Speak Softly and Plant Big Trees: American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century

“I’m standing by the kicker on the cat guard, and the only jewelry we have left are a few Hansons and a strangler, plus some econo.”

For some readers, the previous sentence will be incomprehensible. But for the nearly 140 American smokejumpers who boosted the North Peace base in British Columbia last summer, jargon like this (which translates to: “I’m standing by the series pump on the dozer line, and the only accessories we have left are a few inch-and-a-half nozzles and a hose clamp, plus some toy hose”) became part of our working vernacular for two weeks, along with phrases like “chin-wag” (conversation), “we’re laughing” (it’s all good), and, of course, the supremely versatile “eh” (right, you know, come again, etc.).

A resource order to Canada is the most legendary dispatch an American jumper can receive, coming down three times in the last 20 years. The bureaucratic jiujitsu required to deliver smokejumpers across the 49th parallel is exhausting, so for the powers that be to even consider such an undertaking, circumstances must be extraordinary. For those of us who make a living trying to limit the damage caused by modern wildfires, however, extraordinary circumstances are fast becoming routine.

In early June, as smoke from Ontario dimmed east coast skies, New York City reported an AQI of 342, making Central Park’s air the unhealthiest in the world. On July 31st, Copernicus, the European Union’s atmospheric monitoring service, reported that “accumulated carbon emissions from wildfires across Canada total 290 megatonnes,” putting the fires on track to double the emissions produced by the entire Canadian economy. By August 10th, more than 30 million acres had burned in Canada, with another two months of fire season left. While skimming figures like these has become a mundane ritual of modern existence, it’s worth giving these numbers another moment of consideration. Especially because 2023 (which also included the Lahaina Fire, the deadliest American wildfire in a century) is likely to be positively mild, compared to the fire seasons of 2033 and 2043.

Discussing the future of our forests has led many journalists to adopt a tone of hopelessness. The August 4th, 2023, episode of The Daily, a New York Times podcast, is titled “Fighting Canada’s Unending Wildfires,” and features an interview with climate columnist David Wallace-Wells. The host asks Wallace-Wells about potential solutions regarding fire management. Wallace-Wells replies:

“Unfortunately, I don’t think there are great options out there…It used to be tempting…to think that if the world really got together, we could get a handle on this problem…But I think the lesson of the new age of wildfire is that we have much less control over a lot of these forces than we like to tell ourselves.” 

Wallace-Wells’ grim resignation typifies a novel strain of self-doubt infecting American discourse. Since its founding, the United States has cultivated a mythology that the people of this country can achieve the seemingly impossible. Whether it was a handful of colonies wrestling independence from the world’s largest empire or building a railroad across thousands of miles of wilderness or sending men to the moon, each triumph strengthened the sense of uniqueness first observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. Although deeply flawed in myriad ways, the ideology of American exceptionalism has also been a powerful force for good in the world, particularly when compared to other regimes that have sought global supremacy.

However, if one idea is gaining traction across the political spectrum, it is that the United States no longer has business masquerading as the world’s leader. Increasingly, we understand ourselves as either exploited and embattled, or imperialist and corrupt. Either way, the growing wisdom on both sides of the political aisle is that we should disengage from the global community and confront the problems at home. This pervading neo-isolationism has manifested in a series of self-inflicted disasters: the ongoing catastrophe of our immigration policy, the haphazard attempt to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, the mismanaged retreat from Afghanistan. Somehow, even as the threats facing the human race grow exponentially, citizens of the most powerful, dynamic, diverse country ever known have begun to think, No, nothing is required of us; or, worse, No, nothing can be done.

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The energy at the North Peace Smokejumper Base between June 18th and August 1st was chaotic. The base, built to house 50 jumpers, sometimes had twice as many bodies wandering around, everyone tensed for the gong’s earsplitting clang. I showed up with the second wave of Americans, and while exchanging high fives with the boosters who’d arrived two weeks prior, I noticed the bruise-colored circles ringing their eyes, the bulge of three Zyns stacked beneath their lips, the number of stories that ended with, “…and then, we lost it.” There was jump gear strewn over every inch of the ready room, people hustling to refurb pump kits as components arrived from the field, and 13 jumper-staffed fires listed on the Ops board. The prevailing sense was of an organization stretched beyond its operational capacity, functioning only because everyone involved was putting forth maximum effort. 

This feeling, of being outgunned, deepened on the fire-line. Jump ships regularly flew past multiple fires chugging across the tundra before reaching the incident to which they’d been dispatched. It became routine to look around under one’s parachute and see three separate columns punching up into the troposphere. My first fire was 40,000 acres, staffed by a DC3 load, a unit crew (the Canadian equivalent of an IHC), and a four-person IA module. The temptation to surrender was omnipresent: what could we do to corral so much combustion? Wasn’t this, objectively, pointless?

