New West Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
The Wallow Fire is now the largest in recent Arizona history, encompassing more than 500,000 acres. The media discussion of the fire often leads to misinformation and misunderstanding of wildfires, and feeds the political agenda of politicians, and industries from developers to the timber industry.
One of the problems of media coverage is that most reporters have little or no training in ecology, much less in-depth understanding of wildfire ecology. Context for large blazes like the Wallow Fire are often missing from reportage. The emphasis on fuels makes for easy reportage, but misses some important nuances that lead to simplistic solutions—the common refrain that if we only logged more of the forest such fires would be prevented.
It also tends to reinforce the idea that thinning is needed in all forest ecosystems, when in fact, many fire regimes in higher elevations and more northern locations are more or less still within historic norms.
Furthermore, there is a tendency to focus on the most unfortunate losses which can exaggerate the perception that such fires have done a lot of “damage” to people, seldom holding people accountable for their own losses because they have chosen to build in a fire-prone landscape.
First, large wildfires do not just happen. Media attention on fuels as the driving force in large blazes like the Wallow Fire misses an important and critical factor—fire climate/weather conditions. You can have all the fuels in the world, but if the conditions are not right for fire spread, you won’t get a large blaze.
Climatic/weather conditions are driving the Wallow Fire. The Southwest is experiencing what is described as a 500 year drought. We have not seen such dry conditions in centuries. Is it not surprising that wildfires are larger than in the recent past—when the climatic conditions have no analogy in the recent past?
Contributing to the large blazes are extreme fire weather conditions. Humidity is often 10% or less. Even green trees in the region are drier than kiln-dried lumber. Such green trees still laden with flammable resins and fine fuels in the form of needles and small branches are actually more flammable than dead trees.
The other major ingredient in the Wallow Fire and all large blazes is wind. Every increase in wind is not linear but exponential. A 20 mph wind doesn’t just double fire spread over a 10 mph but it can quadruple spread or more by throwing fire brands and sparks far beyond the fire perimeter. Winds in the Wallow Fire area have gusted to 40-50 mph, fanning rapid fire spread.
Another common reporting problem is the focus on the outer perimeter of the fire. The Wallow Fire has burned an outer perimeter of more than 500,000 acres; however, a significant amount of the land has not burned at all. There are many areas with a nice mosaic of burned and unburned forests.
And fire-fighting efforts themselves also contribute to the large acreage of the fires. Fire fighters, especially under dangerous and severe fire weather, do not attack wildfires head-on. Rather they use fire to fight fire, purposely setting blazes far from the fire front to burn out the fuels, and thus slow fire spread or to keep fires from burning homes and towns.
I do not know how many acres of back fires were set in the Wallow Fire, but in other large blazes across the West, as much as one third of the forest area burned is a direct consequence of fire fighting efforts, thus adding to the large acreage reported. Without acknowledging the contribution of fire fighting to total acres, the public gets an exaggerated view of the fire’s severity.
Another factor contributing to the fire’s large size and cost is the presence of homes in the Wildlands Interface. Across the West, perhaps the biggest factor contributing to increasing fire-fighting costs and also risk to fire fighters is the irresponsible actions of county commissioners and others who regularly approve home construction in the “fire plain”. In far too many instances, rural county commissioners promote home construction in fire-prone landscapes.
The fire plain is like the flood plain of a river. Sooner or later there will be fire in such areas—permitting home construction in such fire-prone landscapes costs all taxpayers who shoulder the costs of fire protection. This is a huge subsidy to these home owners. Ironically, in many cases, those who are demanding that the public pay for fire protection and/or forest thinning projects are the same ones who oppose any reasonable limitations on home construction in fire prone landscapes and frequently complain about excess taxes and government regulation. But they are the first with their hands out when they demand compensation if their homes are burned and are most vocal in their criticism of fire fighters for not protecting their property.
Finally there is the fuel issue. Historically, frequent low intensity fires burned through grassy understory of ponderosa pine forests killing tree seedlings and created open, park-like stands in some areas. It’s important to note that even in the past, not all ponderosa pine stands were “park-like”, nor were all blazes necessarily low intensity. Under extreme climatic conditions, large blazes did occur. So whether a fire like the Wallow Fire is really out of the historic norm depends on the spatial and temporal scale one is considering. A 500 year drought is not the recent historic condition. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that human activities have exacerbated the present conditions that have led to a greater abundance of dense forest stands.
