Stephen J. Pyne

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Stephen J. Pyne | Reflections: Burning Border | Environmental History, 12.4 | The History Cooperative

REFLECTIONS

burning border

ABSTRACT

The United States and Canada approach wildland fire differently. Fire matters to both countries for reasons of economics, public safety, duty-of-care to nature preserves, and bureaucratic identity and inertia. A useful survey of their differences could focus on three simple indices: how each assesses fire threats, how each assigns responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don't merge. These differences reflect larger national traits.

IT IS OFTEN SAID that fire is no respecter of borders. In fact, it respects any boundaries that affect its ability to propagate. Satellite images routinely reveal stark contrasts in fire behavior among landscapes partitioned to farming, ranching, nature preserves, public forests, shopping malls, and exurbs. The U.S.-Canada border is no exception. The delineation would remain abstractly political if both countries had identical land use, adopted similar fire policies, and managed fire the same way. They don't. There are national styles in fire as in literature and health care. Their practices are only superficially interchangeable, like pumps and CL-215s. In their deep structure their fires differ as much as the divergent politics behind the American style of federalism and the Canadian brand of confederation.	1
Does fire really matter? Here an answer is simple: Canada is a large and combustible swathe of fire-planet Earth. Historically, fires swept its prairies every two or three years; combusted its Cordilleran forests every five to fifty; and devoured its boreal forest, in immense chunks, every 50–120 years, a rhythm of binge-burning equaled solely in Russia. Only its sodden outer limits, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and Cape Breton, have evaded serious burns. On average Canada now experiences 8,500 fires a year that burn 2.5 million hectares, although statistics mean little in a place where the episodic big burn does all of the ecological work and where fires can blister 7.5 million hectares in a summer. All this matters because Canadians have sought to shield much of their national estate from flame and now spend $500-$900 million annually on the effort, a number galloping upward. The determination to battle blazes has come from commercial concerns over timber, a need to protect vulnerable human settlements, and bureaucratic inertia. Canada's forest fires are thus a matter of economics, public safety, duty-of-care obligations to nature preserves, and, for those agencies who fight or study them, institutional survival. In all this it resembles American cognates—with a difference.	2
By way of example, reflect how each assesses fire danger, how each distributes responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. (The fire communities of both countries are congenitally partial to grouping by threes—the fire triangle serving as the water cycle does for hydrologists.) In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don't merge.	3
Begin with differences in assessing fire threats. Fire-danger rating began in the 1920s and the U.S. Forest Service soon directed part of its research apparatus to the task, fashioning regional indices tied to the character of the local forests. The Canadian Forest Branch, which had otherwise closely modeled itself on the USFS, struggled, however, to support much research. But in the late 1920s James Wright, against grudging acquiescence, and with the assistance of Herbert Beall, established a research program at the Petawawa, Ontario, experimental forest. Every ten to fifteen years thereafter the Wright System underwent expansion and extensive updating, and eventually was adopted with modifications by all the provinces.	. . .

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