Nature and Politics
Terry Lynn Barton's Fire?
by Jeffrey St.
Clair and Alexander Cockburn
June 21, 2002
If you
believe what the Forest Service interrogators say, Terry Lynn Barton started
the big fire in Colorado's Pike National Forest by burning a letter from her
estranged husband. Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be forgiving when they
hear more details of Ms Barton's married life. But a jury might well be equally
forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the fire by setting fire to her
pay stub.
After 18 years
of dedicated service Terry Lynn Barton's monthly pay was $1,485, which tots up
to $17,820 a year. Try raising two kids on that in the greater metropolitan
area of Denver. She's being described in the press as "a Forest Service
technician" which is FS-speak for all-purpose manual laborers cleaning up
campgrounds, trail maintenance and kindred grunt work.
Forget the
Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the forest fire watchtowers,
turning out literature while communing with nature and scanning the ridge lines
for tell-tale plumes. The Forest Service, part of the USDA, has long been notorious
for exploiting its bottom-rung workers more than any other agency. The laborers
are often forced to live in squalid housing under fairly harsh conditions with
scant benefits.
These grunts
are the ones who have to deal with visitors angered at having to pay as much as
$40 in annual passes for visits to forests in a particular area. Having ponied
up the money these visitors often find nature's temple criss-crossed with
logging roads, scarred by clear cuts or the new, RV friendly rec sites blessed by
recent administrations.
From the
anguish and outrage of Barton's superiors you'd think that you'd think that
that the Forest Service has always regarded fire as the devil's work.
A little
perspective: this particular Colorado fire has so far burned through something
over 100,000 acres. The implication is that all these acres are blackened zones
of ash and carbonized stumps. Not so. Many of those acres will have suffered
minor scorching. And of course healthy forests need fires as a natural and
frequent catalyst to regeneration, particularly in the conifer forests in
Colorado.
But the Forest
Service's policy has been to suppress fires. In the middle and long term this
policy leads to huge fuel loads which, when the inevitable conflagration does
come, then burst out into the kinds of large scale burns that we are now seeing
across the West.
Responsibility
for fires stretches far higher up the bureaucratic chain than poor Ms Barton.
Since the days of Gifford Pinchot the Forest Service has seen fire-suppression
as a sure way to get a blank check from Congress. Fire-suppression gets the
Service the big ticket items, planes, helicopters and so forth. Fire
suppression is used to justify the Service's road building budget and even
logging programs.
The Forest Service
says all fires are bad and need to be suppressed with the help of huge
disbursements from Congress plus public vigilance. All children have the
ursine, self-righteous smirk of Smokey the Bear dinned into their psyches, said
bear being conjured into icon status 60 years ago after the incredible
popularity of that noted fire-fugitive, Bambi.
So the Forest
Service needs fires, and diligently sets them each year, under the rubric,
Controlled Burn, or Prescribed Fire. These regularly surge out of control, as
in the Los Alamos forests a couple of years ago, started by the Park Service in
Bandolier National Monument. The Forest Service bigwigs okay fires and then
summon ill-paid fighters to do the dangerous work. Far more prudent would be to
let the fires run, but that of course would leave idle all the costly
fire-fighting machinery and expose the Forest Service to the wrath of the real
estate industry, which has raised million dollar homes in areas certain to see
a blaze some day.
Terry Lynn
Barton faces twenty years in prison while the timber industry licks its lips at
the prospect of "salvage logging" the Colorado forests. "Light
it and log it," as the old phrase goes. Once a forest burns, existing
restrictions go out the window, the Forest Service offers up 100,000 acres for
salvaging, and in go the timber companies, hauling out the timber, immune to
environmental restrictions. You don't think timber companies have setting fires
for years, often with Forest Service complicity?
We sure hope
Terry Lynn Barton gets a good lawyer. He might start by asking a few pointed
questions about her treatment. Is the Forest Service trying to paint as the
John Walker Lindh of Colorado?
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are the authors of 5
Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000), and the
editors of Counterpunch, the nation's best muckraking newsletter:
www.counterpunch.org