Wildfire
Fire, Part 7: Americans and Wildfire
Wednesday, March 31st, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Society, Wildfire.
All images by Max unless otherwise credited.
Previous: Government and Wildfire
Go West, Young Man!
Why is it so hard for our government to walk the talk, to do what it says it’s doing – to work with fire instead of against it? Why are wildfires getting bigger, and more destructive, reducing suburban neighborhoods and sometimes entire towns to ash, killing dozens of rural citizens, choking millions of city dwellers with dense clouds of smoke, requiring more and more massive paramilitary efforts to control?
It might help to take a fresh look at our history.
In school, I learned about the European Age of Discovery, in which brave explorers like Columbus and Magellan set out in wooden ships to cross oceans and discover new lands. I learned about the first settlement of North America by Pilgrims, English refugees fleeing religious persecution. I learned about the gradual colonization of eastern North America by the English, as part of the growing British Empire. The American Revolution, in which the colonists rejected British rule and established a democratic nation, the United States, based on the sanctity of individual freedom.
I learned that the United States began a new era of democratic nations, an era of freedom and democracy that gradually replaced the old European empires, all over the world. We were no longer English – from now on, we were Americans, a free people who had left the Old World behind. We went on to develop our own culture, with our own heroes and institutions.
I was born and started school in the upper Ohio River valley, in the foothills of the western Appalachians, surrounded by deciduous hardwood forest, where I spent most of my free time outdoors exploring nature. Our town was the first U.S. settlement west of the Appalachians, founded by George Washington’s senior officers in the wake of the American Revolution, capital of the new “Northwest Territory”.
But they’d built the town around prehistoric Indian mounds, an extensive ceremonial complex of the vanished “Hopewell” culture. My dad gave me his collection of arrowheads found by our farming ancestors, and even before I started school I was pulling fossils out of the banks of the creek behind our house. So from earliest childhood I was not only steeped in American history, I had abundant exposure to deep time, and a passionate curiosity that came from direct personal experience, not from books or classrooms.
One of our family vacations took me to North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, deep in the Appalachian spruce-fir forest, where I met Cherokee Indians and toured the mammoth Fontana Dam and hydroelectric generating station, which destroyed a vast area of natural riparian habitat as part of liberal President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Another trip took me farther east to the nation’s capital, colonial landmarks like Williamsburg, and the decisive Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg.
As described in Part 1 of this series, we moved west to Indiana after I turned 8. Away from the dark, forested eastern mountains, to the flat, open cropfields of the Midwest. I learned about the Indian Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, after which this region was settled by my ancestors, and the forests cleared for farms and towns. I looked for Indian mounds in remnants of forest that survived beside the small, serpentine rivers, but the indigenous presence had been completely erased here.
Nevertheless everything seemed old. Many of our buildings, even new ones, copied the East Coast Colonial style, with brick walls and white columns. Government buildings echoed the neo-Classical styles from ancient Greece and Rome that were popular throughout the eastern U.S. My new hometown’s heyday had been the Victorian period of the late 19th century, so our downtown, and many of our biggest homes, consisted of brick and stone buildings in the English Victorian style.
We’d been taught that we were Americans, and our country represented a dramatic break from the Old World and a fresh start in the New, but actually I was living in a European Colonial town, surrounded by a landscape that had been tranformed to look like the English Midlands.
My formal education in ecology began under Mr. Carrigan, my high school biology teacher. He cultivated a special relationship with me, introducing me to soils, soil fauna, and pollination, encouraging my fascination with snakes, intermediaries between the surface world and the hidden, mysterious underground. I spent my last summer in that place living on an ancestral farm, falling in love with the wild forest and river that bordered it.
I started college at the University of Chicago, which was modelled on Oxford University in England. The U of C’s undergraduate curriculum was based on the Great Books of Western Civilization, so I became even more mired in our European cultural legacy. The U of C was not that unique – all of what we call higher education is European in origin, structure, and practice.
