplace else. And I'm assuming that there are other places where it does occur but I guess I wonder is are there places that parallel in conditions that parallel the west outside of the United States and do they think differently about fire than we do. Well you're really coming to the to the core of a lot of my own research which which is think Parrott of studies of how people in places interact with fire around the world. There are several answers. One is that for the year 2000 an estimate was made of how much fire there

was on the planet using remote sensing in the U.S. at about 3.5 million hectares estimated burned which at that times just seemed staggeringly Where's this come from we haven't seen this for 60 years etc. globally about 350 million hectares beyond which is to say the U.S. had roughly one percent of the global fire load. You don't hear about that were actually a fire sink. Relative to our land relative to historic fires I mean we are where we have a huge fire deficit compared with others. Now part of the fires that are elsewhere are the result of similar kinds of conditions to ours. Think of countries with large wildlands back countries similar histories Australia Canada Russia. And most of it however is in bedded in some kind of agricultural system some kind of slash and burn cultivation some kind of pastoralism huge amounts in

Africa for example burning grasslands and so forth. And it would be an enormous mistake to simply take the institution's policies and attitudes that are suitable for one and try to apply it to the others. But you know these television scenes with these sky cranes dumping water and and. Aircraft. Fighting fires and the rest that that's what the that's what they want. That's the last thing they probably need. You need to organize your your patterns of rural burning and smooth it out. There are also interesting cases. Well we could we could go on the but. But they've encountered very similar very similar stories very similar kinds of problems. The whole effort to install firefighting in the US was really in the 19th century was part of a global movement a global conservation movement and European nations were doing it all over their colonies in the U.S. really emulated them in

particular the British in India against another color here in Terre Haute over in Indiana line number four. Well I understand the various federal agencies have a large air tanker contract for the sphere here. I think you're probably working too well. I just wondered what your opinion is the result of that here what you believe happened in the future regarding Marjorie. Oh boy larger tankers. I think the agencies were were correct in canceling the contracts because they could not verify the maintenance history of these and many of these aircraft were left over from World War 2. I mean that there really should have many of them should have been museums rather than flying and there were there were problems probably the timing was not very smart doing that

just on the cusp of fire season. But I think I think there's an opportunity here to rethink what kind of aerial support do you want. And helicopters work very well in many areas large air cranes work very well in certain areas. There is certainly a case for very small as opposed to large air tankers single engine air attack planes converted agricultural plants with relatively small loads but can make first attack. They can get there quickly. Get some water or retardant on a fire hold it until ground crews can come. There's a real place for a kind of cheap swarm of small aircraft that can do that and there's going to be a place for large aircraft but I think it's a fairly small one. There are several there. There are two two versions right now of competing versions of giant aircraft. One is converting the 747s. And when I heard that I thought they were absolutely nuts but apparently

they're they're able to do some demos. Make it work on the other. The Russians who have a couple of giant aircraft including a swept wing jet the Aleutian 76 which could probably drop enough water in one salvo to flatten the small community. And there may be places where these kinds of air tankers are useful. My own my own sense is that I would prefer smaller aircraft and part of an initial attack that once fires become large really large and roaring with a good wind behind them. There is not much you can do. And you're really it's a sort of political theater to send fleets of air tankers up and have them drop stuff. It's good television but it's not really making an effect. So I would put my money in those situations and a fleet of smaller aircraft where you can get initial attack and then maybe think about some large helicopters medium to large helicopters to protect the urban French

because you can maneuver better with some night vision and avionics you can probably fly at night here and you can get the water exactly where you want it. And that if I had to make those decisions that's where I would I would put my money. What is the status of the 747 or evergreen. Well they're still they're still investigating it as fact it's actually down the road from where I live now. Moran of there they've been trying and filming it and apparently to the critics and my surprise there they're able to get they're having some success whether it could actually be loosed in a mountainous country and you're flying 200 feet above the trees. So the 747 I don't know whether they can make the whole thing work. I'm not sure how much need there is. There were probably one could

imagine if you will the need for half a dozen large aircraft on a global scale that could go to different parts of the world different fires in I mean the northern and southern hemispheres are out of sync in terms of fire season so you can imagine these things just sort of migrating globally in the way that we have a national air tanker fleet around the country. I don't know what's going to happen with that. I think they're getting close to the point of actually doing some field trials probably by next summer. There might be places for example if you wanted in Alaska where you have large relatively low level or low rolling hills where you could or you could use it. I'm not sure why. Yeah well very interesting. Thank you Elaine. Thank you. It seems that when whenever you have a big fire and things go wrong and people are killed the same sort of questions are asked and we see the same stories and there's a lot of criticism leveled at the fire service

