Fire Season (16 page)

As Ben lumbers off under the weight of a giant pack, I know I’ve seen him for the last time. Unless my superiors find another relief lookout in a hurry—unlikely, given the prerogatives of government paperwork—more extended tours and overtime await me. I can’t say I’m disappointed by this. Martha’s about to go east and visit family for a month, an annual ritual, and I’ll be left with little for which to pine back in town. Instead I’ll reapply myself to the unfinished project of learning how to think like a mountain. And if the silence begins to disquiet me, I can listen in on my radio’s tactical channels. The west side of the Black Range has caught fire in my absence—two new lightning starts called the Diamond and the Meason—and for the next several weeks their smoke will hug the mountains to my north. These fires, it’s been decided, will not be suppressed. The time has come for the forest to burn.

Aldo Leopold & the world’s first wilderness
*
the joys of walking in cities & mountains
*
a look back at the McKnight Fire
*
Meason & Diamond fires on the move
*
fish rescue in South Diamond Creek
*
camping in Apache country
*
scenes from the Victorio War
*
the wisdom of Marlin Perkins

A
mong the high holy days I observe each summer, the third of June holds a special place. On this day in 1924, Aldo Leopold’s plan to preserve a roadless core surrounding the headwaters of the Gila River received approval from the regional office in Albuquerque. The proposal had been under consideration for two years, during which his draft memo and the accompanying maps were for a time misfiled and presumed lost. From a logistical perspective alone, the ruling was impressive: it banned roads, auto travel, hotels, summer homes, and hunting lodges from an area nearly the size of Rhode Island. From a cultural standpoint, though, Leopold’s vision for the Gila marked a decisive turn in America’s treatment of wilderness. Never in history had a government body, American or otherwise, surveyed the values of so large a piece of country and decided that its highest use lay not in economic exploitation or—as in the case of the national parks—scenic wonders, but in no use at all except by the nonmotorized traveler. If country can be thought of as a text, then the Gila ought to be considered the first rough draft of the wilderness prospect in America.

Two forces shaped Leopold’s thinking as he mulled his proposal for the Gila Wilderness—one practical, one intellectual. His inspections of the national forests in New Mexico and Arizona offered the practical perspective. When he’d first seen the territories in 1909, six areas of between half a million and a million acres contained no roads. In Arizona, these included the Tonto Basin, the Kaibab Plateau around the Grand Canyon, and the Blue Range and adjacent White Mountains. In New Mexico the same held true for the Jemez and Pecos divisions of the Santa Fe National Forest and the Gila River drainage of the Gila National Forest. By 1919, roads had punctured all of them but the Gila. Only the rough and broken nature of the country had spared it.

The second major influence on Leopold’s thinking occurred when he met a young Forest Service architect in December of 1919. Arthur Carhart, like Leopold a native Iowan, was the first full-time landscape architect to be employed by the agency. Among his early assignments was to survey the shoreline of Trappers Lake in the White River National Forest of Colorado, a site of sublime alpine beauty, in preparation for the development of summer homes. Carhart returned from his mission with a surprising proposal: leave the lake alone. Summer homes would only mar it.

A colleague of Carhart’s, aware of the preservationist instincts he shared with Leopold, arranged for the two of them to meet. Their discussion had an impact out of proportion to its footnoted place in the history of American conservation. Though they were hardly the first to express concern over the disappearance of wilderness, their meeting of the minds galvanized an effort within the Forest Service to preserve wilderness before it vanished. While Leopold turned his attention to what remained of the Southwestern wilderness, Carhart became a proponent of protecting what we now call the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota.

Carhart later recorded the essentials of their talk in a memo for Leopold: “The problem spoken of in [our] conversation was, how far shall the Forest Service carry or allow to be carried man-made improvements in scenic territories, and whether there is not a definite point where all such developments, with the exception perhaps of lines of travel and necessary signboards, shall stop.” Their shared thinking centered on the idea of limits: “There is a limit to the number of lands of shore line on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world, and in each one of these situations there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made, and the beauties of which of a right should be the property of all people.”

Starry-eyed notions of wilderness conservation far predated Leopold’s vision for the Gila. In 1810, the poet William Wordsworth described England’s Lake District as a “sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.” In 1832, the painter George Catlin, famous for his richly colored portraits of Plains Indians, argued in favor of preserving a “nation’s Park” on the northern prairies, a kind of museum of the natural world, to include both wild animals and native people. Forty years would pass before the creation of anything resembling Catlin’s idea. By the time the U.S. Congress voted to establish Yellowstone National Park, indigenous people almost everywhere had been killed, imprisoned, or shunted onto marginal reservation land. Yellowstone was saved mainly in the interest of preventing private exploitation of its geothermal wonders. Those who fought to protect it thought of it as a collection of natural curiosities, not a functioning wilderness. The railroads, after coveting the park’s resources for years, saw a chance to profit nonetheless: if they couldn’t be given access to the timber, they could at least transport, feed, and shelter visiting tourists from the East. Camping out of doors for the pleasure of it remained an eccentricity, and the park was duly developed with roads and hotels to serve the masses. New York’s Adirondack Forest Preserve, established in 1885, also found its reason for existence in a utilitarian rationale: it offered protection to the major water source of New York City.

As Leopold developed his plan for protecting the Gila, he tried to synthesize two divergent schools of conservationist thought. One of them, exemplified by the bearded sage John Muir, advocated preserving wilderness both for its own sake and as a natural cathedral for the human spirit, where man could come face-to-face with higher values. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers,” Muir wrote, “but as fountains of life.” He called the forests of California “God’s first temples,” and spoke in rapturous prose about trees “proclaiming the gospel of beauty like apostles.” When he’d encountered a rare orchid,
Calypso borealis
, on his rambles through the swamps of the Great Lakes region, he’d sat down next to it and wept at its beauty and fragility. He sensed a profound interconnectedness in all of nature. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

The other school of thought was led by Gifford Pinchot, President Teddy Roosevelt’s right-hand man on conservation matters. Pinchot argued that the scenic or spiritual qualities of a landscape were not sufficient reason to protect them. He fought against “a fundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generations. There could be no more serious mistake.” When scenic values came into conflict with the material needs of the American people, scenery had to give way to “highest use.” How far development should go, or who was to decide what constituted the highest use of any particular natural resource—these were slippery questions Pinchot left unanswered.

The two men’s differences are neatly illustrated by an event that occurred while they were on a group outing in the Grand Canyon during the summer of 1896. They were part of a commission assessing the forests of the West—some of them already part of the reserve system, others soon to be—and during one of their walks they came upon a tarantula. Pinchot raised his boot to squash it, but Muir stopped him. As Pinchot later wrote in his memoirs, “He wouldn’t let me kill it. He said it had as much right there as we did.” For Muir, all of creation was sacred, including the gnarliest arachnid; he celebrated “the essential oneness of all living beings.” Pinchot believed man ought to be the arbiter of what in the natural world was useful and what was not. Although Pinchot enjoyed Muir’s gifts as a storyteller, and they found common cause in their desire to protect the Western forests from abusive commercial interests, they would clash repeatedly in years to come over how those forests should be managed.

Leopold had come out of the Pinchot school of thought—quite literally. He had earned his forestry degree at Yale in 1909. The curriculum there was the first of its kind in the nation, the forestry school having been founded in 1900 with an endowment from the Pinchot family. Oldest son and scion of a timber magnate, Pinchot used the bequest to put his stamp on a generation of forest rangers. The Forest Service in its early years was often referred to as the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Yale alumni association; Pinchot’s first rangers, Leopold among them, were called “Little G.P.s” for their loyalty to the chief, not to mention the education that formed them in his mold. The Pinchot doctrine of highest use was summed up in his famous dictum: “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” It’s worth remembering that Teddy Roosevelt, advised by Pinchot, chose to fold the forest reserves into the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of the Interior, when he founded the Forest Service—a tacit admission that trees and the watershed they maintained were crops to be tended and protected, not unlike corn or wheat.

Leopold’s first major job as a professional forester, in the summer of 1909, had been to run a reconnaissance mission on Arizona’s Blue Range. The forest reserve there had been established in 1907, and the first thing the Forest Service wanted was a thorough inventory of its new lands. Leopold arrived in time to play his role as one of the “arranger rangers,” the group of young men who mapped and cataloged the nation’s store of forest wealth and reported their findings to the home office on F Street, back in the nation’s capital. Leopold and his crew assessed the type, amount, location, and quality of the timber while mapping and surveying land that largely remained, until their work was finished, a
tabula rasa
to the American government.

In letters home to his parents around this time, Leopold wrote about his joy in the job, about not having to “fight society and all the forty ’leven kinds of tommyrot that includes. [It] deals with big things. Millions of acres, billions of feet of timber, all vast amounts of capital—why it’s fun to twiddle them around in your fingers, especially when you consider your very modest amount of experience. And when you get a job to do, it’s yours, nobody to help, nobody to interfere, no precedents to follow.” The big job that loomed on the Blue, once he completed his survey, involved supplying the copper mines in nearby Clifton with 15 million board feet of timber a year for fuel and mine shaft supports. “I want to handle these 15 million a year sales when they come,” he wrote. “That would
be
something.”

In the years to follow, Leopold supported efforts to hunt wolves to extinction, believing this would increase the number of deer available to hunters. He favored fire suppression as a means of increasing the timber yield. He advocated draining the Rio Grande Valley around Albuquerque to lay claim to marginal farm land. He argued for stocking non-native trout in Southwestern streams to improve recreational fishing. He personally oversaw some road-building projects in the Southwestern wilderness, as part of his agency’s “good roads movement.” All of this fit with Pinchot’s philosophy of scientific management and highest use.

By 1921, the achievements of that philosophy were everywhere evident: roads blasted through the mountains, cattle running the ranges, irrigation works funneling water to farms, predator populations reduced to near nothing. As Leopold surveyed the Southwestern forests, a new and troubling question gnawed at him. Could there be such a thing as too much progress? And if so, what of value would be lost in the bargain?

He first attempted to answer these questions in a 1921 paper, “Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy,” a blandly titled essay the effects of which would ripple outward for decades and eventually lead to the creation of tens of millions of acres of protected wilderness in America. Leopold admitted his bias in favor of developing natural resources and even quoted Pinchot approvingly in regard to the doctrine of highest use. “The majority undoubtedly want all the automobile roads, summer homes, graded trails, and other modern conveniences that we can give them,” Leopold wrote. “It is already decided, and wisely, that they shall have these things as rapidly as brains and money can provide them.” But then he turned the whole concept of highest use on its head. What of that “very substantial minority” of people who wanted precisely the opposite experience of wilderness? Shouldn’t the Forest Service attempt to provide for their needs too? Leopold not only answered in the affirmative, he stated that “highest use demands it.” Because so little of the original Southwestern wilderness remained without roads, it was imperative that a portion of what was left be preserved in that state, in order to provide a recreational experience that would vanish otherwise.