There is general agreement that many ponderosa pine forests in the Southwest exceed historic tree densities. However, the ponderosa pine forests burned by the Wallow Fire are not hugely out of historic range of viability compared to other parts of Arizona. Eastern Arizona contains the largest percentages of mature/old growth ponderosa pine.
Furthermore, some of the higher elevation areas are cloaked in spruce and fir forests which tend to burn in stand replacement blazes and are well within historic conditions.
Thinning forests to reduce forest density can sometimes work to reduce the intensity of blazes and slow the spread of fires. However, we should recognize that we are treating the symptoms, instead of the ultimate cause of changes in forest density and composition.
One of the most important factors has been livestock grazing. Grazing has eliminated the fine fuels or grass cover that once dominated the forest floor in many low elevation forest types across the Southwest. These grasses regularly burned killing tree seedlings.
Trampling by hooves has disrupted soil crusts which in the past helped to reduce soil erosion, the loss of moisture, added nutrients to the soils, and prevented germination of annual species like cheatgrass.
The loss of grass cover and soil crusts by livestock grazing has also reduced the competition for water by tree seedlings, creating more favorable germination and growth condition for trees.
Despite the well known effects of grazing on fire regimes in this landscape, federal and state agencies allow livestock grazing to continue, contributing to the exact same conditions that have led to the dense tree stands.
Adding to the problem has been past logging of old growth pine. Large pines with their thick bark and self pruning loss of lower branches were more resistant to fires and less likely to “crown” out as blazes running through the tree tops. Loss of the larger pines has permitted many smaller trees to survive on the sites, leading to denser forest stands. However, the forest area burned by the Wallow Fire is probably closer to historic conditions than areas nearer Flagstaff where large mills eliminated nearly all the old growth forests.
Compounding the effects that grazing and logging has had on forests, is the on-going policy of fire exclusion. Despite the well known influence of wildfire on thinning ponderosa pine forests, public agencies seldom permit wildfires to burn unimpeded. The good thing about the Wallow and other large blazes is that it is resetting the forest landscape, removing dense tree stands. However, if agencies like the Forest Service continue to suppress fires, and allow livestock grazing, it will ultimately lead to the same dense tree conditions again.
Livestock grazing along with logging and road building has allow exotic weeds to spread throughout these forests. Many of these exotic species are more flammable than the native species they have replaced.
Thinning forests as proposed as a “cure” to the present forest situation may contribute more flammable forests in the future, especially if the on-going activities including livestock grazing, fire suppression, ORV use, and logging continue.
Those who are looking for simplistic answers often support thinning of these forests as a panacea for large blazes. Thinning near towns can contribute to more effective protection of communities. By reducing fuels near towns, one can deflect, slow, and sometimes even stop blazes. But that assumes that you can focus a lot of fire fighting man-power on the fire lines near communities.
However, widespread thinning, especially if it involves removal of larger trees, is not benign and the consequences of logging may be worse for forest ecosystems than anything that results from a large blaze. For instance, if logging requires new roads, it greatly increases the negative effects. Roads create access for people for hunting, trapping, and reduce the security cover for wildlife. Logging roads are also a major source of sedimentation in streams. There is sedimentation after a fire as well, but in most areas, sedimentation levels return to pre-fire levels within a few years, while roads “leak” sediments for decades. Logging can remove biomass from the forest, reducing the future occurrence of rotten logs and snags that are important to many wildlife species. As previously mentioned, disturbance of soils by logging equipment and road building can spread exotic weeds. Unless all these negative impacts are considered in thinning plans, one can’t determine whether logging will have a positive overall influence upon forest ecosystems or perhaps negative.
George Wuerthner’s New West blog is “On the Range.”
No mention of the “bloom” of bark beetles that will kill off the trees that survived the wildfire?!? The weakened survivors on “life support” will serve as “brood trees” for clouds of bark beetles. Salvaging some of the dead and dying trees could reduce the coming bark beetle explosion. Alas, I don’t see any chance that the CBD will allow such a thing to happen. Preserving the damages under some Hippocratic forest oath will lock out any fuels reduction projects leading to rehabilitation. Just as large parts of the Biscuit Fire re-burned with excessive fire intensity, the Wallow Fire mortality is far from over with, inside the Wallow Firestorm. Pretending that this fire is “natural and beneficial” ignores scientific facts. The “mosaic” you see today will be radically-different than in 5 years, 10 years and further into the future. The idea that this fire reduced the unnatural dead fuels buildups is incorrect. The unsalvaged mortality will fuel the next firestorm, which will continue to damage watersheds, ESA habitats, old growth and the rest of the forest features we depend on for clean water and clean air.
