The Fire Last Time

I've long admired Tim Egan's reporting for the NYT, because it seemed to come from a genuine connection with and love for his native Pacific Northwest; plus, it reminded New Yorkers that there was, in fact, a whole entire country out there beyond the brown clouds over New Jersey.

In his latest book, The Big Burn, he spools out a history of the catastrophic forest fires that swept across Idaho and Montana in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt's newly-created National Forest system was still a sizzling-hot controversy, with the usual extractive-industry ho's making all kinds of noise against the whole crazy radical idea of not cutting down every single tree west of the Mississippi.

Eight decades later, not much has changed. Oil and gas companies screech bloody murder at any suggestion that they can't drill everywhere they want to, right now. The only reason the West hasn't been totally raped is because, way back at the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (and John Muir) showed rare courage and vision.

From my Washington Post review of The Big Burn:

What's most striking is how little has really changed since then. Huge corporations still angle for Western resources, misusing laws intended to encourage homesteading to help themselves to the oil, gas and minerals that lie underneath the Rockies. Recent immigrants are still despised in many political quarters, and our African American president has been portrayed as a monkey by his foes. And politicians, particularly Republicans, insist on invoking Teddy Roosevelt's name when in truth his progressive, anti-corporate and pro-conservation agenda would get him branded a radical tree-hugger today.