Abstract

Wildfire in the American West is a "catastrophe" 100 years in the making. Fire intensities, frequencies, and sizes are all on an upward trend, along with the dollars spent on wildland fire management. There is a broad consensus that much of this is due to the diligent suppression efforts of the federal land management agencies, particularly the USDA Forest Service, over the last century. An increasingly common narrative has emerged to explain the rise of "catastrophic fire," featuring a largely autonomous state agency (The USFS) with a misguided missionary-professional ethic, and an overconfident, pseudo-religious belief in the pursuit of human control over nature. Using correspondence between and within the Forest Service and the major timber industry associations, newspaper articles, articles from industry organs, and policy documents all dating from the early 1900s, this paper argues that this common narrative frames much of the relevant action out of the picture. Instead, I argue that while a century of suppression has indeed increased the hazard of wildfire (along with human settlement patterns and climate change), the project of eliminating fire from the woods, and the "blowback" of increasing fire hazard, have stemmed from the commodification of forests, the strict requirements of profitable private forestry, and the very limited room for maneuver afforded by organized timber capital to the Forest Service in its efforts to implement "practical forestry" in America. Finally, using data from interviews with Forest Service fire managers across Oregon, I assess the extent to which the Forest Service is engaging in a process of ecological modernization in their approach to fire, and identify key obstacles to the reintroduction of fire as an ecological process in the American West.