Requiem for the fire lookout

Enhanced video camera technology, the prevalence of cellphones and the relentless march of development into wilderness areas are leading to the extinction of an American icon: the fire lookout. For more than a century, fire lookouts (employed by the U.S. Forest Service and others) stationed on remote mountaintops have been the first responders to forest fires, alerting firefighters and residents to dangerous blazes. But over the last 40 years, the number of lookouts employed in the U.S. has been decreasing steadily.

In a Future Tense article for Slate magazine, Jack Fitzpatrick, a student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, writes that this trend is about more than mechanization and cost savings: “Lookouts are more than government employees. They represent the independence that Americans want to see in themselves.”

Fire lookouts made their cultural mark in the 1950s and 1960s “when literary figures including Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Norman Maclean worked as lookouts and drew inspiration from the seclusion of their mountains.” Fitzpatrick argues that lookouts are culturally resonant because they fuse together two seemingly incompatible sets of cultural values: the quest to conquer and control nature and “the Buddhism-influenced sense of oneness with nature that inspired writers like Kerouac and Snyder.”  

Sophisticated cameras paired with smoke-detecting pattern recognition software and GPS are steadily replacing the pensive, brooding poets that once staffed the lookout towers. In addition, the combination of development of roads and houses in once-isolated areas with the growth of cellphone ownership means that many fires are called in before a lookout can spot them. Fitzpatrick reflects that an ineffable human touch is lost as this unique profession fades away: “As most lookouts are replaced by cameras, software and cellphones, America’s forests will still be under watchful eyes – but they’ll have lost that soul.”

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society.