Yet no one succumbed to the bleak cynicism poisoning modern discourse. Instead, on fire after fire, smokejumpers Canadian and American alike did what we always do: we invented strange rituals to bond with each other, we adapted to the circumstances and agreed on objectives, and then we battled hard to achieve said objectives, even in the face of long odds. In many ways, the Canada boost offered a microcosmic framework for what robust American diplomacy might look like going forward.

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Climate emergencies will increasingly come to define 21st-century international politics. Floods, hurricanes, and droughts will spawn refugee crises, destroy infrastructure, and challenge borders across the world. Wildfires in particular will metastasize in intensity and costliness, and many regions that haven’t had to worry about fire will be caught unprepared. John Vaillant writes in his new book Fire Weather: “This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years…It hardly needs to be said that more CO2 leads to more heat retention, which leads to more fires, which leads to more [CO2]…We are, right now, witnessing the early stages of a self-perpetuating and self-amplifying feedback loop.”

It is time to recognize the grave circumstances we now face and take aggressive action. It is time to rethink which institutions we prioritize, where we allocate resources, and how we exercise influence.

America’s reliance on our military as the centerpiece of our foreign policy has been one of this nation’s greatest mistakes, a strategic error that leaders have doubled down on over the past two decades. In War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Ronan Farrow chronicles the systematic gutting of the State Department since 9/11, as American generals replaced diplomats around the globe. Farrow argues: “The point is not that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements.” Farrow outlines how the United States’ militarized adventurism has led to an anti-American radicalization in the Middle East, an increasing distrust among our allies in Europe, and a turn toward China throughout the world. While we order drone strikes and bankroll proxy wars, the Chinese Communist Party has meticulously cultivated influence by funding infrastructure projects across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America.

In a world convulsing with climate catastrophes, the United States’ land management agencies should assume a preeminent role in our nation’s strategy of soft power. American firefighters should be available to assist on wildfires in Australia and Central America and Canada much more frequently. American foresters should be consulting with their counterparts in Brazil and Indonesia and Angola about how to optimize for carbon sequestration and stand health. The Forest Service’s International Program and Disaster Assistance Support Program should be vastly expanded, so that when calamities occur in Nepal or Colombia or Algeria, there are American civilians present who can help set up a command structure, help manage logistics, and help mitigate the suffering. Not only because it is the right thing to do, but because in the realpolitik of great-power competition, maintaining a non-militarized, assistance-based presence around the world is vital to our national interests and security. 

Especially when that assistance arrives with an attitude of humility and flexibility. There are countless stories of ensuing failures when American aid-workers built projects without consulting the local people first: cobblestone roads in Afghanistan no one uses because they hurt camels’ feet, food donations bankrupting small-scale farmers in India, wildlife reserves displacing African villagers from their native lands. The history of conservation is especially riddled with good intentions gone awry, as hubristic environmentalists with scant contextual knowledge have repeatedly tried to impose simplistic “solutions” on complex problems in faraway lands.

The Canada boost stands in stark relief to these blunders: upon arrival, American smokejumpers received a thorough in-briefing on the nuances of Canadian firefighting. Around the base, Canadians conducted tutorials on how they pack cargo chutes, use radios, and organize pump kits, and Americans followed along. On nearly every fire, a Canadian acted as JIC, organizing logistics and determining tactics, while Americans cut line and wrangled hose.

We were there to support our Canadian counterparts, not teach them how we fight fire. We were there because every mission was simultaneously difficult and outrageously fun. We were there because they asked us to come. There are few experiences as edifying as working alongside people from a different cultural context, in a foreign environment, to accomplish something self-evidently important. Imagine how much more confident, resilient, and creative our society would be, if every American had that kind of opportunity.

As another election cycle ramps up, and makeup-caked candidates blast doom-mongering toxicity over our airwaves, we should remember: fortitude doesn’t trickle from our leaders down. It wells from the people up. Even though many of our current politicians are clearly ill-prepared for the challenges of this era, most American citizens are much tougher than recent years would suggest. But our obsession with victimhood and blame-assignation has gone on long enough.

We need to wake from this fever-dream of petty tribalism and start thinking seriously about how to confront the genuine, but solvable, problems facing our country, and the world.

Prioritizing America’s starving land management agencies is a patently obvious first step. This past July was the hottest month in recorded history. We are on the cusp of allowing our world’s forests to transition from net carbon sinks to net carbon emitters, largely due to wildfire. The suffering guaranteed by allowing such a transformation to take place is akin to moderate-scale nuclear warfare, yet the Department of Defense’s budget is 140 times bigger than that of the Forest Service. 

Isn’t it finally time to reevaluate which of our institutions are likeliest to contribute to a desirable future, and reconsider how we define national strength? Wouldn’t America be better off, if our best and brightest were incentivized to become silviculturists, rangers, and fire management officers? Might the Forest Service and BLM have an easier time attracting the young and talented, if well-remunerated, entry-level opportunities to work abroad abounded?

That month and a half in Fort St. John, B.C., was a good start. But perhaps it’s time to think bigger. Amazon Smokejumpers has a good ring to it, doesn’t it?