n forestry
HOW WE GOT HERE
When lightning sparked fires in the Sierra Nevada mountain
range before European settlement in the 1850s, they were
left to burn, naturally clearing out trees, shrubs and grasses.
“Certainly in California, in fact in much of the Western Unit-
ed States, any of the dry forests historically had [natural]
fire regimes in which they used to burn every 10 to 20 years
roughly,” says Malcolm North, a research scientist with the
U.S. Forest Service and an affiliate professor of forest ecolo-
gy at UC Davis. Early historians of California wrote about the
smoky smell in the air through summer.
Native Americans relied on fire for things like herding animals
for a big hunt and creating open space for villages. Cowboys
used fire to sustain pastures for grazing. “When the cowboys
left higher elevations, they would light behind them as they
left — light the mountains or hills on fire,” says Jennifer Hinck-
ley, a fire management specialist formerly with the U.S. For-
est Service and now with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Upon returning in the spring, there’d be new grass for cows
and sheep to forage.
As miners arrived for the gold rush, trees
were cut down to make way for the Trans-
continental Railroad and to supply lumber
for industry and settlements. Americans
believed the country’s natural resources
were infinite. “There was so much of it,
there’s nothing we could do to put a dent in
it, even though we were denting big-time,”
Hinckley says. “We were cutting down everything we could
cut down.”
Meanwhile, as cities grew overcrowded and polluted in the
late 1880s, affluent Americans retreated outdoors for fishing,
camping, hiking and bird-watching. Preservationists suggest-
ed nature had inherent value, and conservationists argued
nature must be conserved for its economic benefit to people.
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In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt established
230 million acres of national parks, forests and monuments
and oversaw the creation of the Forest Service in 1905.
Then in 1910, forest fires broke out in Montana and tore
through the Northern Rocky Mountains in what came to be
known as the Great Fire. “The Forest Service actually man-
aged to save a bunch of towns and people, and it became
very clear that in terms of establishing a mission … that fire
was going to be one of the things that was going to keep the
Forest Service financially alive with politicians in [Washing-
ton, D.C.],” North says. “It became a real central focus for the
agency itself and has remained so.”
By the 1920s, a shift to fire suppression had taken hold. While
some scientists at the time argued that the right kind of fire
benefitted forest ecosystems, their voices were overshad-
owed, North says. Outdoor recreationists didn’t much care
for wildfire, and it posed a danger to towns and the emerg-
ing commercial timber industry. “A lot of people were saying,
‘Hmm, we could be growing a lot of board feet
and more fiber if we got rid of fire,’ ” North
says. “That was definitely one of the reasons
fire was put out.”
Over the ensuing decades, wildfires continued
to be squashed. In the 1960s, Americans grap-
pled with the effects of water and air pollution,
which led Congress to pass legislation that fur-
ther restricted the use of fire as a tool. By the 1990s, what
had become a flourishing timber industry was about to enter
a period of conflict and consolidation that would set up some
of the conditions — and challenges — California faces today in
effectively managing its forests.
— Sena Christian