Today’s post is by Richard Jurin who, before his retirement, ran the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, launching a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. Today he writes about about human involvement in forest fires in the USA. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
When Europeans first began colonizing the American continent, so vast and unbroken was the American forest, that it was said that a squirrel was able to travel from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Mississippi River without ever having to touch the ground. In the west, a horse rider was able to ride fast through the forest because it was large trees separated by lush meadows under the canopy. Trees were merely thought of as a source of lumber, or worse, just an impediment to farming, and rampant deforestation ensued for over 300 years. In 1891, Carl Schurz, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, lobbied for the Forest Reserve act to protect what was left of the American Forests from total destruction. Yet, this Act was still unable to stem rising tide of forest depletion. Schurz believed that if logging was left unchecked, the great American forests would be gone by 1920, as has occurred in both France and Germany during the past century.
In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) was established with a unique mission: to sustain healthy, diverse, and productive forests and grasslands for present and future generations. Today it protects 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands, and manages 193 million acres of land. From the outset, the forest service was obsessed with fire prevention, providing lumber to pay its bills, and allowing multiple use of the forest lands. German forestry expert Carl Schenk created the first U.S. forestry school in North Carolina, in 1898, to teach scientific principles of forestry. While the supposition was that forest ecology would be central tenet of management, the reality was preservation of trees for future utility. By the 1930s, fire ecology was recognized (especially in the western States) but it was largely left until the 1960s before forest fire management was implemented in earnest. By this time, there had been a half century of fire suppression and mature trees now stood in dense groves throughout the nation where once only very large mature trees had dominated within a natural fire ecology system.
A British friend of mine on visiting the USA commented that he has never seen so many trees. Indeed, the USFS has a reputation for planting 1.4 trees for every one cut down, but it is mostly monoculture. There are now more trees than there were in 1891 when Schurz had first expressed his concern over deforestation. The problems being faced now in the USFS are not that there was mis-management but rather that the ecological system was not known or simply misunderstood.
Six principle factors interact to produce the firestorms (pun intended) that now engulfs many of the western States every year now (and also other fire ecology’s worldwide).
– First, we now see that the not-so-rare pattern of drought has been occurring and getting steadily worse since 1900. The forests and soils are naturally drier than a century ago.
– Second, winters are not as consistently frigid as they used to be, thereby allowing the survival of wood boring insect infestations that hatch and can easily travel between trees in the now denser forests (e.g., The Pine Beetle). Beetles tend to prefer specific species so forest management that preferred fast-growing monoculture trees merely added to the problem. The now large swaths of dead trees stand like fire-kindling awaiting the first lightning strike or careless flame.
– Third, many pine, fir trees and other plants in a fire ecology require short intense heat to stimulate seed germination and to clear out ‘brush’ allowing young plants to fill in gaps within the open glades and forest canopy. This mosaic pattern of forest growth spurred by more frequent fires creates healthier, biodiverse, and well-spaced forests.
– Fourth, fire suppression was the primary concern of the USFS and in 1944, the Smokey the Bear campaign actively began to get the public to prevent fires in the National Forests, not recognizing the benefits of fires and the ultimate consequences of preventing fires for many decades.
– Fifth, fire suppression allowed dense forests coupled with a dense understory of bushes and dead timber. This made ‘Crown fires’ more common that burned the whole forest from understory to tree tops. Short searing fires down in the understory were once more usual. Today, the USFS is trying to mitigate for crown fires by thinning trees (selective cutting), setting controlled burns to remove the dense understory, and cutting wide fire-lines to reduce the likelihood of crown fires leaping the gaps. While fire-lines have worked to some degree, the intensity of out-of-control crown fires means many pine and fir trees literally superheat, with the sap exploding like a flame thrower to nearby trees regardless of the fire-lines.
– Finally, human hubris in thinking that by managing one or two variables (e.g., fire and lumber) we are managing the whole system of complex and interacting variables that make up a healthy and diverse forest.
The USFS now runs 193 million acres [301,562 square miles *] of wild lands that have been ecologically mismanaged despite the scientific principles used to guide forestry practices. These forestry practices are common in many countries, so until massive and very costly mitigation occurs, monstrous forest fires will do the job of thinning the forests for decades to come.
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Richard can be contacted at: richard.jurin@risebroadband.net
Notes
[*] By comparison, the UK’s total area is 95,960 square miles (61.4 million acres)
Editor’s note: Click here to see a short video exploring what “the greatest good for the greatest number” means today. Although it’s about the USFS, it explores themes that are universal and pertinent across contexts, and hence useful for class debates about management practice.