But from there I was catapulted far west, to northern California, echoing the 19th century mass migration that settled our West Coast. That move west was seminal for me – it began my cultural awakening, my growth away from the European legacy, the baggage burdening the eastern U.S., which always looks eastward to the Old World for its history and validation. Despite my thorough indoctrination in European culture, the mentors of my youth had rebelled against the system, encouraging me to question authority and think critically, and I was more than ready to unlearn the propaganda from those many years of school and replace it with accurate knowledge about the world.
I’d known since early childhood that there was a deep, rich, non-European past underlying this entire continent, but in the West it was closer to the surface. Colonists had not transformed the landscape the way they had back east, and large populations of Native Americans survived here and there, in places like the Southwest that were exotic, beautiful, and deeply intriguing to me.
The California desert was the place that quickly captured my heart. As I described in Parts 2 and 3, I encountered natural desert habitats that at first seemed to be pristine wilderness, but turned out to be littered with ancient potsherds, fragments of stone tools, petroglyphs and pictographs that tapped into my childhood curiosity about deep time and fired my artist’s imagination. I met desert rats and field scientists and learned about prehistoric tribes, desert ecology, the history of mining and ranching, the damage to desert habitats caused by cattle grazing, military operations and motorized recreation, the spread of invasive plants, and wildfire.
I spent a lot of time in and around Las Vegas, assisting a friend with wildlife research and conservation, experiencing firsthand the uncontrolled development, growth, and consumption resulting from our society’s founding belief in personal freedom and free enterprise. The rapid destruction of natural habitat by urban and industrial sprawl, the massive solar plants consuming multiple square miles of nature every year.
I met Native Americans and heard their stories, which contradicted much of what I’d learned from Anglo archaeologists. I studied aboriginal survival skills to get a firsthand sense of how indigenous people had lived in the arid Southwest. I lived and worked on ecological preserves, learning about regional ecology and the ecosystem services provided by native habitats and wildlife. I started my Pictures of Knowledge project – titled by biologist friends – to develop a more accurate understanding of humans in nature.
I revisited Mr. Carrigan – my old high school biology teacher, now retired – and saw his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he described how he had directed an engineering effort that dredged and channelized the river bordering our old family farm, to reduce flooding of crop fields. Dozens of miles of precious riparian habitat had escaped destruction throughout seven generations of European culture, only to be wiped out virtually overnight, in the interest of commercial efficiency and profit.
I listened to a radio interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker staff writer and author of The Sixth Extinction. She was emerging as a national authority on climate change and species extinction, but when asked why we should care about these things, she was stumped. She couldn’t explain why humans need wild habitats and ecosystems. After an awkward silence, all she could offer was “well, um, nature is beautiful, it has spiritual value, to lose it would be a tragic loss”.
And in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, after a decade of catastrophic wildfires all over the West, I encountered well-educated, liberal city dwellers from California and other affluent states, driving Priuses up 4wd roads, deep into our fire-adapted local forests, looking for remote cabins, rural properties where they could “get away from it all”.
They’d watched forested suburbs going up in flames on TV, they’d read magazine articles about why forests need to burn, and they’d listened to Forest Service authorities explaining why fire suppression had to end. But they were still moving into fire-adapted forests, and they still expected the government to protect them.
As cognitive scientists have pointed out, people can think critically, exercise reason and logic, share and compare observations and ideas with their peers in the public discourse – but in the long run, it may make little difference what we think and say, because most of our behavior is involuntary. We imitate family, friends, teachers, and celebrity heroes, we act on unconscious urges, we fall prey to habits and addictions we know are bad for us.
Fouling Their Nest
As I described above, for me, moving west was also moving away from our European Colonial legacy. Not to forget or deny it, but to peel back the layer of “American” colonial culture superimposed on this continent, to expose the rich legacy of indigenous cultures underlying ours. To put the imported colonial culture in a broader context, to compare it to cultures that are truly native to this land.
What kind of ecological culture did Europeans bring with them to this continent – how had they treated their habitats back home?
