Evolution of Wilderness Fire Policy

Just as wilderness ecosystems have been shaped by fire (and the condition of those ecosystems has shaped fire behavior), wilderness policy has been affected by fire policy (and vice versa). The Wilderness Act and subsequent wilderness bills have addressed fire, and policy has evolved to recognize the free play of fire as a natural process. Similarly, fire policy has evolved to accommodate the peculiar demands of wilderness. This co-evolution has its origin in the confluence of ecological thought and wilderness philosophy that occurred in the late 20th century. For most of the century, fire was considered a universal threat to people, resources, and wildlands. Eventually though the observations of foresters like Aldo Leopold (1924) and Elers Koch (Arno and Fiedler 2005) added to the research of scientists such as Harold Weaver (1943) and Herb Stoddard (1935) to force realization of the role of fire in sustaining species and maintaining the character of ecosystems. In 1963 a panel of ecologists responded to the National Park Service’s request for a management review with the suggestion that “The goal [of park management] is to maintain or create the mood of wild America” (Leopold et al. 1963). They recommended fire be restored to the national parks. Passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 represented the culmination of the “fight for the freedom of the wilderness” begun by John Muir and sworn to by Robert Marshall (1930) and the other founders of The Wilderness Society in 1935. According to the Wilderness Act definition, “Wilderness [retains] its primeval character and influence [and] generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature” (emphasis added). It became clear that those “forces of nature” include fire. The purpose of this article is to briefly review the policy history of wilderness fire, identify some barriers to its increased use, and propose some policy changes that could lead to more harmonious relations among people, fire, and wilderness. Wilderness Fire Policy This article is by no means intended to provide a comprehensive review of wilderness fire policy. For such a review, there is the excellent work of Kilgore (1986) and Parsons and Landres (1998), a number of papers presented at the 1999 Wilderness Science Conference (Agee 2000; Parsons 2000; Zimmerman and Bunnell 2000), or, for a more poetic treatment, Pyne’s 1995 “Vestal Fires and Virgin Lands.” Together, these reviews characterize the history of policy from the advent and growth of wilderness fire management, to the calamity of Yellowstone in 1988, and through rebirth and recovery. Briefly, wilderness fire policy history began with the fires of 1910, which burned millions of acres in Idaho and Montana, killing 86 people and destroying entire communities. That experience led to a policy of intolerance and all-out suppression of fire throughout most of the 20th century. The accumulation of scientific evidence and societal desire to leave some parts of the country beyond direct human control, however, led to a shift in policy, initiated by the National Park Service in 1968 and followed by the USDA Forest Service in 1978, whereby some natural fires could be allowed to burn in specified locations under previously identified conditions. Over two decades, this prescribed natural fire (PNF) policy spread from its original application in California to national parks and wilderness areas across the country (see figure 1). Whatever momentum had built up over that period ended abruptly in the summer of 1988 when a succession of fires that were allowed to burn in Yellowstone National Park encountered extreme fire weather and blew up into the STEWARDSHIP