Historically Speaking: A Legacy of Tinderbox Forests

Long before climate change exacerbated the problem, policies meant to suppress wildfires served to fan the flames

The Wall Street Journal

August 19, 2021

This year’s heat waves and droughts have led to record-breaking wildfires across three continents. The fires in Siberia are so vast that smoke has reached the North Pole for what is believed to be the first time. In the United States, California’s Dixie Fire has become the largest single fire in the state’s history.

Humans have long wrestled with forest fire, seeking by turns to harness and to suppress it. Early European efforts to control forest fires were tentative and patchy. In the 14th century, the Sardinians experimented with fire breaks, but the practice was slow to catch on. In North America, by contrast, scientists have found 2000-year-old evidence of controlled burnings by Native American tribes. But this practice died out with the arrival of European immigrants, because of local bans as well as the expulsion of tribes from native lands. As a consequence, forests not only became larger and denser but also filled with mounds of dead and dried vegetation, making them very susceptible to fire.

Disaster struck in the fall of 1871. Dozens of wildfires broke out simultaneously across the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region, and on Oct. 8, the same night as the Chicago Fire, a firestorm engulfed the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing an estimated 1,200 people (and possibly many more). The fire was the deadliest in U.S. history.

ILLUSTRATION: ANTHONY FREDA

Early conservationists, such as Franklin Hough, sought to organize a national wildfire policy. The U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905 and was still figuring out its mission in 1910, when the northern Rockies went up in flames. Fires raced through Washington, Montana and Idaho, culminating in what is known as the “Big Blowup” of August 20 and 21.

One of the U.S. Forest Service’s newly minted rangers, Edward C. Pulaski, was leading a team of 45 firefighters near Wallace, Idaho. A firestorm surrounded the men, forcing Pulaski to lead them down a disused mine shaft. Several attempted to go back outside, believing they would be cooked alive in the smoke-filled mine. Pulaski managed to stop the suicidal exodus by threatening to shoot any man who tried to leave. To maintain morale, he organized a water bucket chain to prevent the blankets covering the exit from catching fire. Pulaski’s actions saved the lives of all but five of the firefighters, but his eyesight and lungs never recovered.

The Big Blowup destroyed more than 3 million acres in two days and killed at least 80 people. In response to the devastation, the Forest Service, with the public’s support, adopted the mistaken goal of total fire suppression rather than fire management. The policy remained in place until 1978, bequeathing to the country a legacy of tinderbox forests.

Nowadays, the Forest Service conducts controlled burns, known as prescribed fires, to mitigate the risk of wildfire. The technique is credited with helping to contain July’s 413,000-acre Bootleg Fire in Oregon.

Fire caused by the effects of climate change will require human intervention of another order. In the Bible’s Book of Isaiah, the unhappy “sinners of Zion” cry out: ‘”Who of us can live where there is a consuming fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?” Who, indeed.

Historically Speaking: How Potatoes Conquered the World

It took centuries for the spud to travel from the New World to the Old and back again

The Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2018

At the first Thanksgiving dinner, eaten by the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims in 1621, the menu was rather different from what’s served today. For one thing, the pumpkin was roasted, not made into a pie. And there definitely wasn’t a side dish of mashed potatoes.

In fact, the first hundred Thanksgivings were spud-free, since potatoes weren’t grown in North America until 1719, when Scotch-Irish settlers began planting them in New Hampshire. Mashed potatoes were an even later invention. The first recorded recipe for the dish appeared in 1747, in Hannah Glasse’s splendidly titled “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind yet Published.”

By then, the potato had been known in Europe for a full two centuries. It was first introduced by the Spanish conquerors of Peru, where the Incas had revered the potato and even invented a natural way of freeze-drying it for storage. Nevertheless, despite its nutritional value and ease of growing, the potato didn’t catch on in Europe. It wasn’t merely foreign and ugly-looking; to wheat-growing farmers it seemed unnatural—possibly even un-Christian, since there is no mention of the potato in the Bible. Outside of Spain, it was generally grown for animal feed.

The change in the potato’s fortunes was largely due to the efforts of a Frenchman named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813). During the Seven Years’ War, he was taken prisoner by the Prussians and forced to live on a diet of potatoes. To his surprise, he stayed relatively healthy. Convinced he had found a solution to famine, Parmentier dedicated his life after the war to popularizing the potato’s nutritional benefits. He even persuaded Marie-Antoinette to wear potato flowers in her hair.

Among the converts to his message were the economist Adam Smith, who realized the potato’s economic potential as a staple food for workers, and Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. Ambassador to France, who was keen for his new nation to eat well in all senses of the word. Jefferson is credited with introducing Americans to french fries at a White House dinner in 1802.

As Smith predicted, the potato became the fuel for the Industrial Revolution. A study published in 2011 by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian in the Quarterly Journal of Economics estimates that up to a quarter of the world’s population growth from 1700 to 1900 can be attributed solely to the introduction of the potato. As Louisa May Alcott observed in “Little Men,” in 1871, “Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.”

In 1887, two Americans, Jacob Fitzgerald and William H. Silver, patented the first potato ricer, which forced a cooked potato through a cast iron sieve, ending the scourge of lumpy mash. Still, the holy grail of “quick and easy” mashed potatoes remained elusive until the late 1950s. Using the flakes produced by the potato ricer and a new freeze drying method, U.S. government scientists perfected instant mashed potatoes, which only requires the simple step of adding hot water or milk to the mix. The days of peeling, boiling and mashing were now optional, and for millions of cooks, Thanksgiving became a little easier. And that’s something to be thankful for.

For the Wall Street Journal