52 pages • 1 hour read
Timothy EganThe Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Public Versus Private Interests
Conservation is the effort to protect species from extinction, maintain and restore habitats, enhance ecosystem services, and protect ecological diversity. This effort is motivated by the values of biocentrism, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, and sentientism. Throughout their careers, Roosevelt and Pinchot worked to make conservation, a relatively new idea in the early 20th century, a matter of public interest. For them, America’s landscape was a public good that should be valued for its own sake and protected by the government, in the same way that monuments and cathedrals in Europe were considered national treasures worthy of protection. Roosevelt even expressed this view with foreign heads of state by showing them America’s landscape and touting it as a national treasure.
Though Roosevelt sought the public’s help in making America’s landscape a national treasure that the public could enjoy, his views on conservation represented a direct challenge to private businesses that had a vested interest in exploiting natural resources for financial gain. If Roosevelt were to set aside land for public interest, big business could not deplete the land of its resources for private monetary gains. Roosevelt and Pinchot frequently faced opposition from monied interests and the politicians that supported them. In the late Gilded Age, corruption was rampant. Members of congress often acted as mouthpieces for the businesses who put them in power—as did police officers, judges, local politicians, and newspapers.
In The Big Burn, the fight between public versus private interest comes to a head with the Great Fire of 1910. Roosevelt and Pinchot created the Forest Service as a way to protect America’s landscape. The two men looked toward America’s future by instituting policies to help preserve America’s wilderness. Through manipulation, members of congress fought against the Forest Service and what it stood for, thereby aligning themselves with short-term goes for money and profit. Roosevelt quickly added huge swaths of land to his conservation effort just before congress acted against him. Though Roosevelt won a victory against private interest in doing so, with congress against him, he and Pinchot were unable to get additional money or manpower to maintain the forests that the Forest Service should have been protecting. This in part led to the Great Fire, though there were also a number of natural developments like a dry season and catastrophic winds that also exacerbated the situation.
When Roosevelt left office and Taft replaced him, Taft bowed to the pressure of private interests and allowed parcels of land to be not only sold off but logged without restriction. Private interest and big business stripped forests to a point that left them liable to fire. There was also an overwhelming sense of dread from the rangers who worked in the Forest Service as congress and big business worked together to ensure they had very little to do their jobs. The Big Burn highlights how America has always suffered from a conflict of interest between the public and private sectors. Roosevelt and Pinchot’s fight is especially relevant currently with the fight against climate change. Congress is currently easing restrictions on how big business operates in once-protected areas, setting up further disagreements between public versus private interest.
The Evolution of Labor
Roosevelt’s National Forest Service helped bring tracks of wilderness under the protection of the federal government. It also created jobs for forest rangers. However, these jobs were low paying and threats to cut government funding made the positions precarious. Rangers even had to provide their own supplies. The jobs were also dangerous and lacked prestige. The jobs also pit rangers against homesteader’s and other workers, including miners. Due to the danger and low-paying wages of many jobs, the general public often didn’t concern itself with conservation or preservation. Most men wanted simply to put food on the table and/or engage in whatever pastime they chose without thinking of the future. Much of this disregard for the forest is what helped to fuel the Great Fire of 1910. Many laborers in the West lived and worked among the forests but didn’t care or know about the danger of fire.
The Industrial Age brought an increase in wages, which attracted labor from across the world. However, anti-immigrant sentiment was also rampant, and many immigrants found life difficult in the United States and lacked protection from discrimination. They performed the worst jobs for the lowest pay. Many, such as Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone, joined the Forest Service. Bruno and Viettone were also involved in fighting the Great Fire in 1910, and both perished in the flames. Egan’s description of a plurality of languages being spoken while fighting the fires helps underscore how the fight to save lives and protect land was fought by some of the country’s newest arrivals.
Unfortunately, after the fire, the federal government largely ignored the contributions of the firefighters, shortchanging them on wages, medical care, and recognition. Many families also never received wages from deceased workers, or when they did, found the pay docked. Egan shows just how much the United States depended on labor at the time but also didn’t want to show responsibility for the death of so many laborers by paying. This highlights the continuous battle for recognition of workers’ rights despite, a battle that still wages to this day despite the evolution of labor.
Balancing Ecosystems
The Big Burn raises the issue of how we can best balance our presence in the environment with the preservation of land and its ecosystems. The delicate balance between civilization and nature is displayed in the Forest Service’s belief that it could prevent fires, and that such prevention was a good thing. However, forest ecologies have existed since before civilizations, and they require certain natural events to flourish—including fire. Egan notes that Native American populations understood how fire was a necessary part of the forest’s life cycle, but white settlement of the West—which included the killing and forced relocation of Native Americans—erased much of that knowledge. Pinchot, too, takes the fires personally and determines to prove that the Forest Service can prevent them altogether despite knowing this was a risky promise. Pinchot later admits to himself that his younger self was far too optimistic and that forests do need fires to effectively balance the ecosystem.
Egan’s narrative also laments the presence of humankind in the West; specifically, the presence of big business ensures that the wilderness remained imbalanced. Big Business stripped forests of trees and left such destruction in its path that forests became kindle for fires. Big business then added the destruction of modernity in the form of machines. Machines helped to tear down forests at a faster rate, but as Egan points out, machines also cause sparks. With this unbalanced scenario, fires like the Great Fire of 1910 were inevitable. To better balance humankind’s presence with the natural environment, protections like Roosevelt’s are necessary to ensure that humankind doesn’t use up any and all resources and deplete ecosystems to points of no return. This also ensures that past events like the Great Fire of 1910 don’t happen again from lack of knowledge about what each ecosystem needs to survive effectively.
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By Timothy Egan
