How the West Was Burnt
“USA-FIRES” by Jeff Head is licensed under CC0
Boulder, Colorado is best known as a college town filled with braided hippies, tanned hikers, and Keystone Light enthusiasts. For me, it’s the town where my parents fell in love and nearly half my high school classmates now call home. For the residents of Boulder County, however, the month of October turned the high altitude hub into a haze of fire and smoke. Two wildfires, the CalWood Fire and LeftHand Canyon Fire, pushed Boulder to its breaking point with towering plumes of smoke and plummeting air quality. Like so many towns and cities in the American West, these fires are the new reality after decades of forest mismanagement and climate denialism. The year 2020 was the worst year on record for wildfires in California. This record was set in September and the number of fires has only expanded since. As climate changes worsens, the horrifying pictures of smoke and haze in Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle will be the new normal for the nearly 75 million Americans who live in Western states. The Donald Trump administration initially declined federal relief to California, allowing so-called “blue states” to burn just as his administration rejected COVID relief packages that provided assistance to states with Democratic governors.
For generations, the federal government has ignored the twin crises of decaying public lands and climate change, allowing our planet to burn before our eyes. Climate change continues to dry out the American West, creating a tinder box of destruction. Despite stories of the various idiots and doofuses who ignited various blazes, the blame for ever-worsening wildfire seasons falls upon the action and inaction of the government.
This is the legacy of Manifest Destiny. America swept West upon train and stagecoach, murdering Native Americans and eradicating keystone species along the way. We’ve replaced wild land with pasture, towering spruce with genetically-modified grass, grey wolves with methane-belching cattle. Just as the West was won, it is now being burnt.
The promise of the United States, from the founding era to today, has centered around aspirations for Westward expansion. Thomas Jefferson, in his message to incoming President James Madison in 1809, described the need to expand to establish “such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.” Future Presidents fulfilled Jefferson’s request for Westward expansion, albeit without the stated request for liberty. President Andrew Jackson removed Southeastern Native Americans and forced them West to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, only for the United States to take Oklahoma back upon the discovery of oil. President James Polk invaded Texas as justification to push the United States West to the Pacific Ocean. In this pursuit of land and property, the armies and citizens of the United States murdered thousands of Native Americans. Furthermore, rich Americans culled the majestic herds of the American Bison with sport killing from the windows of Union Pacific trains to starve Native societies that relied on them for survival. Finally, as the United States conquered the West, we began the ultimate project selling off our natural resources to the highest bidder through logging, mining, and grazing. While the Conservative Movement often speaks to the West as the American embodiment of rugged individualism, Westward expansion has instead been the project of corporate crusade.
The shameful legacy of manifest destiny continues today as right-wing political interests mobilize against protecting public lands and combating the climate crisis. In the first-year of his presidency, President Trump cut the size of two national monuments of interest to Native American tribes in Southwest Utah. The Bear Ears Monument was reduced in size by 85 percent and the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument by nearly 50 percent. As Republicans faced a rare threat from Democrats for a competitive Senate seat in Alaska, President Trump removed protections for nine million acres of Alaskan wilderness to reward logging interests in the state. Naturally, President Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, advocated for selling our public lands to the highest bidder. Through subsidies and support for logging and grazing, the Trump administration paid corporations for the privilege of increasing the prevalence of forest fires. The American mythos requires a view of the West as wild and untameable. However, conservative politicians and their corporate allies have instead treated the West as a challenge to be conquered. As land burns throughout the West, the Trump administration removed basic protections for other public lands.
An overview of the preceding decades of climate policy likewise proves that right-wing policies led to the Western tinderbox currently engulfed in flames. Climate change, as an existential threat and geopolitical crisis, has been ignored by right-wing politicians for decades. Further, as the climate crisis worsens, Republicans have backed away from even lackluster climate solutions at the behest of their base. Additionally, the 2020 fire season exemplifies how climate change is no longer a hypothetical problem for tomorrow but an active crisis that threatens lives and livelihoods today. The effect of climate change on the West is clear: longer, dryer fire seasons that will destroy countless homes and leave the bountiful West a withering wasteland. The complicity of President Trump and the Republicans in green-lighting climate destruction hardly needs repeating. Trump’s EPA rolled back numerous regulations of fossil fuels, his handpicked Supreme Court justice refused to recognize the very existence of climate change, and oil and gas lobbyists staffed his swamp of an administration. Trump isolated the United States from the rest of the world by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord. In doing so, the people he claims to represent face climate destruction through storm, flood, and fire.
