fire

I woke up this morning to smoke rising above Main Street. One of the old turn of the century redwood buildings was in flames. Quick work by the local volunteer firefighters may or may not have saved the shell, but for sure the inside is badly gutted. A restaurant is out of business for the near future, and 7 young guys living upstairs are essentially out on the street.

I saw the owner of the restaurant on the sidewalk, she was crying.

I couldn't stay very long, because I had a meeting in Weaverville today... only about 90 miles inland, but more than two hours driving time because of the winding nature of Rt. 299, and because of localized one-way controlled traffic related to cleanup efforts from the recent wildfires in Trinity County. Actually they're still burning, probably will be until the first rains in a few weeks, but things are pretty much under control for now. Unlike two weeks ago, I couldn't really see any smoke from the road today, just a few crews cutting up and hauling off burned trees which were in danger of falling onto the road. But at the meeting we learned that about 260,000 acres have burned since June in Trinity County alone. Blackened ground is visible more often than not from Big Bar to Weaverville. The cost of fighting those fires, both financially and in lives lost (at least 11 firefighters) and in health risk (from particulate matter, or PM 2.5) is mind-boggling.

We debated the fires at the NCUAQMD meeting; I agree with my counterpart from Trinity County that the Smoky-the-Bear mentality of the past 80 years, the conscious policy of suppressing fire, has been a slow-motion disaster. I strongly diisagree with my counterpart from DelNorte County, who thinks that salvage logging is the answer.

That's because dead down wood and standing dead wood (known as "snags" in forestry jargon) are essential habitat components for everything from bats to woodpeckers to salamanders, and they don't contribute all that much to the fuel load. Instead, it's the even-age structure of forests managed for logging that's the problem. They're much too dense relative to their pre-settlement condition, and mostly the same size. So if fire gets up one tree, it jumps to the next, and the next. Soon there's a raging crown fire. A few years ago when fires burned in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the old growth... with its complex multi-layer canopy... escaped with little more than ground fires and an occasional charred trunk base. Adjacent second-growth stands of Douglas fir, even age, went up like an oversized bonfire. There wasn't a lot left in some places.

The inland forests are a lot more vulnerable than the stands in that park, because it's hotter and drier inland. I did see a few recovering stands today which looked healthy, widely spaced mature trees which had survived the fires, only grass below, all the once-dense saplings burned away. Run a nice safe controlled ground fire through there every few years, after the first fall rains when fire is easy to control, and it may be a very long time til catastrophic fire revisits those stands. But other areas are thickets of young shrubs and saplings, tinderboxes waiting for a flame. These are areas where fires were so hot that even the big trees died; now young vegetation fights for space, crowded shoulder to shoulder.

In even age stands, selective cutting may be a good thing. Take half the trees, or even more, out of there, leave the biggest trees and a few smaller ones, and then follow up a few years later with fire, and there's hope for those stands.

Fire is an essential part of the equation, for the simple reason that for thousands of years Native Americans burned the woods. Fire was frequent and of low intensity, and the ecosystem is adapted to that fire. Ironically, in that time before subdivisions, there is evidence that in southern Oregon fires were set by a lone woman as she harvested seeds from last years fire-dependent plants (the guys were probably waiting downwind, bow at the ready for that deer about to flee the fire... but that part is speculation).

Burn enough times, over enough years, and the presettlement open woodlands would eventually return. But modern humans are impatient creatures, unwilling to wait for the sapling that survives every 20th year when it's too wet to burn, unwilling to wait another 70 years for it to grow to maturity. Old-growth structure takes time to develop. I'm fine with helping it along though, at least in managed forests, even-age forests, by culling some of the trees, releasing the remainging ones to sunlight and more rapid growth. Once, or maybe at long intervals that is... because logging = soil disturbance = erosion.

The bottom line is that we can't do it without prescribed fire though. Selective logging by itself only postpones the problem (assuming the contractor doesn't just take the big trees instead of ther small ones they're supposed to when no one is looking, as was documented in one Texas study on Forest Service land... in that case, risk is almost immediately increased). Doing nothing doesn't work either, because that's what got us where we are today.

As is so often the case, the "solutions" pushed by the more extreme special interest groups won't work. What the loggers and their backers want won't work, or at least it's only part of the answer, done the right way and in the right places. And what the more extreme environmentalists want, the hands-off, myth of pristine nature approach, won't work either, because there hasn't been unmanaged land in this place in several thousand years. Hands off old-growth, most of the time, yes... although even there, in most woodland types, an occasional low-intensity managed fire is a good thing. But unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of old growth left. The rest, the disturbed stuff, needs a pretty serious push back toward equilibrium. We may not always get it right on the first try, but it's about time we get out there and start learning.