A Lesson From Smokey

Rabbi Avi Shafran writes:

Which brings us back to more recent flames, those of the unprecedented California fires – which fire-management experts have dubbed “mega-fires,” since they are ten times larger and more intense than wildfires of a mere decade or two ago. More than eight million acres of American forest have burned this year already.

The reasons suggested for the unprecedented infernos include, of course, the “usual suspect” for all natural disasters these days, global warming. But the fact that Baja Mexico has evidenced only much smaller fires than adjacent San Diego County suggests strongly that something else is at work. That something, experts say, is a decades-old misguided conservation policy in the United States. Put simply, the longtime American approach to fire suppression—extinguishing small fires as soon as they appear, rather than allowing them to run their natural course and create undergrowth-free zones—has created huge swaths of unburned brush that, when fire does break out, serve as rich and abundant fuel for infernos of exceptional scope and intensity. “When,” asked University of California professor of earth sciences and fire-management expert Richard A. Minnich, quoted in The New York Times, “do we declare the policy a failure?”

So the culprit, so to speak, is Smokey the Bear. He seemed like a fine enough, if furry, fellow all those years, delivering his ursine, eminently common-sense message that putting out small fires was the obvious way to prevent larger ones. But he was wrong. precisely wrong,entirely wrong. Nothing personal (or specie-ist), but, in the end, only smarts can prevent mega-fires.