When will the nightmare of “passive restoration” end?!?!? It seems that the eco-community is deathly afraid of actions to reduce wildfires ignitions, spread and intensities. They are also afraid of “traitors” who come to realize that preservation doesn’t lead to “protection”.
Fotoware
I am not interested in protecting forests from bugs or fires. That’s like trying to protect a river from floods or coastal areas from hurricanes.
Or, apparently, catastrophic erosion, burned homes, endangered wildlife, jobs, recreation sites, archaeological sites, old growth, etc, etc, etc. If this were 1803, we could use your mindset but, the landscapes are so very, very far from the conditions of 1803. You seem to be saying that today’s wildfires and bark beetle attacks are “natural and beneficial”, and should be welcomed into our forests. That arson fires and escaped campfires produce results you support. That it is OK to “re-set” old growth forests via whatever burn intensity we end up with.
That mindset is definitely rejected by most Americans today, preferring big green trees, rich wildlife inventories and undying landscapes. It has been proven that active forest management is better at restoration than doing nothing, especially in the case of crowded and unhealthy ponderosa pine forests. Sure, go ahead and “preserve” dead Wilderness forests of pure lodgepole.
The main thrust of the story, that the media reporting Is misleading is absolutely correct. The bIased or uninformed reporting leads to further misinformed policies. The blame goes all around, but George makes some very accurate points here that are completely ignored by the media and policymakers. And further shunned by those unwilling to accept responsibility or the truth. If only we have a real conversation and find the points of agreement instead of disagreement, maybe we’d actually get some where.
Fotoware
The mind set that humans know how to fix things is how we got into the current predicament.
The dense stands of ponderosa pine are a consequence of previous management activities including livestock grazing, logging, and fire suppression. All of these activities are on-going. We will never get out of this predicament by doing the same old things over and over.
The first step in intelligent tinkering is to stop doing what caused the problem. If you have a headache from hitting yourself with a hammer, a smart first step is to stop pounding yourself with the hammer. Then we can talk about where to go from there.
I think the Indians did just fine in shaping their environment for their own prosperity and benefit. Actually, Indians were in much the same predicament, with big wildfires burning their camps and hunting grounds down, and killing tribe members.
So, we should block the future because we blame the past? Just how much logging went on last year in the Wallow Firestorm area?!? How many lumber mills are even left in Arizona?!? I place my trust in Dr. Stephen Pyne, who advocates the right treatments for the right pieces of land. His enlightened comments on the Wallow Fire say that it didn’t have to burn. The narrow-minded thought that doing nothing will fix our forests is ludicrous. I’m not saying that we should go back to the last millennium’s mistakes but, I AM saying that we cannot preserve away these unnatural forests without massive impacts to our human existence. It’s all too easy to blame the past without any valid solutions of your own.
Indians learned that managing their forests was essential to their very survival. Could the same be said for us?!?
Fotoware
There are three things wrong with your assumptions.
The first is that it would be impossible to thin the entire forest–or even a significant amount of it. The FS is doing the best it can do under the circumstances, which is to thin around communities so they can be defended.
Keep in mind that thinning is not a “one time” thing–especially as long as we continue to suppress fires, allow livestock grazing, etc. Trees grow back–and within 10-15 years in many areas–and the resulting forests will have a high stocking rate of young trees–providing the small fuels that allow fires to run through the woods. Long before you can thin an entire forest, you need to go back and thin the areas you first thinned. And the costs mount with each repetition. One has to be strategic about thinning since it’s impossible to treat an entire forest.
Second, even with thinning, fires burn through the forest. In fact, there is no scientific agreement about the effectiveness of thinning. Of course, there are all kinds of prescriptions on thinning and differences in age since the last time a forest was thinned, etc. that makes comparisons difficult.
Nevertheless, in some places, under some circumstances, thinning does appear to do what proponents suggest–it appears to slow fires. However there are plenty of places where fires just blast right through thinned forests–and in some fires even seem to burn with greater intensity.
For instance, on the Biscuit Fire in Oregon (Oregon’s biggest fire) thinned forest and previously logged forests had the highest mortality. Thinning can sometimes actually increase fire spread because it opens the forest to greater wind penetration, and drying of the fuels.
