WILDFIRE CAUSE AND CURE: ECOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL
posted by Michael Chihak
By DIANA SOKOLOVA, Arizona Week intern
Wildfires are ravaging Arizona’s wilderness, chasing thousands from their homes, closing popular high-country cool spots and draining money from already hard-pressed governmental agencies.
A carelessly tended campfire, a tossed cigarette butt or a lightning strike are blamed. But the cause is much bigger and the responsibility of many.
Arizona Week on Friday will explore the forest management, environmental and political decisions behind the state’s vulnerability to large-scale, virtually unstoppable fires.
A human-caused wildfire burning for 15 days in eastern Arizona’s high country and now moving into New Mexico is likely to become the largest fire in state history. The Wallow Fire, named for the Bear Wallow Wilderness in which it started in the White Mountains, already has burned 452,000 acres in eastern Arizona’s high country, destroying 29 homes and other structures.
The Horseshoe 2 Fire in southeastern Arizona has been burning for more than five weeks, consuming 148,000 acres and has damaged or destroyed nine homes and 14 outbuildings.
Several other fires also are burning in the state. No human life has been lost.
These and other wildfires seem unrelenting, but should they be?
“Trying to exclude fire in naturally fire-prone places only stirs up an ecological insurgency,” fire management expert Stephen J. Pyne wrote in an op-ed piece for Sunday’s Arizona Republic. Pyne is a professor at the School of Life Sciences at the Arizona State University.
National Geographic magazine backgrounds the country’s wildfire situation on its Website, reporting that more than 100,000 fires burn 4 million to 5 million acres on average in the United States every year.
Although wildfires are catastrophic and expensive to humans, they play an essential role in nature and are considered to be necessary.
In his Arizona Republic article, Pyne discussed several approaches to prevent wildfires. Letting fires burn freely in the backcountry, “is cheap, safe and ecologically benign.” Another method is setting so called prescribed fires. It can help prevent wildfires and do the required ecological work of removing undergrowth, brush, and clean forests from litter. Large-scale landscaping along with building roads can change the behavior of fires.
Each of these approaches is doomed to failure if used on its own, Pyne said. What is needed, he said, is a mixture of strategies, adjusted to particular places, from both ecological and political rationales.
