Jamie Lennox, Alliance for the Wild Rockies

Jamie Lennox is membership coordinator for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and a board member of the Wild Rockies Legislative Action Fund. He previously worked for the Missoula Independent, a weekly newspaper. He lives in Missoula, Mont.

On the cover of today's Missoulian newspaper is the headline, "Air War Getting Intense: Fighting Fires from the Sky." It's that time of year again, when the media heats up hysteria over forest fires. This war against the fires will never be won. The Yellowstone blazes of 1988 can attest to this -- they died out only after September snowstorms squelched them.

The timber industry, the U.S. Forest Service, and the media continue to promote fire fallacies and fuel people's fears. The vast forest ecosystems of the northern Rockies have evolved for thousands of years with periodic wildfires. Forest fires created a mosaic of habitats, maximizing the natural diversity of the forest community. But then came the timber industry.

Logging companies and the Forest Service now manage forests on the premise that we have to log them in order to save them. By suppressing fires for more than 50 years, the Forest Service says we have created a problem -- too much woody material, which is causing the forests to die. Yet the Forest Service continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars fighting fires, logging, and road-building on our public lands.



















Last year, I accompanied Mike Bader, executive director of Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and photographer Jeff Henry to Yellowstone National Park, ten years after the fires of 1988. During the fires, Mike was a Yellowstone park ranger and participated along with 25,000 others in the largest fire-fighting effort in U.S. history. Jeff was a park photographer who took numerous shots of firefighters and the fires themselves. I was moving to Bozeman, Mont., at the time, and I remember being awestruck by the billowing smoke in the atmosphere. Just ten years later, a new forest of lodgepole pines was thriving within burn areas.

Forest fires play an important ecological role in the northern Rockies. What we need is a management plan that respects all forces of nature, including natural fire, and one that protects the wild nature of these landscapes.