You are not thinking about the extraordinary weather/climate circumstances that are causing these large fires. While it’s possible to defend a targeted area like the edge of a community with a lot of fire fighting equipment, etc. it is impossible to stop a fire when the wind, humidity and drought are combined. That’s a fallacy. The best you can do is deflect the fire.
Third, as long as governments allow people to continue building in the fire plain, the situation will only get worse. The high costs of suppression are primarily due to the increasing costs of defending buildings in the hinterlands. Unless county commissioners, state agencies, etc. start to restrict construction in such areas and/or start to require insurance to pay for fire protection much as flood insurance is a requirement for those living in flood plains, than the rest of us are paying for the poor decisions of those who want to live out in the woods.
You want to talk about high costs of suppression, start complaining to county commissioners who are allowing people to build in the fire plain and expect the rest of us to pay for their fire protection costs, including thinning the forest.
The ESA says that we MUST defend Endangered Species Habitat. Whether the danger comes from logging, or wildfire, we cannot afford to lose any more habitat. Without habitat, many listed species cannot survive. No one is saying that all lands would be thinned. Lovely strawman! If the Forest Service was “doing the best it can”, why would they be pushing for a new Planning Rule that could be a game-changer? Yes, they face a steep uphill battle to get projects implemented on the ground but, Indians also expended much effort to manage their lands, as well.
In many areas, projects could, indeed, be a “one time thing”. After an initial reduction of live and dead fuels, prescribed and “natural” fire can do the rest, both ecologically AND economically well. When we get to that sustainable state, yes we CAN treat significant areas of our forests.
With site-specific science, we can choose one of many tools in a forester’s toolbox to reach the desired conditions. And, yes, one tool is to just let the land be, if that is what the science says. When there are too many trees per acre for the annual precipitation, densities MUST be reduced. Where species compositions are out of balance with the historical baseline, we can selectively thin to get more balance. Fuels reduction projects also reduce fire intensities, as you can see in the Wallow Firestorm picture released by the Forest Service.
I worked for 3 weeks on the Biscuit Fire salvage sales, and I saw some stands that were unlogged old growth with 99% mortality. Also contributing heavily to the extreme fire behavior on the Biscuit is the unsalvaged portion of the 1987 Silver Fire. Re-burns are significant dangers, causing longterm soils damage and accelerated erosion, due to heavy fuels close to the ground. Also impacting the Biscuit Fire is an increase in post-fire bark beetle mortality. They chose to cut only completely dead trees, and leaving the trees dying (but not dead yet) from bark beetles. I saw a photo of a cutting unit I worked in and was amazed at how many more trees died since I was there. The bark beetles didn’t stop at the USFS property line, either. The fireline was very close to the property line, and the private land was riddled with bug trees.
Thinning stands back to historical densities and species compositions should offer no problem with increased fire behavior. Where I live, unthinned forests have structurally-weakened trees in them, due to less wind. This last heavy winter has resulted in a bumper crop of broken-topped trees over a very wide area.
The Biscuit Fire was “caused” by letting a lightning strike burn. With so many human-caused fires, why preserved overstocked and unhealthy forests? Do we select which kinds of fires get to burn unimpeded? There is a tiny window of decision, when a wildfire is small, to decide whether to let a fire burn, or to go with full suppression. The Feds have their “Let-Burn” program, which doesn’t follow required NEPA. This program is turning $3000 lightning fires into $50,000,000 fire storms. In Utah, they let a fire burn for weeks, until the winds came up and the escaped fire covered 12 miles to the doorstep of New Harmony. Take a look at the fire costs for individual fires this year. Blaming people for where they live is ridiculous. Many people have lived in the woods for decades. I have Forest Service land right across the street from me, and it could use a prescribed fire. Sadly, from a liability point of view, the Forest Service would rather let fires burn during hot and dry conditions, rather than lighting a prescribed fire. Private landowners can sue if a prescribed fire gets away. If a Let-Burn fire gets away, landowners are screwed, and have no recourse in court.
I do agree with you that zoning has to be smarter. However, you cannot tell an existing resident to move. In the example of Lake Tahoe’s Angora Fire, the Forest Service didn’t do enough to protect a long-existing subdivision next to unhealthy Forest Service lands. The brushlands of the LA Basin are a good example of where not to allow homes, unless you want to provide your own fire protection.
