Wildfire Myths Thrive on Short Memories

I was talking with a rancher the other day about the weather as I took a break from cleaning Tex’s pen.

“Could hit 68 in Denver next week,” he said after I remarked that the horses wouldn’t need blankets for at least the next 10 days.

“Probably shouldn’t expect snow on Christmas then, huh?” I said. He looked up at the mesa which was barely dusted in snow and told me he was already worried about spring.

“They threatened to shut irrigation off this summer,” he said. “I think they’ll actually do it next year if the weather stays like this.”

“Could be a rough wildfire season too if things don’t improve,” I said, thinking we were having a nice moment of connection. But the rancher suddenly gave me a look that said you poor, dumb, idiot.

“How much snow we get has nothing to do with wildfires,” he said, suddenly angry. “It’s those damn treehuggers who won’t let anything burn.” I quietly tried to remember if I’d ever told him what I did for work. But he was on a tear.

“The Utes used to burn half the Mesa one year, wait a couple years, then burn the other half,” he said. “We need to be out there logging if we want these fires under control!”

Well, okay then. I motioned to the wheelbarrow full of horse shit in front of me. “Better get moving on this before it’s dark. Great to see you!” And I happily hurried over to the manure pile.

These “conversations” (if you can call a grouchy old man monologuing at a woman in her 30s a “conversation”) are getting pretty old for me. If you’re committed to being a miserable, mean old fuck without an ounce of complex thought or nuance left in your body—the meaning of your existence nothing more than eternally being upset about something—well, I just thank god that I’ve not been cosmically punished with having to live a life as sad as yours.

I’m also wary of anyone who uses the sentence structure, “If we just did X then Y would be fine!” I feel certain if a solution were that simple, we would have implemented it by now.

“If we just logged every tree in Colorado, we wouldn’t have to worry about forest fires.” The statement is technically correct. But then we’d be similarly impacted by landslides and a second dust bowl (and also any other repercussions we haven’t even thought of like death of pollinators and other ecosystem disruptions that could impact us just as much as forest fires. Also, I don’t want to live in a world without forests and I think that should count for something).

Here are just a few things this old man forgot in his rant:

Before settlers obliterated the Ute Nation, the Indigenous people of this region used low-intensity, mosaic patterns of intentional burns all over what is now Mesa County to encourage production of berry-producing plants, create travel corridors, bring about more big game, and cull dense fuel. These fires were seasonal—done in fall, winter, and spring when risk of mass fire spread was low—and patchwork in nature. They did not “burn half the Mesa one year, wait a couple years, then burn the other half.” They didn’t log an entire mountainside down to stumps.

They were also working in a diverse, healthy ecosystem defined by a montage of meadows, scrub, forest, rock cliffs, and other landscape variations that were made better by these kinds of fires. They also were not in a historic megadrought consisting of the driest two decades in the last 1,200 years as we are today.

And since we’re over here forgetting history, I’d like to remind this particular old man that he’s conveniently forgotten about the 150-year-long campaign by ranchers to exterminate every living thing in Colorado (beaver, bison, elk, deer, bears, wolves, coyotes, magpies, owls, crows, ravens, hawks, prairie dogs, forests, I COULD GO ON) to make way for cattle grazing at an extreme density to produce as much profit as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time—which nearly irreparably destroyed the land, for the sake of wealth, power, and profit—NOT subsistence.

Perhaps he also forgot that long before the U.S. Forest Service (and supposed “treehuggers”) even came into existence, ranchers were arguably the most ardent drivers of fire suppression throughout the West, fighting all and any fires to protect their massive investments. Official federal fire suppression policy didn’t take hold until the 1900s, but the socio-economic practice of fire suppression to protect grazing lands in Colorado was already well underway by the 1880s and 1890s, driven exclusively by—wait for it—the immediate interests of ranchers.

It’s possible he also forgot that the Cattlemen’s Association had a political stranglehold on the U.S. Forest Service for the first 40 years of its official existence, when fire suppression work was at its zenith. And why might you ask, was fire suppression work at its zenith? Because our forests at that time were not viewed as conservation lands, they were viewed as stockholdings of revenue. Lumber. Fire was a destructive enemy that had to be eradicated to protect our profits.

In fact, it was actually the environmentalists of the 1960s who started raising issues around fire suppression and voiced a need for prescribed burns to return to a more natural ecological process. Just because these environmentalists were anti-logging does not mean the “treehuggers” were the ones enforcing fire suppression.

And since this rancher seemed real keen on finding someone to blame, I suppose he’ll be thrilled to know it’s actually his lineage of destructive ranching practices throughout western Colorado that have made wildfires so destructive. And to that I say touché, because I was fully ready to blame climate change and historic drought. But that’s the idiot treehugger in me I suppose. Thank goodness he helped bring the truth to light.