Anyone been to Yellowstone lately???
this is from Gregg Easterbrook's weblog...EASTERBLOGG
NATURE'S REVENGE ON THE CALIFORNIA RECALL: Why is Southern California burning? Because it's supposed to, as far as nature is concerned, at least.
Before people began interfering with forests in the arid Western United States by "managing" them--and research shows that indigenous Americans were engaged in significant forest management long before Europeans arrived--a natural cycle of forest fire and regrowth was standard. Douglas fir, the grand tree of the Pacific Northwest, has been specialized by evolution to rise rapidly in open fields where there is no shade. A tree can't spring up in an open field naturally unless nature has just cleared the field, by fire. (Most tree species of the humid Eastern United States are "shade-tolerant" and evolved to grow slowly amidst other trees, because forest-leveling fires are rare east of the Mississippi.) California's lodgepole pine makes cones sealed in hard resin. Toss a lodgepole pinecone on the ground and nothing will ever happen. Toss one of the cones into a fire, however, and heat melts the resin, releasing seeds. Natural selection conditioned this tree's seeds to survive wildfires and then repopulate the forest.
When men and women settled the American West in large numbers in the nineteenth century, they began fighting wildfires. One result was that forests became denser, because the periodic minor conflagrations that occurred naturally in the West, removing brush and tinder ("fuel," to foresters) stopped occurring. When Lewis and Clark and others of the period arrived at West Coast forests in the nineteenth century, they described open woodlands through which anyone could easily stroll. Today, most forest areas of the West are so thick you can't go off-trail without a machete. Periodic small fires no longer take out underbrush and "understory," the medium-sized vegetation that dies, dries, and provides fuel to heat trees to the temperature at which they burn. Stopping periodic small Western forest fires allows fuel to accumulate, increasing the chance of an eventual fierce, uncontrollable fire that heats trees to the flame point across a large area. Stopping periodic small fires, and thus allowing the woods to grow dense, also means the condition people think of today as "natural" for Western forests--thick growth and lots of very old trees--is in most cases artificial.
About 25 years ago environmentalists, preservationists, and others began to argue against most active management of forests and other public lands. Nature should be left to its own devices, they maintained: including the ending of deliberate "thinning" of forests to reduce fuel, and the resumption of natural fire cycles. Managers of Yellowstone National Park adopted a let-it-burn philosophy and the result did not take long to arrive, in the form of the catastrophic Yellowstone fire of 1988. As far as nature is concerned, Yellowstone is already fine again--forest regrowth was spectacular and rapid, since natural selection conditioned the species of Yellowstone for regrowth in the wake of fire. The "real" property (buildings) destroyed in 1988, on the other hand, did not regrow. The money spent rebuilding them could have been used on something else. Health care, say.
Because standard assumptions about forests and other public lands have in the last 25 years trended toward disdain for active management, especially toward disdain for fire management, the time-line of wildfires shows they were common in the nineteenth century; declined in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century; and have been on the rise again since. Here is the National Interagency Fire Center's chart of "historically significant wildfires". Nineteen of the 32 historically significant wildfires have happened since the year 1980.
Although environmentalist sentiment is behind the fad for disdaining forest management, it's important to bear in mind that Sierra Club lawsuits and similar things are not, of themselves, to blame for the recent surge in wildfires--a charge sometimes heard from the Tom DeLays of the world. Fire cycles are natural; no form of woodland management could prevent all fires. In addition, people's voluntary choices have, over the last generation, increased the likelihood of wildfires, and the likelihood they will do significant property harm. Recent decades have seen construction of millions of homes too close to forested or brushland areas (sometimes, of course, spectacular vacation homes built by people who consider themselves environmentalists), putting men and women increasingly into the natural paths of wildfires. Also, building expensive homes in places that might burn increases the property-loss consequence of wildfires. The Sierra Club is not to blame for the fact that affluent Americans want fancy homes with spectacular views.
But the disdain for (and, in recent years, sometimes legal banning of) human "management" of the woods plays a role in the rising of dangerous wildfires. Time to drop the illusion that everything can be natural in a society of 285 million citizens. People are here and we're not going to go away; people and forests and brushlands are in closer contact all the time; this leaves us little choice but to return to some version of managing lands to exert power over natural fire.
"Thinning" must be practiced in many forests--enviros don't like it, but the main effect of thinning is to restore, mechanically, the pre-European open-forest condition. Environmental restrictions on some lands must be eased. Many "scrub" lands in southern California have for about 20 years been off-limits to anything much beyond game wardens on foot, owing to lawsuits involving the California gnatcatcher; the result is buildup of scrub land undergrowth, which has now dried and caught fire. What foresters call "defensible areas"--the boundaries between housing developments and forest, the sorts of places lighting up in the current California fires--must especially be managed to prevent wildfires. There's no pure-ecologist theory that can describe any of this. What's needed now are pragmatic steps to manage wooded areas so they don't erupt into uncontrollable flames.
Note that, since it is fashionable to deride George W. Bush's environmental policies, the president's "healthy forest" initiative, unveiled months ago, contains many provisions aimed at exactly the sort of pragmatic management that would reduce wildfires. The "healthy forest" bill was blocked in the Senate by Democrats and enviro lobbyists, who expressed horror at the thought of artificial intervention in the forest. Wednesday, as San Diego burned, the Senate passed the legislation 97-1. Bush's plan is far from perfect, but will move forest management back toward realism.
And, yes, the Bush plan will lead to some increased logging. After loggers come through there is a big, denuded open field. A big, denuded open field is also what is left after a wildfire. Better to arrive at the big, denuded open field artificially, avoiding death and destruction while creating logging jobs--since the Douglas fir will be just as happy to grow in the big open field regards of whether nature's fire or people's saws cleared the land.
