Today cooperation is needed to restore forests choked with excessive fuel and threatened by drought.
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Detection, Sitgreaves National Forest. Lookout sighting fire –Deer Spring Tower– on divide between Little Colorado and Gila Rivers. July 16, 1915. |
"1910 was America's millennial year of fire. That summer, American nature and American society collided with tectonic force as western wildfires scorched millions of acres, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland . . . . As one ranger put it, the mountains roared.
"Everything we do in this country with respect to forest fire—from the actual tools firefighters still carry to strategies of land management—is rooted in the way we fought the fires of 1910."
From the dust jacket of Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 by Stephen J. Pyne
| Forestry Department: Fire Control Meeting, February 1961. |
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In response to the August 1910 fires, the U.S. Forest Service embraced a policy which held that all fires were destructive and therefore contrary to the public good. The policy dictated that all forest fires would be suppressed. The policy resulted in nearly a century of tinder-box forest floors and overgrowth.