Much of Europe had already been ecologically degraded centuries before, its wildlands deforested, mined, and overgrazed by goats, sheep, and cattle. (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources)
According to Josh Davis at London’s Natural History Museum:
Centuries of farming, building and industry have made the UK one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. Extensive agricultural lands and road networks, in combination with other factors, have reduced the wildlife in the UK to a point hardly seen elsewhere.
A new analysis looking into how much biodiversity is left in different countries around the world has shown that the UK has some of the lowest amounts of biodiversity remaining.
Before the Industrial Revolution, forests covered much more of the UK than they do now. Large areas of wilderness were home to animals and plants which are now a rare sight, or gone completely. Red squirrels, beavers, wolves and bears were once common in the British Isles.
The advent of mass farming, factories, roads, trainlines and urban sprawl has been a death knell for wild places, and it was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.
This was our ancestors’ cultural legacy. What did they find waiting for them in the “New World”?
Discovering a Virgin Land
Around the arrival of Columbus, “it’s said that squirrels could travel from tree to tree from the Northeast to the Mississippi without ever having to touch the ground,” said Chris Roddick, chief arborist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York. “In the old growth forests in the Northeast, you had hemlock that were six or seven feet in diameter, chestnut trees 200 feet tall.”
But we all know North America wasn’t an empty wilderness. Like Europe, it was filled with people, hundreds of local and regional indigenous tribes that had interacted with nature for thousands of years. The Eastern Seaboard of what’s now the U.S. was dotted with native villages surrounded by cropfields. Centuries later, records are poor and data is sparse, but it stands to reason that instead of continuous forest, eastern North America was a mosaic of habitats cultivated in part by Native Americans. And we’re now rediscovering that one of their tools was fire.
The early European settlers found that much of the East was already being fired on a frequent basis by Indians…These settlers gradually displaced the Indians, but continued their use of fire for many of the same reasons, i.e., to clear the woods of underbrush, to expose nuts, to clear agricultural fields, etc. Frequent fires occurred over large areas of the eastern landscape into the early decades of the 20th century. (D. H. Van Lear and R. F. Harlow, Fire in the Eastern United States: Influence on Wildlife Habitat, U.S. Forest Service)
Developing a Healthy Economy
Lear and Harlow say settlers “displaced” the Indians, suggesting they were just gently nudged aside. That’s a fine euphemism for the genocide we know occurred, and it hints at the unconscious anti-indigenous racism inherent to our culture, including science and academia. North American wasn’t settled, it was violently conquered and colonized. Native Americans were either decimated by the diseases we imported, cheated out of their habitat in unfair trade, slaughtered for their land and resources, or violently driven westward ahead of our invasion.
European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found…This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation…“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team of Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis. (Oliver Milman, The Guardian)
Reviewing the Forest Service maps I included in Part 2, comparing pre-conquest forest cover to that in the early 20th century, we can see far beyond Lear and Harlow’s observations. The European colonists didn’t just use fire to clear a few fields, so they could feed their families. They were part of a global empire with a capitalist consumer economy that would transform much of the world into corporate plantations, producing highly profitable addictive substances like tobacco, coffee, tea, sugar, rum, whiskey, and opium, alongside emerging consumer staples like cotton and palm oil.
To establish these commodity crops and plantations, European colonists employed advanced technology developed by their scientists and engineers to broadly eliminate natural habitat which had been tended by indigenous societies for millenia, across most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi.
Using steel axes, saws, shovels, chains, winches, mule teams, and eventually steam-powered and gas-powered tractors, bulldozers, excavators, and other heavy equipment, European colonists cleared forests, drained and filled wetlands, dammed rivers, and dug canals. Most of the eastern indigenous subsistence mosaic was replaced by plowed fields planted with commercial crops – imported from Europe or appropriated from natives – including pastures for European livestock. Hidden in soil clinging to these imported crops, invasive Eurasian earthworms reached North America, where like human colonists, they’ve conquered and displaced natives, spreading westward, reducing biodiversity in native soils, ultimately transforming and impoverishing native habitats.
