Clean Lines Paddlesports

Way back in March I made a post about how it looked like this summer was going to be a dry one.  That didn’t exactly take Nostradamus-level prescience, given the early indicators, but it’s certainly proven to be true.   It’s mid-August and so far, fires have scorched 2.3 million acres in Oregon, and another million in Washington and Idaho combined.  The fires are near enough to some rivers to cause significant changes in access and use (a put-in in an evacuation zone or a canyon filled with so much smoke it’s unsafe to breathe).  I’ve not been immune to this myself, making a shift from a Lower Salmon trip to the Deschutes to avoid the smoke, and to a specific section of the Deschutes to avoid a different fire evacuation. 

The impacts I’ve felt are nothing in comparison to the hundreds of families who have lost their homes and belongings, the communities who have been on edge and on notice around evacuations, or the flora and fauna that continue to struggle with the human impacts to natural processes. Those challenges are real, and life-changing, but even these are not the hardest hits.

So far this year, 8 firefighters have lost their lives trying to keep people, property, and nature safe across the western United States.   This hits the families of these men and women hard; the folks doing this incredibly hard work know there are risks that come with the job, but these are lives that should never have been lost.  I am passionate about that, since one of my best friends died in 1994, working on a fire in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  In the subsequent years, under state and national leadership from both parties and across the political spectrum, not one substantial thing has changed around our country’s overall approach to fire management.  It can’t be a ‘just let it burn’ approach – 100 years of suppression make this a non-starter without generationally devastating consequences.  It can’t be a ‘suppression is the solution’ model – perpetuation of this terrible management practice kicks the can down the road only as far as the next lightning strike that leads to a 100,000 acre crown fire.  It sure as hell can’t be a ‘rake the forest’ approach – a limited grasp on solutions by leaders who don’t care about outcomes is just a recipe for ongoing disaster.  

What it will take is the intestinal fortitude to make tough decisions about what is in the best interest of our entire, interconnected country, and then to stand behind those decisions in the face of the pressure applied by local governments and landowners looking out for their own short term interests.  It will require a comprehensive plan for controlled burns, for protection, and for permitting wildfires to burn.  And this plan needs to include international, federal, state, and private property managed not by abstract lines and human geography, but by the natural forces that affect fire.  I wrote another post last year about the interconnectedness of our world through water, but it is just as connected by fire.  If we had started this management 32 years ago, the number of lives lost to wildfires could have been zero.  The longer we wait, the more lives will be lost.  We need leaders willing to do their jobs.

I’m headed out on another trip later this week.  Not on the Lower Salmon, but likely to put-in at Buck Hollow on the Deschutes.  Floating relatively near the Grasshopper fire in order to avoid the unhealthy levels of smoke coming from fires in 4 states and 2 countries that is settling in Idaho.  You can bet fire management will be on my mind.