Mother Nature's Wild Fires - 18 August 200

A week ago, in between the conventions, I began by saying I had just telephoned my son who lives way up in the Rockies to hear how things were going in Wyoming.

Of course this was intended to explore his views on the Republicans' choice of Mr Cheney, who was born in a Wyoming town.

But as the talk went along we never got around to politics.

The first thing he said was: "Well up here at 6-7,000 feet a day of 75-80 degrees is remarkable and it would be great - is great - until the west wind comes in and if it's strong enough we could close to being suffocated."

From?

"From the smoke, from the wild fires in Idaho."

Ah! Idaho is, so to speak, his next door neighbour but not to minimise the picture that comes to mind let me say that Wyoming is just the size of Italy, Idaho a little less and that if you look up the rude facts of life in these Western states you always see after "population" an item: "acres forested".

For Wyoming: 9,900,000. Idaho acres forested: 21,600,000 - a lot of timber in them thar hills.

So the smoke that came from wild fires 10 miles away could have been raging a hundred miles away from son John.

A south-west wind today could bring a strong whiff of fires from 500 miles away and if a south-east wind were a possibility at this time of the year it could carry the smoke into Wyoming from a thousand miles away.

What I'm trying to do most of all for people who live in a small country with a temperate climate - England is exactly the size of New York state - is to try and convey the colossal scale of the wild fires that are devastating vast areas of the West, all the way down from the extreme North West from the Bitterroot mountains in the state of Washington and then over into Montana and the Great Plains - the grasslands - back west over the mountains again into Idaho, Wyoming, down into Colorado, ravaging the dense forests of the foothills of the highest peaks and down again into New Mexico and practically to the Mexican border. A crow's flight of about 1500 miles.

Since May the fires have destroyed four and a half million acres of so-called wild lands - mostly vast stretches of preserved national or state forests. Thankfully mostly uninhabited.

You'll recall that one of the earliest fires destroyed most of the outlying parts of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and came very close to singeing the government's main nuclear research lab.

As I speak now there are 90 fires roaring away in 13 states and by now one million acres have been consumed.

The state which has most fires is Montana and on Wednesday the despairing governor begged the president to declare the whole state of Montana a disaster area, which he did. Montana is just a little larger than Italy, Scotland and Wales combined.

The governor did this so as to get a federal grant for the huge cost of fire fighting and to enable him to have the National Guard called out and used.

When the fires started in the late spring 400 marines were sent out west - for more than 200 years the marines have always been the first of the nation's armed forces to go to the rescue of any threat to the life of the Republic.

And pretty soon they were followed by 400 soldiers and then 1500 and on Thursday by a thousand more.

There are now 25,000 so-called fire-fighters which might sound comforting on the evening news but on the ground, at first and for many days after the arrival of the troops, it meant no more than another batch of bewildered onlookers for fire-fighting of this kind and scale is a very special and expert trade and there's no prior guarantee that a soldier or a marine will be any better at it than the volunteer fire brigade of your own small town.

Early on the Forest Service of the United States, which is in charge of this desperate and perilous occupation, pleaded around the world for trained forest and grassland fire-fighters and they have responded from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Canada.

Even so there are many of the 90 fires that cannot be controlled and will have to run their course.

President Clinton dropped in last week at a place called Burgdorf Junction in Idaho where a fire the width of a small city had been blazing away for three weeks.

The president, who is probably the best we've ever had at saying the right thing on impulse, unfortunately said a sentence that jumped right into the Republicans' lap - and by Republicans I'm not thinking so much of the party at large as of the governors of the Western states most greatly afflicted by the fires.

California apart there are five states - Montana, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado - taking the blazing brunt of it.

All five have Republican governors. And at the start of an active presidential campaign they'd have to show commendable restraint not to jump on a phrase Mr Clinton used when he saw the scale of the inferno.

"I know," he said, "that Mother Nature will burn out forests one way or another."

This was promptly taken as the text by a Republican national newspaper for a sermon on the folly, the irresponsibility, of what it called "a let-it-happen philosophy".

But Mr Clinton's phrase was only the beginning of a sentence. What he said was: "Mother Nature will burn out forests one way or another but it matters how it happens." And of course he knows the difference between an uncontrolled fire, a controlled fire and a burn out.

However, this influential newspaper took its cue from the outrage of the governor of Montana who bluntly told the New York Times: "The Clinton administration's policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis."

The other influential newspaper expanded on what it calls the administration's philosophy in a pungent paragraph: "The governor's bitter complaint probably won't resonate much in the cities of the East where the apartment dwellers get a warm glow from sending money to tree-hugger lobbyists. Al Gore, the champion of the enviro radicals, will not be inclined to offer the West much relief from federal land mismanagement."

Well until last week and the arrival in the ravaged lands of President Clinton I believe most Americans looked on the fires - glimpses of which they saw every night on the tele - as a natural disaster, like an earthquake, a hurricane.

And most of the media comment has led people, quite fairly, into assuming that the cause was the extreme drought which throughout the spring and summer has afflicted half the land mass of the United States.

Before the fires this was a regular and troublesome item in the news because of the huge ruination of crops across the Midwest and the West and the prospect of much higher prices for food later on.

And then came the fires. And the media stir was all about the perils of fire-fighting, the experts flown in from abroad and the vast territorial extent of the blazes.

Then the president appeared in Idaho and only then with the reported bitterness of the governor of Montana the whole thing has turned into a political partisan issue.

It was probably bound to happen since the presidential campaign is just getting underway and Vice President Gore's concern, not to say infatuation, with the environment is one of the Republican's big gripes against him.

I ought to say, at once, that Mr Gore was one of the earliest men in Congress to sound the alarm and to do something about the pollution of the Great Lakes, the rivers, the weakening of the ozone layer and the perils of industrial waste - that's the big sore point with many industrialists and big businesses.

Congressman Gore, Senator Gore, Vice-President Gore were unflagging in pushing laws that restrict and punish industrial spill. So in a presidential election year with Mr Gore, himself, as the Democrats' candidate the Western wild fires are an irresistible issue to the Republicans.

"Who is to blame?" is the title of many sudden newspaper pieces and since election campaigns notoriously simplify and coarsen all issues, reducing them to caricature and catch words, Mr Gore is now being called "the president of the tree huggers" and "the man who cherishes the spotted owl more than good timber which makes houses for ordinary, decent Americans."

I ought to say there is a case to be made against the Democrats but the Democrats of nearly 30 years ago who, the Western governors probably believe, are the ideological fathers of such as Mr Gore.

In 1964, with the blessing of President Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congress passed a Wilderness Act to "preserve and protect" 104 million acres of federal public lands, to be left true wilderness.

One provision was that there should be no roads, no permanent human intrusion - not even fire trucks.

The loggers and the Republicans now maintain that no roads meant no fire breaks and no human intrusion meant no logging and necessary thinning out of forests to nurture seedlings, and worst of all they say is total freedom being given to the vast spread of underbrush that has been the tinder box of the present inferno.

Well fundamentally they're right but for campaign purposes they're making all Democrats out to be extreme greens who regard whatever is pristine in nature as "nature undefiled." Like the natural medicine fans who ignore the fact that many natural things are also poisonous.

However, this truly burning issue of the Western fires with their far floating smoke is why my son and I didn't talk about the remote, comparatively unreal events taking place in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

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