Colonial exploitation of North America’s natural resources began the accumulation of wealth that would eventually enable the U.S. to build a global political, military, economic, industrial, and cultural empire. But the indigenous practices that colonists replaced – controlled burning and many other forms of tending documented in recent studies – had provided ecosystem services in cooperation with nature – nutrient cycling, soil renewal, water purification, fuel reduction, etc. Under the new regime, white elites gained wealth and power, but in the long term, everyone – colonists, surviving natives, and wildlife – suffered unforseen consequences, losing many of the ecosystem services provided by the original mosaic. Including climate regulation.
The very essence of the frontier experience lies in the extent of its resources, and when resources are boundless, why conserve them or even utilise them efficiently? The principal goal is to exploit them as quickly as possible, then move on. It is this frontier attitude to resource utilisation that lies at the heart of much capitalism, and which presents such a challenge to conservationists today. (Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples)
Land of Liberty
The first European ventures in the Western Hemisphere were combined military, commercial, and religious expeditions – from Spain and Portugal – to dominate native populations, claim their land for the empire, exploit their labor and natural resources for profit, and convert them to Christianity.
But with colonial settlement, religious oppression, and commercial exploitation, European diseases and brutality began to depopulate the New World, and accounts of the richness of indigenous habitats gradually reached the “common people” back in Europe. Many Europeans, like the English Pilgrims and my Scottish ancestors, suffered from the oppression of empire at home, and the first European colonists in eastern North America were refugees seeking the freedom to practice religions unpopular or illegal in Europe.
This freedom from religious persecution became one of the founding values of colonial society. But the land-owning and business-owning classes in the colonies – minor aristocracy and the urban middle class that was becoming known in Europe as the bourgeoisie – had more secular concerns. They wanted freedom from taxes and other forms of imperial control imposed from Europe. They romanticized and sanctified this broader, more secular form of freedom in the term “liberty”.
The European culture they inherited was intensely individualistic and competitive, and their Judeo-Christian religious tradition had granted them dominion over nature. They eventually formed a nation – the United States – based on individual freedom, private property, and free enterprise.
As white Europeans pushed westward, replacing indigenous communal subsistence ecologies and habitat with capitalist consumer economies, cropfields and pastures, they corralled surviving native communities into less economically desirable fragments called reservations. Eventually, in the late 19th century, with most of the continent transformed, romantic activists like the Scotsman John Muir warned white citizens that surviving fragments of native habitat with “scenic” value to Europeans were in danger of being lost to settlement and commercial development.
In the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society in the early twentieth century, ‘nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States…an earthly paradise is being turned into an earthly Hades; and it is not savages or primitive men who are doing this, but men and women who boast of their civilization’. This is the sad story of the economic machine that ate the life of a continent, and it was not just animals that were fed into its maw, but people and cultures too. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)
These fragments of surviving habitat had provided final refuge for indigenous communities which had so far escaped European conquest; in response to white concern over the loss of “wild nature,” these indigenous refuges were confiscated and native people were driven off. This became a model for European colonial “conservation” worldwide. Indigenous people were driven off, their land was now called “public” – meaning it was for the use of white colonists – and the former indigenous refuges were now “preserved for future generations” of white colonists as National (and State) Parks and Preserves. This racist policy has been acclaimed in our own time as “America’s Best Idea”.
Managing Resources
Gifford Pinchot and a handful of his contemporaries…went to Europe to study the relatively new profession of forestry…In Europe, forestry practices were developed to reforest lands that had long ago been denuded by the large rural population to provide timber, charcoal, firewood, and pasture…Under Pinchot’s leadership, the Forest Service claimed fire control as its compelling mission…The Forest Service used zealous promotion and propaganda to build an aggressive national program for suppressing forest fires in all forests…People who suggested that fire be used or sometimes be allowed to burn were ignored or put down. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)
Not until the early 1900s were there serious efforts to exclude fire as an ecological process in eastern North America. In 1910, an outbreak of wildfires in the western United States–concentrated in Idaho and Montana, burned millions of acres, much of which was on national forests, and killed 78 firefighters…These events occurred just after the Forest Service had made fire control a top priority on the nation’s national forests and caused the public to become concerned about the sustainability of the nation’s natural resources. (Lear and Harlow, USFS)
Led by the Forest Service and the state forestry commissions, the public began to see fire as an enemy to be suppressed at all costs. An era of fire suppression began that created different environments from those that had existed for millennia, often to the detriment of many wildlife species. (Lear and Harlow, USFS)
Thus federal agencies’ policy of fire suppression emerged in collaboration with media and public opinion – just as now, sensational media stories of wildfire trigger emotional reactions and demands for political action on climate change – actions which will have unforseen consequences far in the future, beyond our leaders’ brief terms of office, beyond our own lifetimes.
