For more than 20 years, wildfire has played an increasingly influential role in the lives of westerners.
Since Yellowstone's signal fires of 1988, the size and scope of wildfires has brought the issue to the front steps of people in both rural and urban areas. Wildfire's smoke fills the air from soon after the snow melts until it returns in the fall. The fire season begins earlier and lasts longer almost every year.
Great ideological debates rage over our ability to control fire and the cause of its growth. I suspect both those who believe it is caused by increased fuels and those who blame it on warmer, drier climatic conditions are right.
But now scientists are stepping into a new place. A team of forest scientists said in the recent issue of Science that deforestation due to fire may contribute one-fifth of the human-caused effects of climate change.
It appears Yellowstone's fires were signaling even more than we thought.
Tom Swetnam, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in an article in Science Daily that fire is a "primary catalyst of global climate change." This remarkable insight will once again force scientists and decision makers to re-evaluate how we manage fire.
Swetnam's co-author, Jennifer K. Balch of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif., said in the Science Daily article that they hope their paper will trigger new and deeper research into the role of fire on Earth.
"Fire is as elemental as air or water," Balch told Science Daily. "We live on a fire planet. We are a fire species. Yet, the study of fire has been very fragmented. We know lots about the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, but we know very little about the fire cycle, or how fire cycles through the biosphere."
The paradox of fire policy -that the more we fight it the bigger it gets and the more we spend in the wildlands the more dangerous the fires become - won't be resolved until we learn what it takes to live with fire. That's an answer humans have sought since the beginning.
KING KEEPS PUSHING HER WILDLANDS PLAN
Idahoan Carole King was on MSNBC last week touting her Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act in advance of a hearing Tuesday by the House Natural Resources Committee's subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.
King has been working since the early 1990s on the ambitious wilderness bill that got a hearing last year but no vote.
She said this is the year with the right people in place.
The bill, HR 980, has no backing from any congressmen in the region where the protected areas are located. It would designate as wilderness nearly 7 million acres in Montana, 9.5 million acres in Idaho, 5 million acres in Wyoming, 750,000 acres in eastern Oregon, and 500,000 acres in eastern Washington. Another 3 million acres in Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks also would become wilderness.Idaho Statesman