It’s all about appropriate action, and I feel that important parts of our existing forests are worth saving from catastrophic wildfires. You seem to believe differently.
Fotoware
Thinning if it is kept up and is used to buffer places like communities and other important areas can work–at least with a lot of fire fighting power behind them. That is strategic use of thinning.
But timing of thinning (when was the last time it was thinned and subsequent treatment–has there been follow up prescribed burns) greatly influences the effectiveness of these treatments as I suspect you know.
If you just finished thinning and burned the area just prior to the fire, you get a lot more effective results. But we are not going to ever have the money nor the resources to treat all the forests. And I am not trying to make a strawman here. Many do advocate treating millions of acres, and as I pointed out, by the time you finish treating one area of a forest, you need to go back and repeat the treatments, and the job multiples.
Plus there are a lot of negatives that come with logging. I might wager, for instance, that introduction of weeds by logging equipment may well have far greater repercussions for forest ecosystems than if they burn up in a fire. And weed introduction is only one of many typically ignored or downplayed costs often associated with thinning operations. Sure one can point to places that have burned and where there are weeds as well, especially if there are livestock in the area, but in general, the more human activity the greater the chance of weed invasion.
Weeds are only one of many negatives associated with thinning operations.
Furthermore, I think thinning advocates are exaggerating the effectiveness of such activities, especially under severe fire conditions.Sure thinning may stop or slow a fire under “normal” weather conditions. But under “normal” weather conditions, you don’t get 500,000 acre fires.
I have seen many thinned forest stands, even clearcuts, that were cooked in fires under severe fire conditions. And since these large fires are the only fires we are typically worried about it, it is an important question. And it’s a question that is difficult to study scientifically.
Thinning may also be dangerous in that it may foster even more construction in the rural landscape because it could give people a false sense of security.
By analogy thinning may be like the levees that burst in New Orleans. Those levees had held back floods for decades. So everyone assumed they worked. But there was never a direct hit by a category five hurricane until Katrina. Then we discovered that the levees didn’t work. Many thinning operations are like that. They may work under “normal” conditions. But put the ecological equivalent of a category five hurricane (big wildfire) and many of these thinning projects fail.
Who is going to set a fire in controlled plots with a 500 year drought, 50 mph wind, and 10% humidity to see whether the thinned plots fared better than the unthinned stands. The best we can do is visit and look at fires that have occurred and see how they have burned through lands that for one reason or another were previously treated. Assuming that all other factors are equal like topography, wind, and so on. When you do that, you find many failures in thinning projects to stop or even slow fires.
The response one gets from thinning proponents is that we just need to thin more. But it’s reasonable to ask whether there will ever be enough thinning to really be effective–under those severe fire conditions.
There is also a sense I get from many that somehow eliminating these large fires is desirable. I am not so sure we would want to do that. The vast majority of all acreage in any single year is a result of few large fires. If you remove the large fires, you get very little fire “work” being performed. Most fires do not burn very much land. It is the large fires–the ones that everyone wants to eliminate–that does all the work.
If as many agree that wildfires are critical to many ecosystems. Many things occur in the severe fires that does not occur in the moderate fires.
As for homes in the woods, sure we can try to protect some of those homes, but maybe it’s time to say to folks, you build in the woods, you need to get insurance. And we surely should not allow them to rebuild in such places.
I think people have enough information to decide whether to follow George, and push for doing nothing, or to follow Dr. Stephen Pyne (THE most respected wildfire scientist), and use science and sociology to decide what to do with a particular piece of land. Congress will do what is right for their individual constituencies, unless they vote the strict party lines. The new Planning Rule should be coming out this fall, and we will see if America is progressive enough to accept New Millennium treatments, or whether to fall back on the 1982 Rule, yet again. Also important to decide is whether to continue to give firefighters control over a flawed, destructive, expensive and illegal Let-Burn program. Their on-the-fly analyses do not meet NEPA or ESA laws, and continue to shut out stakeholders.
Will the Wallow Firestorm be a giant legacy to our offspring? How severe will the floods and erosion be, when the monsoon comes? When will evacuated communities be allowed to return home? Many, many more questions need answers and our government doesn’t have many answers, right now. In the meantime, it is “Burn, Baby, Burn”!!!
