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 Introduction been sown with the seeds of federal control . . . Each year sees greater and greater extension of the power of the Federal bureaucracy over your economic freedom . . . There is the danger.7 The looming threat of a socialist takeover was a favorite theme of the timber industry during this period. When confronted with the fact that the industry’s practices had, in fact, devastated US forests, workers, and communities in pursuit of private gain, executives took up a well-practiced refrain. “We are not the problem ,” they claimed. “Rather, turn your eyes toward the real destroyer of forests. Fire is the problem, and it is a hazard generated by the public, not the private owner. If you want to stop forest devastation, put out the flames.” Jewett, testifying in 1940 before the Joint Congressional Committee on Forestry, which had a mandate to recommend forestry legislation, stated the case bluntly: “From your extended travels and the eight hearings held throughout the various forest regions of the United States, it is clear to you that nature will grow trees on over one-third of our continental area, if given the proper encouragement by man. This encouragement included protection against man-made hazards . . . The principal man-made hazard is fire.”8 Contrary to the dominant narrative’s account, the picture that emerges from a close historical investigation is one in which fire is stamped out and rages back not as a result of the insulated policies of an overly muscular state agency run amuck but instead as a result of that agency’s weakness relative to a highly organized network of timber capitalists. The fuels of catastrophic fire are to be found in the tension created by the contradictory roles of state agencies operating within a context of predominantly capitalist social relations. Modern wildfire, in addition to being produced by the usual “fire triangle” of heat, fuels, and oxygen, is the result of a political-economic triangle made up of the commodification of forests, the strict requirements of profitable private forestry, and the very limited room for maneuver afforded the Forest Service in its efforts to implement “practical forestry” in the United States. Practical forestry, as George Gonzalez has pointed out, was an early euphemism in both timber and conservation circles for harvesting and growing trees in a manner that was practical in terms of the accumulation of capital.9 Practical forestry was profitable forestry. The history of wildland fire management policy and its effects on the western landscape today, then, are best explained by looking at the context from which this policy emerged and in which land managers struggle to reform it. That context is an epic battle over two questions: for what purposes should US forests be managed, and in whose interest? These questions retain relevance today as environmental groups clash with timber companies and  Introduction the state over forest management. Indeed, as Richard Behan has pointed out, the fight over the fate of the nation’s forests is still bitterly contested, largely in the courtroom but also within managerial ranks, in the halls of the US Congress, and in the forests themselves when activists directly confront loggers.10 But between 1930 and 1950, the state was likely to be the party clashing with timber interests in defense of forestry management for the public good, with its leaders angry and despondent about the devastation of the nation’s forests. Organization of the Book This book is intended to answer two questions. First, what are the origins of the current relationship between people and fire in the US West? Since that relationship is heavily conditioned by the actions of the United States Forest Service, a considerable portion of the book is dedicated to unearthing a history of how the USFS arrived at its longstanding policy and practice of trying to exclude fire from the woods. This history focuses on the period between the end of the nineteenth century (with the genesis of the Forest Service) and 1950. This is not to say that the contest over fire policy is contained within that period. Indeed, fire policy has been increasingly contested within the Forest Service since the late 1970s and on into the 2000s. These recent debates and political struggles have had a significant effect on contemporary fire policy, as discussed in chapter 2. However, the policy of fire exclusion that has so profoundly remade much of the western forest landscape has its roots in battles fought in the first half of the...

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