“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.
In the Pacific Northwest, people are beginning to refer to the month of August as “smoke season.” For most of this past August, for example, the Methow Valley in Washington State was choked with smoke from the Crescent Mountain fire to the southwest and from the McLeod Fire to the north. The Okanogan County post offices and community centers were offering free particulate respirator masks, and fire progression maps were updated daily and posted outside the town halls. Local businesses offered 10 percent off to all firefighting personnel, who were camped in tents on the sprawling rodeo grounds outside of town. Helicopters with drop buckets of water and red fire retardant were constantly overhead. And at dinner, everyone’s cell phone rang at once with fire updates from the county.
The irony is that, when I was growing up there, August was the month that could be most relied upon for sunny weather. But in August of 2014, during the massive Carlton Complex wildfire, nearly 260,000 acres of Okanogan County burned and destroyed 363 homes, the largest single fire in state history. In August of 2015, the Okanogan Complex fires burned over 300,000 acres, killed three U.S. Forest Service firefighters, and forced the evacuation of several towns. My parents were evacuated for several days in 2015, and this summer, I helped them dust ashes from the vegetables in the garden. On particularly bad days, the sun shone red and the air smelled like campfires and hurt your lungs. Not being able to see the mountains hurt your heart.
Smoke season is not exactly new, for the forests of the West have always burned. But the scale of these huge wildfires—“megafires,” they are called—have grown, due to a complex interplay of increased human habitation in and near the forests, the multifaceted effects of climate change, and the long practice of fire suppression rather than fire management by the U.S. Forest Service. While wildfires are a constant of the forests’ ecology, the once-exceptional burns have now become routine.
So routine, in fact, that researchers now study the mental health effects of prolonged exposure to the “smoke apocalypse.” Last summer, New York Times contributing opinion writer (and, like me, a Pacific Northwesterner) Lindy West described smoke-blanketed Seattle, four hours southwest of Okanogan County, as filled with “the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air,” and rightly pointed to it as a phenomenon exacerbated by climate change. “In Seattle, in a week or so, a big wind will come and give us our blue sky back,” she wrote. “Someday, though, it won’t.”
Indeed, friends of my parents are talking about moving away. Those who stay long for the smoke to clear and for the summer sky to be as blue as it once was. But this nostalgia is worth attending to, for how we talk about the wildfires is also how we talk about the West. The idea of the West—as region, ideology, national mythos—is all about desiring the authentic in a landscape of inauthenticity, about safely yearning for something never there in the first place, about obscuring violence with romance.
Since the landscape of the West is indelibly shaped by its own story, talking about land in the West always contains a moral. How we talk about the wildfires illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself, one that will need to collapse from its own weight if we ever hope to see the sky for what it truly is. And each summer now, that sky is on fire.
Forest fires are an intrinsic part of our world’s carbon-rich ecology. Ecosystems such as Washington’s thick central and eastern forests are reliant on fire to help liberate nutrients in the soil, open the tree cones that need heat to release their seeds, clear out unwanted underbrush, and produce a healthily shifting mosaic of micro-ecologies on the forest floor. Fire is also one of the oldest—and perhaps the most determinative—parts of the human world, and native economies used it to transform the North American landscape well before Europeans arrived. Native peoples turned forests into grassland and savannah, cleared and carefully curated forest vegetation and fauna to better hunt and gather, and even practiced fire prevention and, when necessary, fought wildfires.
Living among wildfire smoke is also not new, especially in the Northwest as settlements formed in the drainages and valleys of mountains where smoke tends to pool. During the big fires—1865, when a million acres burned from the Olympics to the Sierras, the Tillamook cycle, which burned from 1933 until 1951 in a series of reburns—smoke was endemic to the Pacific Northwest. In the 1880s, smoke was reportedly so thick through the summer and fall seasons that geological survey crews in the Cascades had to abandon their work.