Government fire suppression didn’t just apply to the parks and preserves set aside for white people. Government fire suppression furthered our founding values of free enterprise and private property, enabling private individuals and businesses to expand further into fire-adapted natural habitat.
In the 1930s, liberal President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a program which dammed hundreds of rivers, damaging or destroying aquatic and riparian ecosystems and habitats nationwide. This program is celebrated today by liberals as the inspiration for the proposed Green New Deal, their weapon in the War on Climate Change.
The destruction of North America’s waterways is arguably the greatest blow ever struck by the European Americans at the continent’s biodiversity, for it blasted the oldest and most distinctive biological element on the continent. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)
Roosevelt’s program accelerated the development of the massive infrastructure our modern civilization depends on, which we now take for granted and expect government and industry to maintain for us in perpetuity. Dams – which are still promoted as clean energy – mines, factories, refineries, railroads, highways, pipelines, solar plants, wind farms, powerlines, and aquaducts all destroy natural habitat and endanger wild plant and animal populations.
By the 1950’s North Americans had eliminated about four-fifths of the continent’s wildlife, cut more than half its timber, all but destroyed its native cultures, dammed most of its rivers, destroyed its most productive freshwater fisheries and depleted a good proportion of its soils. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)
As the innovations of science and technology enabled population growth, cities, farms, and factories continued to expand and consume natural habitat, until, in the Postwar Boom of the mid-20th century, prosperity and advances in transportation technology gave us a global trade empire, introducing new waves of invasive plants and animals, which domestic air travel and conservative President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System rapidly dispersed from coast to coast – including the invasive plants which are now fueling high-intensity wildfire in the desert.
At the same time, our science achieved a quantum leap in environmental destruction through the “miracle products” of chemistry like plastics, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, and the nuclear radiation unleashed by physicists in weapons development, medicine, and electric power generation. Whereas before, urban and industrial development had consumed and replaced discrete patches of rural habitat, these new toxins spread continuously through air, water, soil, and living populations, both urban and rural, resulting in more unforseen consequences far into the future.
We’re all familiar with the revelations of these dangers in the early 1960s and the subsequent Environmental Movement, the establishment of the EPA, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and the Endangered Species act. But despite these brief flurries of public opinion and legislation, the chemical industry continued to churn out plastics and other pollutants, and fire suppression and individual freedom ensured that natural habitat continued to be consumed as cities, homes, and businesses moved deeper into rural land.
Getting Away From It All
Eventually, in recent decades, just as science was beginning to discover the role of fire in ecosystems and government agencies were struggling to overhaul fire management policy, both scientists and agencies identified a fly in the ointment, another unforseen consequence of our culture – the newly-christened wildland-urban interface, the physical boundary between nature and human dwellings and businesses.
Just as we belatedly recognized the need for wildfire to maintain natural habitat and ecosystem services, we discovered that our policy of fire suppression had made wildfire nearly impossible to restore to the system – because there were people, buildings, pets, and equipment already established there, throughout fire-adapted habitats. Private property and free enterprise are fundamental to our culture, but ecological sustainability appears nowhere in the Constitution or other founding documents, because it was not part of our European legacy.
