Sign up to receive alerts when articles like this are published. Touring Montana last week, J. Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, blamed the Clinton administration for not logging the tinder-dry forests. Environmentalists pointed at the timber industry and development for altering forest ecology and creating an artificial landscape ripe for catastrophe. The era of prevention and suppression represented by Smokey and his shovel may have been good for safety, but it was not the best thing for forests. The agency had reached that conclusion even before the additional evidence foresters drew from the fires that tore through almost half of Yellowstone National Park in 1988.
Fire is as much a part of nature as creeks and wildflowers.
It's just not correct to say a forest is destroyed by fire.'' During the decades when fires were routinely suppressed, forests choked themselves with excess growth, creating better habitats for tree-killing insects. The fires that have already run through five million acres this year are hotter, faster-burning, more ferocious than any burns of modern times, the people battling them say. And a number of reports say future fire seasons may be worse, identifying about 40 million acres of public land as being at risk of catastrophic fire. Fire suppression is only part of the problem. In some forests, experts say, logging has removed the biggest and most fire-resistant trees.