Smokey Bear

The Smokey Bear fire suppression campaign, launched by the U.S. Forest Service in 1944, became the most successful conservation messaging effort in history — and one of the most ecologically destructive. By framing all forest fires as preventable catastrophes, the campaign suppressed the low-intensity burns that had maintained North American forest health for millennia, leading to catastrophic megafires when accumulated fuel loads finally ignited. The Smokey Bear story is a paradigmatic case of Engineering Resilience thinking defeating Ecological Resilience through the power of a simple, wrong narrative.