At the same time the environmental movement was burgeoning and timber sales were being appealed, people were moving into homes and developments located in forests beyond the traditional suburbs. It became feasible to extend power and phone lines into the woods and maybe even to obtain a conventional mortgage loan. Comfortable four-wheel-drive vehicles and pickup-mounted snowplows were now available, allowing year-round access…
By the late 1980s a few million people had moved into the western forests…The new residents often resisted suggestions to thin their own forest, yet most had fire insurance and expected the rural fire department to come to their aid if a fire came near…
Television news and movies feature heroic images of brave firefighters and their impressive technology battling destructive fires…These superheroes had a record of defeated wildfires, and most forest residents felt confident that the fire department could protect them…Exurban housing in ponderosa pine forests threatens wildlands like national forests, national parks, and other preserves, because it prevents managers from using prescribed burning or allowing natural fires to burn to maintain the ecosystem. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)
Climate Change
We’ve seen how, during the early 20th century, public opinion in our ecologically ignorant and environmentally destructive culture was manipulated by science, government, and media to demand wildfire suppression. Government propaganda promoting this policy – the Smokey Bear campaign – continued through my childhood and youth. And the unforseen consequences of this cultural manipulation, misguided public opinion, and political action accumulated for more than a century, resulting in our current wildfire crisis.
Now science and liberal media are urging us to demand political action on climate change, which is presented as the cause of all our pressing environmental problems, including destructive wildfire.
Yes, average temperatures are rising globally. Average precipitation is decreasing in many areas, and natural habitats are drying out, increasing fuel loads for wildfire. Climate change can make wildfire worse, but it’s not the root cause. Wildfire is a problem for us because our culture denies its value and its necessity. Wildfire is a natural creative force – our culture is what’s destructive.
Wildfires are getting bigger and more damaging because from the very beginning, European colonists unleashed a plague of livestock, invasive plants and animals, and Eurasian diseases to disrupt and replace native ecosystems. European colonists deforested the Eastern U.S., dammed rivers, drained and filled wetlands, replacing natural habitat with cities, factories, and industrial commodity farms, eliminating natural ecosystem services, enabling an unsustainable population explosion and causing damage that has yet to be repaired.
Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because in the early 20th century, white Americans reacted to sensational news stories and urgent warnings from science and media, building a groundswell of public opinion that forced government and industry to take major short-term actions – fire suppression – with unforseen consequences unfolding far into the future. We suppressed the wildfires the forest needed, and the longer we suppressed fires, the more desperately they were needed.
Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because our industrial civilization denies nature and her cycles. Clinging to the hallowed principles of liberty, private property, and free enterprise that our colonial founders lived and died for, we fight to maintain homes, businesses, and infrastructure in fire-starved habitats. But worst of all, wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because we slaughtered and drove off the natives who sustainably tended fire-adapted habitats.
Climate change isn’t causing destructive wildfires – we should’ve been having frequent wildfire all along, and our culture, our entire civilized way of life, is responsible for making it worse now. Climate change is only one of many unforseen consequences of industrial civilization. And the actions we take now, in a desperate effort to save that civilization, will have more far-reaching unforseen consequences, just like the fire suppression we demanded over a century ago.
I mentioned above that Native Americans lived with wildfire, using it as a tool to increase productivity of natural habitats. Is there anything we can learn from them?
Next: Native Americans and Wildfire
Fire, Part 8: Native Americans and Wildfire
Wednesday, April 14th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Wildfire.
All images by Max unless otherwise credited.
Previous: Americans and Wildfire
Both Sides of the Tracks
My ancestors were poor Gaelic farmers in the Scottish highlands and border country who were driven from their homelands and forced to emigrate to North America. Here, we didn’t become part of the power structure that founded the United States. We remained ethnic underdogs, independent and self-reliant, no friends of government.
I grew up in small rural communities within which Blacks had their own tiny enclaves, enduring racism but studying with us in school and becoming our sports heroes. Thanks to my parents’ cosmopolitan aspirations, I was raised not to look down on other races and ethnic groups, but to admire them – my dad idolized Black musicians like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and my childhood soundtrack ranged from Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte to African superstars Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.
