Coming to PBS’s American Experience and to DVD today, Tuesday, February 3: THE BIG BURN
Stephen Ives’ recounting of an infamous forest fire makes its debut on the venerable PBS program as well as on DVD.
In the Summer of 1910, an unprecedented wildfire claimed more than three million acres of forest in the Northern Rockies in about a day and a half. As the nascent – and overconfident – US Forest Service attempted to combat the blaze, calling upon several companies of African American recruits – the Buffalo Soldiers – to aid the effort, they found themselves facing the near-impossible task of reining in Mother Nature. As argued in Ives’ informative if conventionally structured film, which is based on historian Timothy Egan’s book, the grave lessons learned from the devastating blaze spurred Washington to expand the protection of the nation’s public lands, and to adopt policies to prevent its repetition – with both good and bad consequences. While the 1910 fire made legends of the valiant men who fought it, creating the image of the forest ranger as a selfless national hero, the standing order that resulted, to suppress every subsequent forest fire, may have unintentionally backfired, removing a natural, replenishing cycle of small wildfires and instead turning swaths of forest into fuel for larger, more destructive fires to again blaze out of control.
what (not) to doc 