Let'Em Burn

Ever since July 17 when lightning set a tree ablaze, a forest fire has been burning in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. On some days it rages across hundreds of acres of trees. On others it smolders slowly over an acre or two. By last week about 3,500 acres had been charred. Is the National Park Service concerned? Not really: its new policy --first tested in California in 1968 and now in effect in many of the U.S.'s heavily forested parks--is "Let 'em burn."

Potential Holocaust. That practice seems to contradict Smokey the Bear's highly publicized advice to extinguish all fires. But Smokey is no ecologist; he is not aware that natural--as opposed to man-made--fires are good for forests. They clear patches of land for new generations of trees. Far from depriving animals of food, the fires make way for a prodigious growth of succulent sprouts. Moreover, they eliminate accumulated deadwood and underbrush --the fuel for more dangerous holocausts. All in all, says Dick Riegelhuth, chief of resources management at Yosemite National Park in California: "It is ridiculous that we have been fighting natural fires for 100 years.*"

According to Bruce Kilgore, chief architect of the Park Service's new policy, one of the parks in which natural fires would have done the most good is one where fires have been rigorously controlled: California's Sequoia National Park. There, if natural fires had been allowed to sweep through the area's firs while they were young, the trees would have burned without involving the great redwoods. But now the fir forest has grown so tall that the tops of the firs reach the Sequoias' lowest branches. Should a fire sweep through the firs, it would probably also ignite the redwoods, destroying the very trees that the park was designed to protect.

The continuing blaze in a remote part of Grand Teton Park represents the first public test of the Park Service's new policy--and many citizens do not like it. Mrs. Miles Seeley, a longtime summer resident of nearby Jackson, Wyo., has begun a petition drive to control what she calls the new "scorched earth policy." Says she: "They have burned up one of the most beautiful areas in Teton County." And almost as bad, the fire is causing massive air pollution by sending carbon monoxide and ash into the atmosphere.

Tourists, too, have been complaining all summer, partly out of a feeling of helplessness in the face of natural disaster and partly out of pique. As a New Yorker put it last week, "I thought I'd see beautiful mountains up there, and all I saw was a bunch of smoke." The Park Service's Bruce Kilgore sighs: "We've got a major problem in explaining our position to the public." Which suggests it may be time to fire Smokey the Bear and hire some new symbolic mascot like Sparky the Firebug.

*In fact, Park and Forest Service rangers actually start fires in some carefully selected areas--e.g., in places where old trees have been attacked by disease and pests.

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