Yosemite is special. In 1864, amid a bitter civil war, Congress set aside Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, ceding management to the state of California. At the time, the Miwok Indigenous people annually burned both the Valley and the Grove to facilitate access, hunting and prevent bad fires. Between the fires caused by lightning strikes and travellers burning along trails (to keep paths clear and assist hunting), the backcountry burned as well. Smoke was constant and, according to early observers, scorch marks were visible on nearly every tree: ‘There is not to be found now in the whole forest any tree of great magnitude which has not upon it the marks of fire.’
However, it was those lands savaged by ‘fire and axe’ – ‘skinned’, as a later US president put it – that so often accompanied the evolving European imperium and led to demands for intervention. State-sponsored conservation, mostly through extensive forest reserves, became a global project, part of the sanctioning of European rule. Staying the axe was politically problematic, but success was easily measured. Ending fire was more intractable.
From the beginning, Yosemite’s fires provoked controversy. Authorities denounced fire as environmentally damaging, a kind of vandalism; an emblem of unenlightened primitivism; and messy, an index of social disorder. These were views commonly held by Europe’s elites, and accepted as axioms by foresters. They applied as much to Europe’s traditional fire users (and settler newcomers) as they did to Indigenous peoples in colonies from California to India and Australia, and in Europe itself, from Finland to Greece. The United States’ first professional forester, Bernhard Fernow, dismissed the causes behind the country’s simmering landscapes as one of ‘bad habits and loose morals’. Western Australia’s conservator of forests, Stephen Kessell, grumbled that ‘only a few years ago the general public felt no compunction about setting the wild and untended forest alight whenever opportunity presented itself.’
Nearly everywhere that Europe or European-inspired modernity went, it found landscapes routinely ablaze, and everywhere authorities made fire’s suppression a foundational doctrine of conservation. Protecting forests from fire was a hallmark of civilisation. Yosemite’s Board of Commissioners applauded Galen Clark, ‘guardian’ of Yosemite, for shielding the park from wanton fire. Park commissioner Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for designing Central Park in New York City, denounced ‘Indians and others’ (primarily shepherds) for their promiscuous burning. Even John Muir, the genius loci of Yosemite and one of era’s great observers of nature, wrote in 1876 that fire ‘is the arch destroyer of our forests, and sequoia forests suffer most of all’.