Whilst inno­cently surfing the tubes, I saw this advertisment:

They’re still using Bambi.

The forest fire in Bambi, in which Bambi’s mom dies a hor­rible death (or is it Bambi’s dad?) is cred­ited with scar­ring a gen­er­a­tion of kids. It’s also cred­ited with emo­tion­ally cementing an anti-​​forest-​​fire par­a­digm which has left American and Canadian forests in a ruth­less paradox. After decades of abso­lutist fire-​​prevention, the build up of what gets called “fuel load” — all that stuff that in the normal course of forest events burns every so often in a forest fire — is tremen­dous. Consequently, if a fire does start, it tends to be cat­a­strophic, tearing down forest sys­tems beyond their ability to recover, and spreading across huge tracts. Keep in mind, in many or most North American forest ecosys­tems, fire was a normal or even nec­es­sary inter­mit­tent dis­tur­bance. What we — and Bambi’s stupid mom — have cre­ated is a classic tiger-​​by-​​the-​​tail. We can’t allow fires to start any­more, so the dan­gers of any fire that does start keeps growing.

This is the sit­u­a­tion that inspired the Bush régime’s bril­liant Healthy Forests Initiative, a blanket policy of oh-​​so-​​selective tree cut­ting (pre­vi­ously known as “log­ging”) to reduce fire load.

As with the Bushian fire pro­gram, Smokey the Bear and the Forest Service’s long standing “Only You” cam­paign is pre­sum­ably geared more towards pre­serving standing timber stock for the log­ging industry than saving forests for their own sake. The pro­gram has been around since the 40s. I could well be wrong, but I’m assuming that the fuel load issue didn’t exist in the same way in the war era, and even if You failed to Stop a Forest Fire, there was no reason to assume it was going to engulf the San Bernadino. Perhaps the Forest Service was really so inno­cent as to think that it was con­sti­tuted just in time to save the millenia-​​old forests from the fires which must have been on the cusp of rav­aging them for so long. Maybe the forest lobby was savvy then as now.

This crit­i­cism is not rad­ical or fringey. As I under­stand it, crit­i­cism of absolute anti-​​fire policy is wide spread and well estab­lished across the sci­en­tific and policy crowds. Experiments with con­trolled burns have been around for many years now, and there is even appar­ently some real change in Forest Service policy towards nat­ural fires.

Which makes it all the more sur­prising that the Freddies would dig poor old Bambi back out his (her?) rest­less grave and prop him up beside Smokey for one more gut-​​wrenching knee-​​jerk hurrah. Who signs of on this stuff? Have they no shame?