Hey, why not read his OWN WORDS!?! I very much agree with his take on the Wallow Firestorm.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/2011/06/11/20110611pyne-wallow-fire-monster.html
Nowhere did I advocate continuous harvesting, and nowhere have I pushed for using thinning in every nook and cranny on every Forest. Over and over I keep saying that site-specific science and rural sociology (as in fire safety for towns) should decide what to do with a particular piece of Federal land. Once forests are restored to more natural conditions and fuels loadings, it might be a long time before there is another timber sale there. Nothing about “continuous, cyclical, industrial harvest”.
Read the piece and tell me what you think. I am 100% behind Pyne’s commentary.
Also of interest in that article is the comments. Already, it seems, the Wallow Firestorm has become a political football, even before it has stopped burning. We’ll soon see Phase 2 of this disaster when the monsoon rains come and cannot penetrate the “melted” hydrophobic soils, channeling it into a destructive, erosive force. Yep, didn’t you know that fires and floods often go hand-in-hand?
And so much for this year’s crop of Mexican spotted owls or other young of the year.
But that’s “good” because it makes the owl more endangered and longer to recovery, if ever.
Now we are looking at flooding come monsoon season. That should be a pretty time.
The Wallow is an environmental disaster of epic proportions, thanks in large part to lack of prescriptive management. Sure, the whole thing might not have been fireproofed, but forestry belts and routine management over time (which George opposes) would manage fuels and preserve the vegetative attributes that create habitat. Managing break belts with fiscally-self-supporting timber harvest and processing operations would without a doubt have broken up a 700,000 acre fire into what, 50,000 acres?
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the results of a crown fire running up into a managed unit and either stopping or at least hitting the ground for a beneficial underburn.
I feel spoken to, since I write about wildfires and I use the acreage figures reported by the agencies, however, I’m always careful to use the words “fire footprint.” It’s a but much to explain in each and every article that there’s a burn mosaic within that footprint, and so on, blah, blah.
Fact is, there’s an accepted definition for reporting the size of a fire, and that’s what most journalists use. If you want to start a discussion about coming up with a new definition, I think that’s a fine idea.
Ripping on journalists who report on fire as a public service is a different story.
Mr. Berwyn: this issue is that the USFS and BLM don’t report damage estimates because they don’t do that kind of reporting. They report their costs to fight the fire, and that is an ongoing budget item for the next fiscal year. That they don’t report damage is because the Govt lawyers tell them not to. Or they don’t want the public to find out the real economic costs of fire allowed to burn without suppression efforts.
There is a fire perimeter, which can be gps conjured by rolling a measuring device on a map, and then making a circle out of it and use pi and there you have the area of the fire. Sure, not everything inside the line is killed by the fire—yet. In some forest regimes, 90% of the burned through but still green needle trees will die in the next three years. And then the beetles will get the rest. That mosaic of “unburned” is fuel, and “mop up” will have “hot shots doing burn outs in fuel pockets inside the perimeter of the fire..” and who hasn’t heard or read that fire report more than you ever want to???
Journalists, especially television, are into the nomex shirt and pants, and looking oh so helpful. Journalists are what they are, and come in a variety of grades and sizes, and truthfulness. The old adage about don’t believe all you read is good advice.
The issue with journalists posting Govt press releases as news is that they are nothing more than a cog in the propaganda mill that our government has become. A politicized propaganda mill for the ruling party, and of the ruling party, for the ruling party members who are on the public payroll. Ugly deal, but just what we have become. The fire folks like fire, and fire is their business. As it now stands, the allies of fire and the fire budget are the crazies of the Green NGO lobby who WANT fire, and will take fire over logging any time and every time. But if there were to be a compiled account of economic loss, opportunity loss, species loss, and resource loss, and damage to the watersheds and atmosphere, it would not reflect on the ongoing project to burn our legacy and heritage forests as a “told you so” deal about how “bad man is” and “it is the greedy capitalists” who are at fault. The real issue is that vast economic dislocation and dire economic outcomes have become common and widespread, and there is a body of folks who want this fire crap stopped, yesterday. They know it is not about “climate change” and “global warming.” It is about trees that grow every year, and seedlings that arise every year, and that drought does not stop trees from growing, but it does slow them down and it does kill the weakest, and that is all about fuel. Trees that are removed can’t burn. Remove enough trees, and the remainder, the survivors, will have more water and do much better in droughty times, and be open crowned and spaced so that fire is not often apt to get into the crown and run. Instead, the fires moseys around on the forest floor, and does the house keeping, and the renewals, and life is great. Just like it was for 15,000 years under Native American management.
