A Test of Adversity and Strength Wildland Fire in the National Park System

Rothman, Hal

The National Park Service’s mission, unique among federal agencies, has made its history of fire policy diverge from that of its peers. Federal fire protection began in the national parks in 1886, when the U.S. Army assumed administration of Yellowstone National Park. After the trauma of the 1910 fire season and creation of a civilian National Park Service in 1916, the new Service embraced the U.S. Forest Service’s policy of aggressive fire suppression. For almost fifty years, suppression was policy, a reality that only began to change in the 1950s. The Leopold Report, published in 1963, further articulated differences in the National Park Service’s mission with its call for parks to be managed as “vignettes of primitive America.” Following passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, federal agencies – including the NPS – were compelled to reassess their management plans in the context of the new law. Steadily, each federal agency found its mission redefined and its goals recast; this translated into a more diverse spectrum of fire practices, at once splintering the former unity of purpose that surrounded suppression while demanding new ideas and devices to reintegrate those fragmented parts. By 1967, the National Park Service found itself at the vanguard of federal fire programs as it experimented with fire ecology, explored fire management strategies, and devised administrative models better suited to fire’s reintroduction than its removal. This new emphasis on the use of fire as management tool reigned for the rest of the twentieth century. The National Park Service moved to the forefront of federal land management agencies, for the difference in its mission gave it a latitude to experiment with fire that other agencies did not enjoy. As they extended the reach of their management to more and more public land in the United States, government officials found that their success depended on an ability to cooperate with peer agencies in new ways. The cooperative model of Alaska came to the rest of the nation in the 1990s. A series of devastating fires on public and private acreage threw this new set of strategies into doubt, but in the 1990s, the National Park Service remained in the forefront of fire management. Its ideas and practices led; other agencies, including the Forest Service, followed even as national parks experienced fewer fires and other federal lands bore the brunt. Fire remained an important tool in maintaining the national parks. The boundaries on its use continued to be in flux in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The question for the NPS became how to integrate its fire management goals with the controversy that surrounded both prescribed burns and those naturally occurring fires that were allowed to burn and with the new management structure that evolved during a succession of difficult fire years.

A Test of Adversity and Strength Wildland Fire in the National Park System

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