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 who clean up campgrounds, trail maintenance and
kindred grunt work.
Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the
forest fire watches, turning out literature while communing with nature and
scanning the ridge lines for telltale 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 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 that, when
the inevitable conflagration does come, 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 OK 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 someday.
Terry Lynn Barton says she started the big fire in Colorado's
Pike National Forest accidentally, burning a letter from her estranged
husband. The Forest Service investigators now claim she set off the blaze
deliberately. My guess is that she took a look at her pay stub, saw red and
reached for the matches
I 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 her as the John Walker Lindh of Colorado?
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
