KEEPING WATCH

need transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:07

[Jack] Did you guys just because we’re a little pressed for time. Did you touch on the movement away from.

[Chris] Oh, no, No, we didn’t.

[Mark] Moving away from what?

[Jack] The movement away from the human fire lookout. And now what do you think is lost in the transition?

[Mark] Okay, I’ve studied the history, and a lot of these were built by the CCC during the thirties.

00:00:34:10 - 00:00:59:10

[Mark] Uh, you see some, what, 5000 lookouts nationwide. And when I wrote the manual, I think they were down to 200 that were manned. And everybody says, oh, they’re going by the wayside. And with satellites, you know, you can plot lightning strikes and aerial, uh, ships can come. And I’d like to think that we live here all the time.

00:00:59:11 - 00:01:30:12

[Mark] You know, they were looking at the place. I hope lookouts don’t go away. The human lookout. I hope not, and maybe GPS and all that.

[Jack] But why not? I mean, what. What can the human lookout do that, uh, a camera cannot do?

[Mark] Okay, so we’re replaceable. Uh, maybe it’s just the romance that I don’t want to give up.

00:01:30:15 - 00:02:20:15

[Mark] Um, I don’t know. It’s technology. And when I teach environmental history and you talk about wilderness, is it wilderness anymore? And like when Renee would go up to Sheepeater. She’d go up by horse and mules because you can’t land a helicopter there in wilderness. But what if we’re up in the Brooks Range in Alaska and you break your leg and you get out your GPS and find your coordinates and you use your satellite phone to call someone, maybe it’s a helicopter rescue and they come land where they’re not supposed to.

00:02:20:17 - 00:03:00:26

[Mark] You know, is that wilderness? Is it the end of wilderness? As Morgan Sherwood would say, when I teach Alaska history: is there wilderness anymore? And so maybe I to answer your question, I eschew technology, because as Aldo Leopold also said, writing in the 1940s, he said, what passes for woodsmanship then is simply the mastery of gadgetry. This is before GPS.

00:03:00:28 - 00:03:26:01

[Mark] You know, I had a compass and a contour map. I had smokejumpers down here and they and then I had to they couldn’t spell see the smoke. They’re going through timber. And I got at the maps here and you know, I take and there’s the smoke, there’s these guys are but wait and alidade is set to true north and they’re using magnetic north.

00:03:26:02 - 00:03:53:13

[Mark] You have to get the declination which was 18 degrees or maybe it’s 21 around here and you have to know that and then lead them into the fire and they couldn’t see it and you did that. But that’s using technology, of course. But nowadays I’ve and I’ve been away from it for a while, so I don’t even know what tricks they have up their sleeves.

00:03:53:13 - 00:04:00:20

[Mark] But maybe just for personal or sentimental reasons, I would hope that lookouts don’t go away.