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 regime’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?