and it has happened happening recently fairly recently because of questions about a fire that occurred in the summer of 2000 and three in Idaho where it seemed like there was there were a lot of bad decisions. People were killed and questions were raised about does the fire service do they first of all do they know what they're doing and then do they really have the tools to do the job that they're being given to do. Wow what a what about that I mean we you know we've talked about the fact that maybe word were taken the wrong approach but even with the approach we're taking to the people that we have given this job to. Have we given them the tools to come anywhere close to being able to do it without without putting their people in such danger that we have situations like this where it where people die because they because they're in the middle of fires and suddenly things go wrong and things appen that you don't expect and you know it doesn't take very long for people to

die. Yeah I think you're just going to have to accept the fact that firefighting is a dangerous business and you want to do it as safely as you can but there are just inherent risks and people will have to at some point they will have to accept if you choose you're not being conscripted for this you're volunteering. And at some point you have to accept those. I would say that the US has fallen behind over the last decade maybe 20 years and in the technologies of firefighting we have some whiz bang stuff but I don't think it's fundamentally changed how we go about fighting fires or getting the mix of things that we need. And I I would be happy to have a kind of recharge if you will the technological base of fire and thinking about not simply adding new stuff to the mix but remaking the mix. How do we really want to do it how many people do we really need tens of thousands of people being shipped out to this work can we do it with a lot

smaller group can we use technology. Where and when do we have to have people where can we pull back really at a fundamental level do that and you have to do that well in advance of fire season you can't expect people. Will these kinds of responsibilities to make decisions instantly when the fires are racing towards the town or whatever the have to be done well in advance. I think also that the flip side of that is that we have not really come up with a good auditing system for fire and I think of something it's only in the last 10 years that Osho even began considering this is a workplace environment and begun contributing some analysis to it. I would think we need something like the National Transportation Safety Board or whatever some third party to come in and investigate it's always been the case that the fire community has investigated itself and while they certainly try

hard and are well intentioned inevitably there's going to be a conflict of interest as to who is appointed what report comes out. How do the agencies look. There is really no independent truly independent auditor making those decisions. And I I don't think we can expect the agencies to do that on their own. I would think there's a cause there's a case to be made for creating an investigative body that can then make policy decisions and the rest independent of the internal politics of the city. Well if we go back to you know some of the issues we were talking about earlier and about the fact that. I think you and you argued I think the last time we talked you said really the problem is that we're still we're still going between the the two extreme poles when it comes to fires that is either we got to fight him or we gotta light him one on the other and that I think you argued then and are still arguing that that's real. That there's something in the middle of

that and that's really where we should be and what what would a more rational kind of wild land fire policy look like. I think I think I mean I think you have basically four options. We're talking about public land and we're talking about public land that is fire prone. I think you can let it burn. Back off. Let fire have more ground. You can try to suppress it. You can try to do the burning yourself. That's the fighting a lighting contrast and I think you can try to change the combustibility of the landscape that is to say. Regardless of the source of the fire the fire will take on certain traits because of what it's burning and a fire is very different in a way from a flood or a hurricane or whatever. It's not just a physical disturbance it's propagated through a biological medium and if you don't have that those living organisms that those hydrocarbon fuels out there the fire doesn't burn or a flood will go regardless of whether there's anything or not so there's a

real opportunity to intervene in the medium that carries the fire in the landscape itself. And you need to do this with some sense and sensibility. You need to agree what you want the landscape to be and that's where the political wall is. But otherwise I think it's sort of like a game of you know rock scissors paper you just sort of chasing yourself endlessly around. And at least in a limited way intervening and to change the combustibility gives you an option of another degree of control. No no one of those four options by the way is going to work by itself you need mixtures of them and it's all going to be different place by place. It's a lot of lot of hard work a lot of negotiation. To try to make this work but I think that's where you have to go and you have to be able. You have to have social consensus as to why you want to do that. And then you have to have enough political will and sustained funding to really make it happen.

And you know much of the reforms the proposals that came out for trying this at least selectively were a few years ago we were in a budget surplus and appeared to have a large surplus and now we're we have enormous deficits and frankly faced with a choice between prescribed fires or prescription drugs I'm pretty confident where Congress is going to vote. So I think in that case the future does not look great. I think we can begin handling some of the the the wild land urban interface thing we're already making steps towards that. I think we can selectively improve areas elsewhere. I think free burning fire is going to be rather like an endangered species. It's going to retreat into special preserves and habitats where it does work that nothing else does its biological work we have to we have to have it there we have to make room for it. But otherwise I think the the near future and indeed perhaps a long future is to see it

recede leach away from most of the American landscape. And we seem to be contempt of court chemicals or do other things to replace it. Well I think at that we're probably going to have to stop for people who would like to read more on the subject. Our guest Stephen Pyne has authored a number of books the most recent that sets out some of the same issues that we've been discussing here this morning is tending fire coping with America's wild land fires. And it's published by the Island Press and of course he has a number of others including this kind of global historical look at fire and its place in the environment and a number x more than one book that deals with that and some other so you can look at the library look at the bookstore. STEVEN PYNE He's professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and Professor Pyne thanks very much for talking with us. Well thank you.