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Roger Contor
"In creating change, credibility is the best
product you have to offer."
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Mike: Describe what you learned as you watched and participated in the evolution of the thinking about fire management in the National Parks.
Roger: . . . A person’s actions and decisions are usually pre-determined by our conditioned value system. An example is our hatred for forest fires in the National Park Service. A student at Colorado State University told us one time, ‘You really shouldn’t be putting out natural fires in National Parks.’ Our response was, ‘What the hell you mean, kid? We’ve always done it that way.’ He had challenged our traditions but it finally came to the point where we looked at each other, and said, ‘He’s right, now what do we do?’
. . . Then along came the opportunity offered by North Cascades National Park. A brand new park. No history as a park. No built-in set of critics. No built-in industries. No built-in advocates for the status quo. After a park is in place for 20-30 years, it is surrounded by critics, economic interests, and advocates and they’ve all pretty well made up their minds about how the park should be managed. That’s a lot of inertia to overcome for a big policy change like let-it-burn.
. . . 1970 was a big fire year in Oregon and Washington. A lightening storm set 500 fires and everybody was very, very busy fighting fires. We were expected to put out fires and our guys in the Stehekin District near Lake Chelan, which is the southern half of North Cascades Park, put out all their fires in the first day or two. The Forest Service’s Lake Chelan employees, who had more fire fighting experience than even us, told their wives to get out the Sears & Roebucks catalogs because they were going to get lots of overtime pay.
. . . In the north part of North Cascades Park the fires weren’t so easy to put out. We brought in firefighters from the big center in Boise and were spending $100,000 a day, but we weren’t making any real progress.
. . . So I had a conversation with my fine Regional Director. We agreed that if we challenged the assumed emergency of these fires and viewed them as a natural event, we shouldn’t be fighting them at all. I said, ‘It’s September and it’s going to rain. That’s the only way they are going to go out anyway.’ He said, ‘Let me make a couple of calls.’ He called the director of the Park Service and asked if he was ready to let these natural fires burn. My Regional Director was told. ‘I guess so, but check with Senator Jackson.’ He called Senator Jackson and asked if he was ready to stand by us. The Senator thought it made good sense, but that at some point we ought to talk to Scott Paper Company, the Park neighbor, so they would understand our thinking.
. . . We demobilized and saved taxpayers $100,000 per day over the next 2 weeks. That was a great risk. Everybody who fights fires is a hero and nobody ever asks how much it costs. Everyone acted on the assumption that fire is bad and the Park Service had always been well rewarded for its aggressiveness as firefighters.
. . . The next day it hit the news that North Cascades Park was ignoring wildfires in keeping with the National Park Service’s new let-it-burn philosophy. In came an immediate call from Keep Washington Green. They were very upset. Their director said, ‘Look, we’ve been showing that the average size of forest fires in Washington has been going down progressively since 1920. Now you are going to let some fires run wild. Our statistics are going to be all screwed up.’ I said, "Here’s a suggestion, just create two categories: one for (suppression) fires that you have tried to put out and another category for natural fires (managed) that you let burn.’ He said, ‘Great idea!’. They were totally happy and so was I. Next I called Scott Paper to talk about our decision to let certain fires burn. They laughingly said they wondered when we would get smart enough to do that.
. . . That’s the story. The origins track back to World War I and the conscious public relations effort of the Forest Service that created an industry - the forest fire suppression industry. There is a lot of money to be made by selling chemicals and fire fighting equipment. There is a lot of money to be made through government programs, like the Boise Interagency Fire Center, that have a stake in putting out fires. Where the government spends a lot of money you create entrenched industries to go after it - sometimes counterproductive ‘industries.’
. . . You’ve got to be smart. At North Cascades, if it had been in June or July, we wouldn’t have dared to let the fires burn. But the timing turned out to be right. We acted on our feeling that the fires weren’t going anywhere. In the northwest at that time of year there is a lot of dew at night and everything really cools down. And it was about to rain. Our fires grew to only about 200-300 acres. Timing our ‘courageous’ act was important.
. . . Looking back, it is interesting to think about how our value system pre-determined the outcome of our decisions. Before North Cascades we just went along with the given assumptions and were unable to change. It took 10 years after that Colorado State University student said we should stop putting out natural fires in National Parks until we finally did it in North Cascades.
. . . Believe me, it took more than a little courage to let those fires burn in the North Cascades. What if I was wrong? I’d have been transferred. A National Park Superintendent is very expendable.
. . . Successful courage is intelligent courage.