by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was an American Experience episode on the so-called “Big Burn,” a huge set of
wildfires in Montana and Idaho in 1910 that started in separate parts of the
recently proclaimed national forests in that area and ultimately converged into
a huge firestorm that almost completely wiped out the town of Wallace, Idaho.
Apparently this is still the worst fire in U.S. history in terms of the total
amount of acreage burned and the property damage — dwarfing such celebrated
urban conflagrations as the Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco
earthquake and fire of 1906 — and what made this documentary, written and
directed by Stephen Ives and based in part on the book The Big Burn:
Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan, especially interesting was how much it was bound up
with the overall politics of conservation and in particular the determination
of President Theodore Roosevelt and his appointee to head the newly created
U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, to set up “national forests” in which
logging and other extractive activities would be permitted, but only carefully
and sustainably. As I noted before when PBS showed Ken Burns’ documentary The
Roosevelts, the idea that a U.S. President
— and a Republican President, at
that — would take such an interest in preserving nature seems almost
science-fictional today (as I was writing the above I got an e-mail from the
Audubon Society pleading with me to make a donation to help stop logging of
old-growth trees in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, indicating that the
Obama Administration is well to the right of T.R. on this issue); the tradition
of Republican environmentalism that began with Teddy Roosevelt and ended with
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act
and the other big environmental bills of 1969-70 into law and he and Ford
appointed people to the Environmental Protection Agency who were genuinely
concerned about protecting the environment) was definitively repudiated by
Ronald Reagan, who in his 1980 campaign publicly aligned himself with the
so-called “Sagebrush Rebels” who wanted all restrictions on logging and grazing
Western lands removed so they could exploit them for short-term profit.
Pinchot
was the founding director of the U.S. Forest Service and inspired so much
loyalty in his men that they nicknamed themselves “Little G.P.’s,” and even
when he was forced out of that position by Roosevelt’s far more reactionary
successor, William Howard Taft, he pleaded with his people to remain and
continue to fight the good fight to protect America’s natural resources against
predatory development. The Big Burn
is one of those documentaries that suggests a great fiction film waiting to be
made from the material — not only the spectacle of the fire itself (though I
suspect most of the footage of fire comes from later blazes because it looks
too photographically clear to be from 1910) but the genuine heroism of Ed
Pulaski, the forest ranger who set off into the wilderness with a band of men
armed with nothing more than shovels and hoes to try to stop the blazes by
clearing firebreaks. If nothing else, The Big Burn vividly dramatizes how difficult it is to stop a
forest fire, and how much harder it was in 1910 when you couldn’t see it from
the air (Pulaski and his men frequently had to walk through the wilderness just
to find what parts of it were
burning!) and the technology of human flight was just seven years old and
hadn’t got anywhere near the ability of planes to “bomb” a fire with
fire-retardant chemicals that we take for granted today. (And even with that
technology it’s harder than hell to control a really big forest fire — imagine
what Pulaski and Richard Greeley had to go through with nothing more than axes,
shovels and hoes — indeed, the last part of the show indicates that after 1910
Pulaski continued to live in the Montana wilderness and work on new
fire-fighting technology, including a device that combined an ax on one end and
a hoe on the other and is still in use today and known by firefighters as a
“Pulaski.”)
One of the things that fascinates about this program is that,
though the firefighting technology of 1910 seems ass-backwards to us, the
political debates are the same — including the intense opposition to forming
the U.S. Forest Service at all by some of the same forces that want to get rid
of virtually all environmental protection now, including giant corporations
making money off uncontrolled environmental exploitation and the politicians
who either come from the ranks of the corporate rich themselves or depend for
their continuation in office on contributions from those who do. One
fascinating detail mentioned in the show is that many of the forest fires of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries were caused by
sparks from the combustion that powered steam locomotives — and the railroad
owners basically told the forest rangers, “Not our problem.” There were also
the same familiar plaints from the big logging industries that enforcing
controls to preserve the forests would cost loggers their jobs and destroy
whole regional economies, and the usual calls for zero regulation of the
environment and attempts by the corporados and their handmaidens in Congress to put the Forest Service out of
business by starving its budget and cutting its staff. At a time when the
takeover of the U.S. government by modern-day anti-environment, anti-labor,
anti-middle class, pro-corporate rich Republicans is virtually complete — they
now own both houses of Congress and
the Supreme Court, and only the presidency stands between them and complete
control — there’s a sense of tragedy in a program like this, a sense that the
idea that the natural resources of the U.S. are a trust we need to use wisely
and hold for our heirs is as obsolete and quaint as the one that government
(i.e., we, collectively, through
our tax money) has a social and moral obligation to pay for the poor, destitute
and old.
Like the Ken Burns series The Roosevelts, The Big Burn comes off as much a requiem for a certain vision of
social trust as anything else, even though filmmaker Ives tries at the very end
of his show to drag in the later criticism of the U.S. Forest Service that by
defining its mission as putting out all forest fires, they were unwittingly contributing to the problem by accumulating
so much combustible material on the forest floor that when a fire ultimately
broke out, it would be that much worse. “I think the fundamental dilemma with
the fire suppression policy that Pinchot advocated was, in the end, it was the
wrong policy for the land,” historian Chris Miller says towards the end of the
program. “It might have been the right policy for the agency, but it’s the
wrong policy for the environment.” Yet Timothy Egan, whose book formed part of
the basis for the program, says, “By putting out every fire for a hundred
years, they created indirectly, what are now some of the greatest wildfires.
But imagine now, if this fire had not happened. They might have killed the
Forest Service. And with it would’ve gone the idea that’s so embraced by a
majority of Americans today, that we have more than 500 million acres that is
all of ours, that belongs to each of us. By saving the fledgling idea of
conservation, then only a few years old, this fire did save a larger part of
America.” Actually I think Egan is wrong — the idea “that we have more than 500
million acres that is all of ours, that belongs to each of us” has become quite
unfashionable; it may still be
“embraced,” more or less, “by a majority of Americans today,” but the people
who are actually being elected to public office today — and the corporate rich
who are funding their campaigns — either openly or secretly regard the 1880’s,
the peak years of the robber barons, as the American ideal to which we should
aspire to return, in which the owners of giant corporations were free to do
almost anything they wanted and the whole idea of “the public interest” didn’t
exist as a political concept.