Yet today Washington State has more homes in fire-prone wildland areas—known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—than anywhere else in the country. There is estimated to be a 40 percent increase in homes in the WUI between 2001 and 2030, with no sign of such development abating, despite the megafires. New developments have no mandatory review procedures to assess wildfire risk. The Okanogan County Comprehensive Plan on managing growth, for example, released just after the Carlton Complex fires in 2014, didn’t include a single concrete guideline or requirement. Instead, it is up to each individual property owner to reduce risk on their own land.
As a result, state and federal firefighters have to actively suppress fires—not merely manage them—in order to save homes (which they do with remarkable and laudable precision). This suppression leaves forests overly dense and ready to burn while the increased presence of people also makes fires much more likely: in the dry tinderbox of southern California, for instance, 95 percent of fires are started by human activity.
The reigning ethos of development is, of course, private property: let people do what they like on their own land. There is a byzantine patchwork of environmental regulations and land usage laws at the county, state, and federal level, but these are largely geared toward managing growth rather than suppressing it. “I’m not real big on over-regulating people,” Andy Hover, one of the current Okanogan County Commissioners, said in the middle of this year’s fire season. “Rules and regulations are kind of like—well, is that really what we want?”
Whether or not “we” really want rules and regulations in the West is the historically vexed question that has driven the development of the West since colonial settlement. Despite its mythic ethos of self-reliance, independence, and rugged autonomy, a massive influx of federal funds and intervention has always been necessary for non-Native settlers to live in the West. The federal government funded decades of military campaigns and genocidal wars against indigenous people to clear the land. Federal land grants of over 100 million acres, tax incentives, and government loans all helped build the transcontinental railroads, which both opened the West to increased settlement and built the power of banks and finance on Wall Street. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to white farmers if they agreed to “improve” it for five years; and the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887 broke up the grants of reservation land initially sanctioned for Native Americans. One name for this, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is the frontier thesis; another is manifest destiny. Yet another is imperialism. Its legacy continues in the approach to western housing developments today: what was once held in common is nominally and culturally understood as the preserve of the individual yet underwritten by the federal government.
Today, more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting wildfires and, increasingly, keeping them away from people’s private property.
So while fire season is not new, it still feels new to many of us who are used to seeing summer mountain skies where the blue was so vast it humbled even the mountains at its edge. It feels new when the hills you’ve driven through for years are lined with blackened, charred trunks, and the old and chipping Smokey Bear sign, just across the street from the tiny U.S. Forest Service office in the Methow Valley, continually points to the color-coded scale of today’s fire danger: red for EXTREME. (...)
I was reading a book about wildfires in a local bakery in Winthrop when a contractor who rents firefighting equipment to the Forest Service gamely tried to pick me up. But because this is a western story, instead of offering me his phone number, he offered me a pamphlet on how to defend my home from wildfire.
“Defensible space,” I learned, is the goal behind any wildfire preparedness campaign. It denotes the area between a house and an oncoming fire that has been managed by the homeowner to reduce wildfire risk and provide firefighters with a clear space of operations. Defensible space has become the watchword of private programs such as Firewise USA®, a partnership between a nonprofit organization and federal agencies that teaches property owners how to “adapt to living with wildfire” and prepare their homes for fire risk.
Creating defensible space involves reducing excessive vegetation (shrubs, dense clusters of trees, dried grass) from around the house, and replacing them with well-irrigated lawn or flowerbeds, as well as surrounding your home with inflammable materials to deflect burning embers. Depending on your particular vegetation type and the percent of slope on which your house rests, you will need between 30 to 200 feet of defensible space surrounding your home.
The idea of defensible space strikes me as an intrinsically western one. It has taken a tremendous amount of government money, environmental engineering, and colonial violence for there to be such a thing as “private property” in the West, and for people to live out their—historically speaking—absurd fantasies of independence and self-reliance, to create their own western defensible space. And yet still, for the one third of the United States that lives in the wildland-urban interface, each house in each subdivision attempts to surround itself by its own barrier of self-created defensible space, each pretending to be self-reliant yet in need of massive federal funds for power, water, roads, and firefighting.