These policies have directly worsened Western fire seasons. Thus, the U.S. government, from Manifest Destiny onward, has prioritized the accumulation of Western capital rather than the protection of Western beauty. Per statistics accumulated by Christopher Ketcham in his book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, 37 percent of lands in the West suffer from “severe desertification” and 85 percent of Western rangeland is degraded with overgrazing. These statistics fail to account for the hundreds of acres of public land that are cleared each year to expand cattle production. So how much cattle is actually raised on public lands? Less than two percent, despite subsidies for private grazing costing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) more than $120 million a year, according to Ketcham’s analysis. Overgrazing on public lands is only one example of government initiatives increasing the fire risk to Western communities.
USDA National Agriculture Library is licensed under CC0
Further, tracking along the destructive impact of Westward expansion, U.S. government fire policy has far worsened the condition in many of the West’s iconic forests. Until recently, controlled burn practices perfected by Native American tribes had been banned in California. This has led to a landscape overgrown with dry brush that threatens natural ecosystems typically reinvigorated by normal burns. Therefore, forests that have not seen any fire in the last 100 years are prone to massive, all encompassing burns that will destroy entire ecosystems and towns. Even the advocacy of forest fire prevention alludes to the government's abdication of responsibility for fire suppression. Long a feature in the West’s public lands, the U.S. Forest Service’s mascot, Smokey Bear, is ubiquitous in the pamphlets and posters of national forests. Smokey’s message is clear: Only you can prevent forest fires. Smokey Bear is lying. The mascot of the forest service represents clearly the charade of personal responsibility perfected by right-wing politicians. Rather than taking responsibility for the climate catastrophe and land degradation that create super fires, the government tells us that forest fires are actually our fault. Through the beloved spokes-bear of the Forest Service, government agencies have abdicated responsibility for the smoke and destruction putting half the country at risk.
The health of our national forests presents a complex problem. The legacy of the American West is one of domination. Government intervention in the West, from the brutality of the Mexican-American war through the promises of the Homestead Act, to the current state of state-subsidized destruction of public lands represents a blatant disregard for ecosystems and people. William Kittridge, a writer and rancher in Oregon who spoke to Ketcham for his book, describes the culture of “absolute domination of soil, flora, and fauna [as] an assertion of natural rights, in the Lockean sense of applying labor to the raw stuff of nature.” Rather than allowing the West to be a vessel for freedom, our government imposes its will on the environment, leaving a flame-ravaged landscape in the wake. Ketcham himself describes wildfires as a symbolic terror that threatens to overwhelm the true threats from climate change to public lands, writing, “We can handle the flames as an irrational traumatized people — the preference of the logging industry, the Forest Service, and the Trump Administration—… or we can protect our forests from pillage and focus resources on creating fire-safe communities.” Wildfires pose a risk not just to the public lands but also the public psyche; the capacity of the people to stave off climate catastrophe thus requires a recognition of how and why the West became a plundering ground.
As President-elect Joseph Biden comes into office, much of his job will be to rebuild a stable government to address current and future crises. However, to reckon with the last four years, we must come to terms with the extent to which Trump and his Republican allies have systematically dismantled environmental protections and put the country on the path to climate catastrophe. The Republicans have enriched themselves by bailing out fossil fuels and shamelessly allowing the West to burn. Rather than relying on the “personal responsibility” of Smokey the Bear, we need a government that accepts culpability for the ills of Westward expansion and commits to a proactive role in the protection of our environment. Trump’s chapter in American history will be remembered for many destructive decisions that have threatened our country. In a time of dire need, Trump capped off the American legacy of plundering the West by simply allowing it to burn.