This tends to fulfill a nice role in the natural cycle, but only when nature herself is experiencing a proper cycle. In the past few decades, temperatures have been rising in the region, and a life cycle that was largely restricted to an adult stage in the brief alpine summer of late June through August has now moved up as much as a month or more. Simply put, the bugs are looking for more to eat, and they are also getting higher up on the slopes that would have been too cold for them to handle. What gets left behind?
Dead forests that just explode when a fire happens to come into the area. There have been a lot of big changes to the Rocky Mountain ecosystems lately, and with the High Park Fire being news lately, this has raised a lot of big questions yet again in the political arena.
I had posted on this earlier, in a post on the source of the Colorado River. I used cautious language then, as I often do in this blog, because I want people from a wide variety of political viewpoints to read what I have to say and discover the raw beauty of our landscape without turning away because of some fear of a radical conservationist viewpoint. While I do not retract my statement made in that post about the insect issues in Colorado and elsewhere, I will say that what has turned our forests dead has probably been the insects. You see, this is what is so tricky about this and so many other issues regarding the natural world. Environmental issues are heavily politicized and the preservationist instinct is so strong that some times conservation efforts also turn into a semi-religion while the opposition points this out and tries to gain the upper hand by decrying such sentimentality. One of the "religious" issues, of course, is wildfire.
For most people, an image of a forest fire would probably be a bad thing. Most of us from North America are familiar with Disney films, among them the famous Bambi which featured a scene involving scared animals running from a huge forest fire towards the end of the movie. I know it scared me to death when I saw it as a child, especially since I was familiar with the lovely forests of northern Ontario in which I grew up. This and other images in popular culture have stuck with us, and the idea that forest fires are bad have been seared into our consciousness ever since. Frightening and tragic news images of homes being destroyed have only added to a public fear and distaste of wildfire. We get upset when a church burns down, and sometimes even more so when the cathedral of nature is torched. Surely, then, wildfire is an evil to be expunged! Not quite, but nor is it to be actively embraced.
This sort of thing got wild land management into big trouble throughout North America when it turned out that protection efforts and suppression of fires, regardless of whether they were naturally occurring or set by humans, were actually detrimental to the natural cycle of many ecosystems. Fire, you see, is an agent of change, often a very good one. Our grasslands, in fact, depend on it, to the point where our native peoples actually set fire to prairies in order to clear out dead grasses and rejuvenate the soil. Oak savannas, the southeastern pine barrens, and other park-like openings in the wetter east actually existed both because of soil conditions and because of fires that kept the landscape from turning into a forest. The Jack Pines (Pinus Banksiana) of the Boreal forests can actually reproduce only when fire opens their cones, and the towering Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus) formed a supercanopy over a dense lower canopy of beech-maple forests throughout the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley because that lower canopy would sometimes open and fire would take care of competing trees.
As noted, native peoples would sometimes do burns of their own to create better hunting grounds or farming conditions, but by large nature was in control of the landscape. Fires would often be caused by lightning, sometimes indirectly by smoldering within a great tree. Dry fuel like grasses would often easily catch fire, while in other places towering pines in the supercanopy would be an easy target for the wrath of a storm. This is where speculation and modern observations made during abnormal conditions can often take us for a ride however. In some cases, we might even tend to think that fire happened so often that without it, nature can't cope! Fortunately, people with some amount of an appreciation for a broader picture work at the United States Forest Service, and have left us with a map that theorizes what natural fire regimes should look like:
 |
| Courtesy United States Forest Service: Brown, James K.; Smith, Jane Kapler (2000). "Wildland fire in ecosystems: effects of fire on flora". Gen. Tech. Rep. RMRS-GTR-42-vol. 2 40,56-68. |
I would absolutely love a map like this for Canada and Mexico, but I take what I can get...
Looking at the light creams and yellows of the grasslands and the blues of the eastern tallgrass prairies, savannas, and forests, we see that fire could have indeed been a frequent part of the natural cycle, perhaps to the extent that annual fires were not entirely unexpected. What it is important to note, however, is that while some areas (mostly grassland and openings) were prone to frequent fires, most of the map deals not with the concept of "stand replacement", meaning a massive fire that pretty much burns everything from underbrush to canopy, but in fires that burned the understory and/or mixed levels of the canopy.
We would also do well to note the situation regarding southern California, where fire has always been quite misunderstood (including by your author, who had to correct this post on California a few times). Southern California is often prime disaster candy for the evening news, complete with mudslides, earthquakes, and yes, devastating wildfires which take out those poor, unsuspecting multi-million dollar homes in Malibu and the San Gabriel foothills. This has led to a scouring of the native chaparral ecosystem both by the developers, who want to rid the hillsides of what they see only as flammable vegetation build up, and the preservationists, who think that prescribed burns every year are good for the chaparral and prevent the manzanitas from getting too "overgrown and tangled". The truth of the matter is that such fires have been devastating because of our control, both intentionally good and ill, over natural fire regimes in the wild, which, while intense (among the hottest in the world) are also not as naturally frequent as suspected (once every few decades to a century or more). Thankfully, the fine folks over at The California Chaparral Institute have been doing their part to educate the public on fire issues in southern California (while also getting into a tricky and perhaps unnecessary battle with the USFS -see note at end-). I mention the institute and focus so much on the example of California because it pretty much cuts to the core of what this entry is all about:
Fire, as you can see, is misunderstood by just about everyone. Our climate is decidedly changing, and I leave my readers to argue about whether you think it is from the hand of man or a natural cycle, but the fact is that these massive wildfires, which supposedly all started from lightning, have also been impacted by poor wild land management in the past and accelerated by abnormally warm and dry conditions. Again, this largely depends on the fire itself. Colorado's High Park Fire is from an overabundance of fuel and favorable conditions. The Duck Lake Fire in Michigan was accelerated by extremely favorable conditions despite having to burn through very wet bogs. In both places we may see some truly wonderful regrowth in regions that should have eventually seen stand replacements, and we hope that the importance of defensible space and wise wild land management will set us in a favorable direction for the human factor in the future. In any case, be it involving beetles, budworms, fire supression or fire spreading, too much of a thing can turn out to not be good.
I have every hope that as we continue to develop technologically and better our communication patterns and processes, we will also learn more about the greater world around us. I have been fortunate in that my education and experiences have guided me into broader viewpoints in regards to conservation efforts, but at the same time, what I have seen in my travels across the continent in the last few years as well as my recent work in monitoring and controlling invasive species in southeastern Michigan has left me asking a lot of the big questions. The plan for American Voyages includes perspectives on the whys as much as the whats of North America, so expect more coverage of environmental issues when they arise. The purpose of this blog, after all, is to share with my readers what this continent is all about, and in doing so, we can all better educate ourselves on the world around us to both understand it and help prevent wasteful destruction.
Note on the United States Forest Service (USFS):
The USFS is a good organization that has had its ups and downs through a rather turbulent existence. In order to even exist for much of their history, they have had to promote forests and grasslands as places of multiple use, to please both development and preservationist interests. As noted, the California Chaparral Institute is currently in a position of thinking the USFS is out of its mind in regards to prescribed burnings and forest management in the San Gabriel Mountains. I hope that both sides can overcome shortcomings in communication efforts and understand what needs to be done in the best interest of a very fragile southern California. As such, I recommend checking out both the Institute's website:
http://www.californiachaparral.com/
And the USFS's publication on wildfires, which is a truly amazing resource:
http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr042_2.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment