Haven't posted on the Rim Fire, which has been burning for nearly two weeks on the western slope of the Sierras, not far from Yosemite National Park. Big destructive fires trouble me, and the conventional wisdom on wildfire is that climate change will make matters worse, and, frankly, that's part of the reason I didn't rush to post on this one — didn't want to go down that road blindly.
As the fire continued to burn, a prominent forest advocate, Chad Hanson, came forward with an essay in Earth Island Journal in which he argues that, contrary to those sort of fears, this kind of "high-intensity" fire is exactly what the Sierra and its wild creatures and plants need. To wit:
The fire, which is currently [301,000] acres in size and covers portions of the Stanislaus National Forest and the northwestern corner of Yosemite National Park, has been consistently described as “catastrophic”, “destructive”, and “devastating.” One story featured a quote from a local man who said he expected “nothing to be left”. However, if we can, for a moment, set aside the fear, the panic, and the decades of misunderstanding about wildland fires in our forests, it turns out that the facts differ dramatically from the popular misconceptions. The Rim fire is a good thing for the health of the forest ecosystem. It is not devastation, or loss. It is ecological restoration.
Hanson has a point. The forest ecology of California depends on fire, and always has, and those who understand it, as the Native Americans did, see it less as fearful than useful. Or even beautiful. Here's a description of a fire sweeping up from the foothills into forests by John Muir, who stopped on a journey into the Kaweah in the Southern Sierra to admire the work being done.
(Thanks to Harold Wood and the John Muir Exhibit for tracking down this quote from Our National Parks)
I met a great fire, and as fire is the master scourge and controller of the distribution of trees, I stopped to watch it and learn what I could of its works and ways with the giants [Giant Sequoia]. It came racing up the steep chaparral-covered slopes of the East Fork cañon with passionate enthusiasm in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again, the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering a lake, creeping and spreading beneath the trees where the ground was level or sloped gently, slowly nibbling the cake of compressed needles and scales with flames an inch high, rising here and there to a foot or two on dry twigs and clumps of small bushes and brome grass.
But in that passage Muir subtly makes a distinction between a ground fire, which doesn't threaten great old sequoias, and a crown fire in the tops of the trees, which travels fast, and can destroy any kind of tree, according to the experts. The not-good fires the experts feared have come to us today.
Maggie Stevens gives us just Nine Scary Facts about Rim Fire, in a fast Buzzfeed-style explainer for Mother Jones, and yes, it's scary. Tens of thousands of acres burning, and every indication that this is connected to the fact that this has been the driest year in recorded history in California. Tom Swetnam, a fire expert at the University of Arizona, has a talk on this subject from April of this year, in which he includes a graph of spring temperatures in the Western U.S., showing a huge spike in recent years.
Spring temperatures are really important in forests. If you have a warmer spring, the snow melts, and the water runs off, the fuels dry out, and the forests dry out, and wildfires occur. You can see this in the records, ever since l985, and 2012 really smashed the record of warm springs set in l910. Incidentally, in l910 we had enormous wildfires in the Western states, with more than a million acres burned in the Rocky Mountains, and more than eighty people killed.
Does Hanson accept this? Not really. He speaks of the importance of snag forest habitat for biodiversity, mentioning the black-backed woodpecker evolved to hunt for beetle larvae in burned forests, but scoffs at the end that we are seeing a fundamental change.
These are species that have evolved to depend upon the many habitat features in snag forest — habitat that cannot be created by any other means. Further, high-intensity fire is not increasing currently, according to most studies (and contrary to widespread assumptions), and our forests are getting wetter, not drier (according to every study that has empirically investigated this question), so we cannot afford to be cavalier and assume that there will be more fire in the future, despite fire suppression efforts. We will need to purposefully allow more fires to burn, especially in the more remote forests.
He ignores spring temperatures, and the fact that as the climate warms, the Sierra will receive more water as rain and less as snow, evidently assuming that all "wetness" is equal.
So, there is no ecological reason to fear or lament fires like the Rim fire, especially in an era of ongoing fire deficit.
Or: "All is for the best, in this best of all [ecologically] possible worlds, as Pangloss said. Sort of.
Really? Wish I could be so doubtless. The experts polled by Wired paint a more nuanced picture.
Some parts of Yosemite may be radically altered, entering entire new ecological states. Yet others may be restored to historical conditions that prevailed for for thousands of years from the last Ice Age’s end until the 19th century, when short-sighted fire management disrupted natural fire cycles and transformed the landscape.
In certain areas, “you could absolutely consider it a rebooting, getting the system back to the way it used to be,” said fire ecologist Andrea Thode of Northern Arizona University. “But where there’s a high-severity fire in a system that wasn’t used to having high-severity fires, you’re creating a new system.”
But the possibility that this is not an unmitigated disaster does allow me to appreciate artist friend Barbara Medaille's painting of fire (posted recently on fb) called Crowning.
So that's something. The Rim Fire's awesomeness cannot be doubted.
Kit Stolz 