Burn and let burn

THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR

The West is burning.

Wildfires rage, provoking fear and consternation.

At last count, 16 major forest fires were burning in Arizona and around the region.

Here alone, the Rincon fire hung a pall of smoke over the mountains east of town, while the costs of fighting the stubborn Rattlesnake fire near Chiricahua Peak have pushed $3 million.

And last week, the entire nation paused at the destruction of 14 firefighters on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, where a fire ``blew up'' on a steep slope near Glenwood Springs.

No wonder the impulse to ``do something'' now recurs, as it did during the great Yellowstone fires of 1988. No wonder sparks of contention are flying again over the issue of Yellowstone: whether to fight fires or let them burn.

And yet, healthy debate aside, federal authorities should resist a new round of calls - not least from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal - for an overly-aggressive fire-suppression program this summer. In so doing, they should recall the hard lessons of Yellowstone, now proven by science. Those lessons say, Let it burn: Fire is the scourge that keeps nature healthy.

Yellowstone, after all, speaks of nature's uncontrollable power, and the need for man to relinquish at times his will to control that power.

A huge blaze that blackened 1.2 million acres and defied some $120 million in firefighting efforts, the Yellowstone fire decreed forever the ill-fatedness of fighting what cannot be fought.

At the same time, research on the fire's aftermath has helped demonstrate the forest's quick regeneration after a burn, as well as the grave damage firefighting has done to the West.

Without fires, forests grow jungly, too dense, even diseased. Dead trees accumulate as fuels, then explode in hotter, larger, more violent fires.

And so in the wake of Yellowstone a scientific consensus has spread, even to the Interior Department and the Forest Service. Under that consensus, more and more firefighters are coming to agree with the fire scholar Richard Manning: ``The West ought to burn, and we ought to have the political will to burn it.''

For that reason, it was a fine gesture last month when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt inaugurated the summer fire season with a strong assertion of ``prescribed fire'' policy in a Denver Post interview. Babbitt spoke as a leader then in citing fire's beneficial effects on species diversity and grazing land. He spoke courageously and well when he promoted the idea of letting back country fires burn while deliberately setting out-of-fire-season controlled burns to remove dangerous fuels near inhabited areas.

In this light, federal administrators should hold to their emerging wisdom on fire, despite what promises to be a hot and dangerous fire season.

They should ignore the knee-jerk hand-wringing of the Eastern media and the big city politicians, which pander to the public's misunderstandings.

And when the lightning strikes and the pines burn, they should not flinch.

Except along what is known as the ``interface'' between habitation and wilderness, they should let forest fires burn: for the good of nature, for the safety of firefighters, for the good of the treasury.