In the Pacific Northwest, people are beginning to refer to the month of August as “smoke season.” For most of this past August, for example, the Methow Valley in Washington State was choked with smoke from the Crescent Mountain fire to the southwest and from the McLeod Fire to the north. The Okanogan County post offices and community centers were offering free particulate respirator masks, and fire progression maps were updated daily and posted outside the town halls. Local businesses offered 10 percent off to all firefighting personnel, who were camped in tents on the sprawling rodeo grounds outside of town. Helicopters with drop buckets of water and red fire retardant were constantly overhead. And at dinner, everyone’s cell phone rang at once with fire updates from the county.
The irony is that, when I was growing up there, August was the month that could be most relied upon for sunny weather. But in August of 2014, during the massive Carlton Complex wildfire, nearly 260,000 acres of Okanogan County burned and destroyed 363 homes, the largest single fire in state history. In August of 2015, the Okanogan Complex fires burned over 300,000 acres, killed three U.S. Forest Service firefighters, and forced the evacuation of several towns. My parents were evacuated for several days in 2015, and this summer, I helped them dust ashes from the vegetables in the garden. On particularly bad days, the sun shone red and the air smelled like campfires and hurt your lungs. Not being able to see the mountains hurt your heart.Smoke season is not exactly new, for the forests of the West have always burned. But the scale of these huge wildfires—“megafires,” they are called—have grown, due to a complex interplay of increased human habitation in and near the forests, the multifaceted effects of climate change, and the long practice of fire suppression rather than fire management by the U.S. Forest Service. While wildfires are a constant of the forests’ ecology, the once-exceptional burns have now become routine.
So routine, in fact, that researchers now study the mental health effects of prolonged exposure to the “smoke apocalypse.” Last summer, New York Times contributing opinion writer (and, like me, a Pacific Northwesterner) Lindy West described smoke-blanketed Seattle, four hours southwest of Okanogan County, as filled with “the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air,” and rightly pointed to it as a phenomenon exacerbated by climate change. “In Seattle, in a week or so, a big wind will come and give us our blue sky back,” she wrote. “Someday, though, it won’t.”
Indeed, friends of my parents are talking about moving away. Those who stay long for the smoke to clear and for the summer sky to be as blue as it once was. But this nostalgia is worth attending to, for how we talk about the wildfires is also how we talk about the West. The idea of the West—as region, ideology, national mythos—is all about desiring the authentic in a landscape of inauthenticity, about safely yearning for something never there in the first place, about obscuring violence with romance.
Since the landscape of the West is indelibly shaped by its own story, talking about land in the West always contains a moral. How we talk about the wildfires illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself, one that will need to collapse from its own weight if we ever hope to see the sky for what it truly is. And each summer now, that sky is on fire.
Forest fires are an intrinsic part of our world’s carbon-rich ecology. Ecosystems such as Washington’s thick central and eastern forests are reliant on fire to help liberate nutrients in the soil, open the tree cones that need heat to release their seeds, clear out unwanted underbrush, and produce a healthily shifting mosaic of micro-ecologies on the forest floor. Fire is also one of the oldest—and perhaps the most determinative—parts of the human world, and native economies used it to transform the North American landscape well before Europeans arrived. Native peoples turned forests into grassland and savannah, cleared and carefully curated forest vegetation and fauna to better hunt and gather, and even practiced fire prevention and, when necessary, fought wildfires.
Living among wildfire smoke is also not new, especially in the Northwest as settlements formed in the drainages and valleys of mountains where smoke tends to pool. During the big fires—1865, when a million acres burned from the Olympics to the Sierras, the Tillamook cycle, which burned from 1933 until 1951 in a series of reburns—smoke was endemic to the Pacific Northwest. In the 1880s, smoke was reportedly so thick through the summer and fall seasons that geological survey crews in the Cascades had to abandon their work.