I read an ethnobotanical discussion of pinyon pine nut culture, and how it was incumbent upon nut gatherers to take a strong stick and whack off low lying dead limbs so that ground fire would be less able to climb into foliage and kill the trees, which, after all, were providing a significant food and key to survival as the nuts could be stored. You had to maintain your pinyon pines if you expected to get nuts every year. Concept!!! And at this time, not a part of USFS management and their lexicon of acronyms and words on speed dial. Managing your resource for use and dependable outputs on an annual basis. We have lost our way, these United States, and we really do have to find it in ourselves to reclaim our common sense and move ahead. Hard to do when so many are on the dole of public service, public retirement accounts, public distribution of collected taxes to others than who earned the money in the first place. I believe that is called socialism, and was not a part of what this country was supposed to end up like. The predicted end results of socialism are sloth, dependence, and failure, and what do really think the USFS and BLM have turned out to be??? Rudderless in a sea of destruction that Native Americans long ago lived with and learned to avoid by pro active decision making and actions. How flipping hard is that to understand?? We have screwed up the forests, and now they are being consumed and if you think that is good, don’t bitch about the smoke, or the floods when the monsoon comes, and it will. The smoke is from the “plume”, which is now known to be carrying away as much as an inch or more of top soil, and all the organic material in the top soil as well as several to many tons of nitrogen per acre. Hot fire is NOT a benign event. It is an earth changing event.
It would behoove some journalist somewhere to gain the knowledge to be able to responsibly and knowingly report on wildland fire. He or she would be the only one.
Nice story on the piñon nuts, I heard the same thing from some Mono Basin Paiutes I used to hang with. But in the nuanced world some of us live in, there’s a difference between trying to get out some basic facts about a burning fire: How big is it, which way is it moving, how many people have lost their homes; and writing explanatory articles or opinion columns that dig a bit deeper to try and get closer to the truth of fire’s — and humans’ — role in forest ecosystems.
George, I agree with you.I don’t know if you know this, but, aside from the drought,(we had NO winter rain or snow here) this spring was the windiest spring many people here in SE Arizona could remember. Every day , for months it seemed, the wind picked up and blew ferociously. another day, another red flag warning, you might say. this drove the fires mercilessly and must be taken into account as a major factor for the spread.
The Republican State legislators politicized this fire horribly, blaming environmentalists and the feds, demanding that people were being denied the timber and grazing they deserved. ” Why shouldn’t we harvest it all ,if it is just going to burn anyway?” was the ‘logic’. As you know ,that kind of illogical logic can only lead to wholesale denuding of the forest for fear it might burn. DOH! As to the ranching, as far as i know, cattle ranchers have always had pretty damn good, and pretty damn inexpensive access to our public lands. so why would they complain, they have had GREAT access for next to nothing. Everytime you find a headwaters, a spring a pond or a creek, it is already mucked up with cowpies a plenty. Cattle helped spread a lot of the weed seeds too. that, and overgrazing have changed the nature of the forest, which have made it more susceptible to these bad types of fire. unfortunately the regional Arizona Republican representatives used that fire, to try to score political points . There are a number of them down here that feel the state should be able to re-take federal lands. oh boy, would that be a disaster. the land would be squeezed of every last resource it could give, without a second thought for the most important resource WATER, or wildlife, or soil or regeneratrion of timber and other support species either.. they also forget that federal dollars fought that fire. the fact is , right when we needed sound science and sound management, these politicians played on the tragedy to score anti environment, anti government, anti conservation, and anti good management points. i get more ashamed of these representatives by the day.
as to the ‘mill’ jobs. i have lived in a number of mil towns in the west and known lots of loyal employees who worked at those mills. problem is, the mills take all the good stuff then move on. i remember up in NE oregon. first they made lots of long term promises, then as soon as the getting was good, they left their employees high and dry to go chase faster growing trees in the south. then they left there, headed for SE asia, where it gre even faster and labor was cheaper. they always go lots of points for blaming environmental laws whenever they left an area, but the fact was, these multinational ,large corporations had NO loyalty to the area, the forest, the community, or their employees, they were in it to skim off the best , then move on, leaving locals, who by the way, gave them a lot of ta breaks to operate there, with a lot of dashed dreams and ruined careers. so be careful what you see as pie in the sky, you’ll be left worse off than you were before.