People, Fire, and the BWCAW

A Social History, Natural History, and Public Opinion Analysis

By Jonathan G. Geurts

“Fire is an event, not an element. It exists within a fire environment, without which it would perish. To modify this environment is to change the nature of fire. Equally, to change the nature of fire is to modify the fire environment. That environment is as much cultural as natural, and fires are only truly comparable when their physical, biological, and cultural environments are comparable. Ecologically speaking, the counterreclaimed landscape may or may not be new; culturally speaking, it is unprecedented” (Pyne, 1982).

In 1999, 30% of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) forest blew down or was damaged by an extraordinarily powerful straight-line wind. The resulting pick-up-sticks landscape spurred a conflict over who, if anyone, should pick them up. Proponents of salvage logging bemoaned leaving them in the wilderness to go to waste, and proponents of letting them be agitated against the building of logging roads to extract the resource. Out of this conflict came the BWCAW Fuels Treatment EIS, which proposed setting a series of prescribed burns to remove the fuel from the wilderness lest a fire dangerous to human health and property be ignited. When implemented, this would be the largest set of intentionally prescribed burns to be set in Minnesota.

Citizens who commented on the EIS were surprizingly at ease about the danger of the fires. This popular attitude is amazing considering how recently wildland fire was portrayed as the enemy of American homeland security. The southern boreal forest needs a regular fire regime to maintain biological diversity and resistance to other disturbances such as wind and disease. If this fuels treatment project goes according to plan, perhaps it would set a good precedent for future use of prescribed fire and wildland fire use.

An analysis of the BWCAW Fuels Treatment project would miss a significant amount of the whole picture if the natural and social fire histories of northern Minnesota were omitted. Therefore, here is a historical, ecological, and sociological analysis of Minnesota's relationship to forest fire.

Photo courtesy of http://shamsi.cascadia.ctc.edu/~jrobinson/bit112/2004spring/assignments/wildfire.jpg