I think the tide may be turning on perceptions of forest management and forest fires. NPR ran this story today on the legacy of fire suppression.
The idea that every fire is bad and should be put out runs contrary to centuries of evidence of ‘natural’ fires. A lightning strike. A fire runs its course. The Father of American Forestry, Gifford Pinchot, found evidence of frequent fires in tree rings:
On June 2,1900, Gifford Pinchot was riding horseback through park-like stands of ponderosa pine on the Mogollon Rim near Chevlon, Arizona. As he rode up onto a ridge he noticed a fire-scarred tree that appeared to have recently died. He dismounted, and taking a hatchet he chopped into one side… On the cut surface he could see the annual tree rings and the successive scars that had formed by the re-burning of the resinous scar boundaries each time a surface fire swept past the tree. He counted the tree rings between the scars, and then he estimated the dates of each fire. In all he counted 14 separate fires, the most recent in 1898 and the earliest in 1785. (Swetnam and Baisan 1994, p.11-12)
In a natural fire regime, yes there’s damage. But because fires are periodic, when they occur they are not the massive, raging beasts they are today. Forests looked different pre-fire suppression. Did you know that? Here’s a photo comparison as an example:
The photo above is from Klamath National Forest (Oregon). Photo from CA Department of Fish and Game, found at this link.
So now we have these massive tinderboxes of forests just waiting for a match. Possibly from a bored firefighter arsonist (for real).
An interesting thing though, is that the story never mentioned forest management like thinning as a solution. Maybe that will be another part in the five-part series. My 17-year old self thought cutting a forest was just awful, immoral even. What I didn’t realize until taking a Sustainable Forestry class is that leaving a forest alone… no harvesting, no thinning, no fires… is actually a kind of management. Or mis-management, because the result is an unnatural build-up of fuels and a forest ecology that doesn’t match patterns from pre-European settlement.
Here’s a short list of the damage to ecosystem services from fire suppression:
- Reduction of water quality from increased sedimentation from catastrophic fires
- Reduction of water supply (in some areas)
- Loss of habitat (for example, the endangered Red Cockaded Woodpecker’s favorite home is longleaf pine forest with frequent low level fires)
- Potential loss of sequestered carbon
Madsen Environmental 