Yet today Washington State has more homes in fire-prone wildland areas—known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—than anywhere else in the country. There is estimated to be a 40 percent increase in homes in the WUI between 2001 and 2030, with no sign of such development abating, despite the megafires. New developments have no mandatory review procedures to assess wildfire risk. The Okanogan County Comprehensive Plan on managing growth, for example, released just after the Carlton Complex fires in 2014, didn’t include a single concrete guideline or requirement. Instead, it is up to each individual property owner to reduce risk on their own land.
As a result, state and federal firefighters have to actively suppress fires—not merely manage them—in order to save homes (which they do with remarkable and laudable precision). This suppression leaves forests overly dense and ready to burn while the increased presence of people also makes fires much more likely: in the dry tinderbox of southern California, for instance, 95 percent of fires are started by human activity.
The reigning ethos of development is, of course, private property: let people do what they like on their own land. There is a byzantine patchwork of environmental regulations and land usage laws at the county, state, and federal level, but these are largely geared toward managing growth rather than suppressing it. “I’m not real big on over-regulating people,” Andy Hover, one of the current Okanogan County Commissioners, said in the middle of this year’s fire season. “Rules and regulations are kind of like—well, is that really what we want?”
Whether or not “we” really want rules and regulations in the West is the historically vexed question that has driven the development of the West since colonial settlement. Despite its mythic ethos of self-reliance, independence, and rugged autonomy, a massive influx of federal funds and intervention has always been necessary for non-Native settlers to live in the West. The federal government funded decades of military campaigns and genocidal wars against indigenous people to clear the land. Federal land grants of over 100 million acres, tax incentives, and government loans all helped build the transcontinental railroads, which both opened the West to increased settlement and built the power of banks and finance on Wall Street. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to white farmers if they agreed to “improve” it for five years; and the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887 broke up the grants of reservation land initially sanctioned for Native Americans. One name for this, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is the frontier thesis; another is manifest destiny. Yet another is imperialism. Its legacy continues in the approach to western housing developments today: what was once held in common is nominally and culturally understood as the preserve of the individual yet underwritten by the federal government.
Today, more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting wildfires and, increasingly, keeping them away from people’s private property.
So while fire season is not new, it still feels new to many of us who are used to seeing summer mountain skies where the blue was so vast it humbled even the mountains at its edge. It feels new when the hills you’ve driven through for years are lined with blackened, charred trunks, and the old and chipping Smokey Bear sign, just across the street from the tiny U.S. Forest Service office in the Methow Valley, continually points to the color-coded scale of today’s fire danger: red for EXTREME. (...)
I was reading a book about wildfires in a local bakery in Winthrop when a contractor who rents firefighting equipment to the Forest Service gamely tried to pick me up. But because this is a western story, instead of offering me his phone number, he offered me a pamphlet on how to defend my home from wildfire.
“Defensible space,” I learned, is the goal behind any wildfire preparedness campaign. It denotes the area between a house and an oncoming fire that has been managed by the homeowner to reduce wildfire risk and provide firefighters with a clear space of operations. Defensible space has become the watchword of private programs such as Firewise USA®, a partnership between a nonprofit organization and federal agencies that teaches property owners how to “adapt to living with wildfire” and prepare their homes for fire risk.
Creating defensible space involves reducing excessive vegetation (shrubs, dense clusters of trees, dried grass) from around the house, and replacing them with well-irrigated lawn or flowerbeds, as well as surrounding your home with inflammable materials to deflect burning embers. Depending on your particular vegetation type and the percent of slope on which your house rests, you will need between 30 to 200 feet of defensible space surrounding your home.
The idea of defensible space strikes me as an intrinsically western one. It has taken a tremendous amount of government money, environmental engineering, and colonial violence for there to be such a thing as “private property” in the West, and for people to live out their—historically speaking—absurd fantasies of independence and self-reliance, to create their own western defensible space. And yet still, for the one third of the United States that lives in the wildland-urban interface, each house in each subdivision attempts to surround itself by its own barrier of self-created defensible space, each pretending to be self-reliant yet in need of massive federal funds for power, water, roads, and firefighting.
by Jessie Kindig, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Ashley Siple
