The Forest That Needed Fire to Live

In the summer of 1988, wildfires consumed nearly 800,000 acres of Yellowstone National Park. Television cameras captured what looked like total devastation — blackened trunks, smoldering meadows, ash-gray hillsides stretching to the horizon. Rangers wept. Journalists called it a catastrophe. To every eye, death had won. But lodgepole pines, which make up eighty percent of Yellowstone's forests, carry a secret.…