WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- At first glance, Whitman's Rachel Smith might not seem like the right person to spend the next year exploring the effects of wildland fire in profoundly different ecosystems spread from Australia and New Zealand to Africa, Europe and the dry tropical forests of Costa Rica. What that first glance doesn't show, however, is that Smith, who stands just a shade under five feet in height, recently became the youngest, smallest woman in history to graduate from the U.S. Forest Service's Smokejumper Basic Training.
"Sometimes I don't know why I worked so hard to qualify to become a Forest Service smokejumper," the 22-year-old Smith admits. Given that she weighs "considerably less than the 110-pound pack I carried, completing the arduous physical requirements alone seemed like an impossible task. I kind of liked that. While there are more than 400 smokejumpers currently active in the United States, only 78 women had braved the patriarchal structure of the smokejumping organization. I intended to be number 79."
Smith began her fire-fighting career at age 18 as a volunteer at a fire station near her Everett, Wash., home. She soon advanced into a paid position as a structure firefighter, became an Emergency Medical Technician, and later completed training as a Forest Service Hotshot in La Grande, Ore. Overcoming a fear of heights, she finished her smokejumper training in May, 1999, in the Redding, Calif., area.
Smith plans to begin her year-long travel with two months of study in each of four countries: South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Ghana. After spending one month in both France and the United Kingdom, she will finish her studies in Costa Rica. "During my journey, I will investigate wildfire polices in both first world and developing nations, observing first hand how societies are impacted by wildland fire," she says. Her goal is to find a "fire management plan that is both integrated into the ecosystem that it protects and has long-term viability."
In South Africa, Smith will visit a land where years of rapid population growth have triggered an exponential increase in wildfires. "This has substantially escalated the number of fires that annually roar out of control, burning the land in such great quantities that the wildfires can be seen from space," she says. "For subsistence farmers, the short-term benefit of increased soil production outweighs the long-term negative aspects of burning the grasslands."
Smith plans to focus on Kruger National Park, South Africa's largest game reserve. Officials once banned all fires in the park but later adopted a regimen of controlled burns. Recognizing the detrimental effects of both policies on wildlife, officials over the past decade have vigorously suppressed all wildfires ignited by humans while allowing all lightning-caused fires to burn unchecked. Smith wants to examine wildlife population numbers during each of the three fire management periods and interview park officials as to what they envision for the future. Smith will also visit organizations dedicated to ecosystem management and various wildland firefighting units, most of which are privately owned and funded, largely by the timber industry.
While South Africa lacks a unified approach to wildfire suppression, that isn't the case in Australia, Smith's second stop. "Whatever the cause, the men and women who volunteer to put out bushfires in Australia clearly both enjoy their work and are proud to be part of such service to their country," she says.
Until very recently, Australia's rural fire brigades and 200,000 volunteers served in a fractured manner, each brigade acting semi-independently of the others with little communication. The past year's creation of the Bushfires Cooperation Research Center, however, has brought the brigades into a cohesive whole. Smith plans a number of contacts, including representatives of the bush brigades, in seeking a working knowledge of how Australians approach wildfire management. Volunteers take pride in striving to protect their homes and districts, but Smith wonders if that manner of fire suppression is viable in the long-term. "Would the volunteer brigades be happier if there were more firefighters trained and paid to protect their homes and their land?"
Her third stop will be New Zealand, where wildfires have long been considered dangerous. The 2000-01 fire season saw 4,100 vegetation fires, more than double the yearly average. The National Rural Fire Authority, which coordinates 3,000 volunteers, is midway through an ambitious 10-year plan that vows to contain all wildfires within two hours of the time they are first reported. Smith wants to examine fire management plans as well as increased funding from a new fire levy. Some of New Zealand's volunteer brigades have existed for more than 100 years, but Smith questions if contracted personnel might be the key to a more efficient and effective fire suppression system in both New Zealand and Australia.
In Ghana, Smith's fourth stop, there is no evidence that lightning causes any of the wildfires that have ravaged the country's rain forests in recent years. As in South Africa, subsistence farmers regularly burn their fields, a practice that allows fire to spread, at times, throughout the countryside. Part of the problem, she says, is that fire is an integral part of daily life in Ghana. Its uses range from cooking and hunting to protection from pests and snakes to the enactment of rituals. The relationship between fire and humans, she notes, is intensively personal and entirely detached from the concepts of fire safety zones and proper fireline widths.
"Ghana, like South Africa, seems to exemplify a country feeling the strain between a government that is attempting to introduce fire-suppression techniques and a society that is unwilling to change," Smith says. In addition to talking with government officials, she plans to stay part of the time in a small village to gain a better understanding of Ghana's mythology of fire and why its people are resistant to reducing the number of fires that rage each fire season.
In France, where government officials realize exactly how precious their forests are, Smith will study a professional fire suppression system that kept 95 percent of fires in one recent year from growing larger than 12.5 acres. As the European Union works to standardize wildfire management among its members, France is offering assistance to other countries.
In the United Kingdom, there is a history of rural landowners wielding everything from brooms to sackcloth to "beat" out fires. More recently, rural fire groups and brigades have banded together to respond to more than 40,000 fires annually. While similar in nature to volunteer efforts in Australia and New Zealand, the program in the United Kingdom is "far newer," Smith says. "I hope to compare their efficacy and come to a conclusion as to whether this is a strategy that will work in the long term."
Smith's final stop, Costa Rica, offers the most unique fire management situation. Its dry tropical forest evolved completely without natural fires due to the lack of lightning strikes in that area. While officials in some parts of the world argue that fire is beneficial to an ecosystem, scientists in Costa Rica "insist that fire is simply not helpful at all" in that country, Smith says. In recent years, field burning and carelessness have led to serious wildfires in Costa Rica. In 1998, for example, fire suppression supplies donated by foreign governments was insufficient to handle that year's crisis.
Smith says her overall hope is to gain a "truly global understanding of wildland fire, both of fire's benefits or detriments to differing ecosystems, as well as the impact fire can have on a society, such as the powerful nationalism exhibited by Australian volunteer rural firefighters or the mythology of fire that evolved in Ghana's tribes. If this trip does not answer my desire to find a response to wildfire that is balanced and shows promise of continuing and evolving naturally with the ecosystem around it, it will surely help me gain an understanding of the possibilities inherent in wildland ecosystem management."
Smith, a 1999 graduate of Everett (Wash.) High School, is the daughter of Phil and Barbara Smith of Everett. Smith, a bioethics major at Whitman, says her future plans focus on one of three possibilities: medical school, post-graduate studies in bioethics, or a career in politics with the ambitious goal of becoming president of the United States.
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