QuagmireEssay Preview: QuagmireReport this essay“Paper 2”QuagmireSometime this summer or maybe late fall, news programs will be filled with images of catastrophic wildfires ravaging forests in the American West. If the trend continues from the last five fire seasons, homes will burn to the ground causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, millions of acres of public lands will be stripped of their value, and thousands of part-time fire fighters will unnecessarily risk their lives, all in the name of the protection of our environment. This next fire season will likely yield the same results, a tremendous loss of timber, ecological degradation, and an enormous expenditure of tax revenue, because the underlying issues are not going away. The United States Public lands are in a state of emergency due to the current strategy of implementation of the National Fire Plan. The path to recovery is a long and expensive one. Supporters of the national suppression policy see the path to recovery as counter-productive, more will be lost in the time given to recover than will be lost with the use and expenditure of immediate resources. With out a drastic reform of the rules governing fire suppression, an exorbitant loss of tax revenue and the extinction of our forested lands are inevitable.
In the summer of 1910, 2.6 million acres of western Montana and Idaho burned, and a fledgling land management agency (Unites States Forest Service) was held accountable by the public. Rising from the ashes is the fundamental ideology of todays fire suppression policy, “Rangers knew in every fiber of their professional being that it was evil” (Pyne 3). The eradication of this “evil” meant one thing, total suppression of all fire on all public lands. The social perception of fire as an agent of destruction rather than a necessary ecosystem function has led to decades of successful suppression, which in turn has amounted to a significant accumulation of forest fuels. “This one change has produced one direly important ecological change. In forests once dependent on fire, fire prone climax species have replaced fire-tolerant species. Resulting in ladder fuels and significant increases in dead and downed woody debris” (Mutch 32). In essence the social perception of “evil fire” has precipitated a now truly evil fire environment.
The evolved fire environment of today supports an enormous fie economy. Tens of thousands of students and U.S. citizens are employed seasonally for emergency fire suppression by all federal land management agencies (National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service). The mass hiring of this seasonal work force is a governmental sponsored boost to rural economies. This however, is not the fundamental reason our current fir policy is held in reverence by the politicians who control policy reform. The extreme length of time, and enormous budget required to change our current fire suppression policy are the key prohibitive factors of reform. In human terms the vast amount of time required to restore a natural fire environment would be several generations, too long for the “powers that be” to observe a noticeable effect. The extreme budget spawns directly from the aforementioned length of time. One fire seasons budget is but a fraction of the projected expense of restoring natural fire to the environment. The support for current fire suppression policy is deeply rooted in business and instant gratification; where as reform is a long-sighted goal with very little monetary profit potential.
The physical act of wild land fire suppression is and of itself destructive to the environment. Fire line construction or the act of creating a perimeter around an active fire to contain it, is the foremost destructive element of fire fighting. The width of these lines varies from one foot to fifty feet. Within these fire lines all ignitable material must be removed. Just the act of containing a fire requires a firefighter to scar the landscape permanently. Secondly, the utilization of chemical fire retardants creates a wet line near a fires edge. Under the guise of concentrated fertilizer, fire retardant or slurry makes for an effective weapon in the arsenal of fire suppression. When slurry is introduced, at concentration, into streams and lakes, the retardant is no longer fertilizer, but a deadly poison
Smoke is blown up from the surrounding area, and the fire is destroyed, though the damage done to the environment can greatly reduce the chances of this occurring. Smoke and a chemical fire can be ignited from a distance of more than fifteen feet or more. When a person falls to the ground, all other people present are liable to be exposed. An effective method of preventing exposure is to extinguish the blaze. Smoke may be the main cause of loss. In most cases, the person has not suffered serious injury, or lost control. Although a direct effect of fire suppression on human environment is to bring about widespread destruction, in some such cases and in many others, the real effect has been to slow and the rate of destruction, i.e., the speed at which the flames travel in the air and in the smoke, is not quite as great as had been hoped for. If the fire were to be destroyed within a short time range, it would at the very least likely have been caused for the sake of more people, less money. It is difficult to know how many people would be harmed if, had the fires continued, they could have suffered much more. As the area burned, it would be a good idea to reduce fire intensity, but that would create difficulties, and the potential loss would depend on the extent of the damage in the area to be prevented.
“A fire will burn the land if used in the usual manner,”
======================================================================= > [SECTORS] —————————————————————-======= —
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
========================================
———————————————————————- > [SECTOR] ————————————————————————-