I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and started college at the peak of the Black Power movement. Native Americans and their legacy had been thoroughly erased from my Midwestern county, but in high school, I supported the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and hung a poster of Apache leader Geronimo over my bed.
The University of Chicago was an island of whiteness surrounded by one of the world’s largest and most nightmarish Black ghettos. Its Eurocentric curriculum was designed to impress students with the towering achievements of the white race, but in a gesture to accommodate the Counterculture, the U of C had scrambled to hire a few token radicals like Bill Zimmerman, co-founder of Science for the People. He taught me how racism and imperialism are justified using myths about cultural evolution and the superiority of European culture.
Zimmerman introduced me to the anthropology of indigenous cultures and the work of Thomas Kuhn, often considered the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century. Kuhn showed that far from the objective search for truth it claims to be, science is a competitive political activity. Scientists routinely form prejudiced hypotheses, resist new ideas, and reject data which challenge their preconceived notions.
Forced to switch from the arts to science and technology, my social circle expanded to include Asians, who were accepted as “honorary white people” because they adapted easily to European values and institutions. But nowhere in those elite programs did I see a Black, Latino, or indigenous face. Those races remained in the background, working in inferior roles, safely segregated in impoverished enclaves.
After grad school at Stanford, I’d had enough of that white European bullshit. Needing cheap studio space for my art and music, I lived for decades in poor Black and mixed ethnic neighborhoods, while working day jobs with whites and Asians. I had a Mexican-American girlfriend with indigenous ancestry who became the love of my life. I had Black and Native American bandmates, roommates, and landlords, and even went to jail with them, where we all encountered racism and injustice.
I studied West African music and culture and the Native American cultures of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, and those became the main inspirations for my art and music. I studied aboriginal survival skills to understand how indigenous people had thrived in the arid Southwest. I spent time with the desert tribe’s most celebrated traditional craftsperson and their leading environmental activist, and got involved with a coalition of tribespeople preserving natural habitats as sacred cultural spaces – something our secular society can’t do.
All that firsthand experience led me to respect and admire traditional cultures and oppressed races more than the European civilization that had conquered, enslaved, and oppressed them.
Meanwhile, my brother and father – the rocket scientist who had once worshiped Black musicians – were being turned into racists by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the neo-conservative movement. And while I was living and working in poor neighborhoods and learning about other cultures firsthand, most of my friends in science and academia were gravitating more and more toward safe, clean all-white enclaves where they only encountered people of color in inferior roles, as gardeners, custodians, dishwashers in restaurants, and the like. They voted for liberal politicians, and praised diversity, while tacitly accepting inequality and segregation.
The Myth of the Noble Scientist
In 2004, two years into my research for Pictures of Knowledge, I was visiting an old friend, a professor at a large state university who conducts research and conservation on endangered species. When I tried to share what I’d learned about indigenous conservation practices, he interrupted me impatiently, citing a recent study in the popular scientific literature about a prehistoric tribe somewhere in the South Pacific that had over-exploited their resources, driven species to extinction, and experienced a population crash. “Indigenous people are NOT conservationists!” he shouted.
Later that year I joined some even older friends involved with ecological research and conservation at an elite university. Again on the topic of conservation, when I offered “In some traditional societies…” they began shouting in unison, “NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE!” I was never allowed to finish.
For more than a decade after that, whenever I raised the subject of traditional societies and indigenous practices with biologists, they were quick to interrupt, ridiculing me for “romanticizing the noble savage” and dismissing my observations before I even had a chance to articulate them. Most recently, when I tried to share anthropologists’ observations about indigenous conservation practices in an email exchange with friends in science and academia, a senior wildlife biologist immediately dismissed them: “For North America the evidence is the opposite. The myth was the noble savage.”
As mentioned above, I studied science at the University of Chicago and Stanford. I’ve helped my biologist friends collect data in the field and process it in the lab. I respect and praise their work and treasure our friendships. Why have they responded with ridicule and contempt to the very mention of the traditional cultures I’ve spent much of my life studying and experiencing firsthand? Why do they reject evidence of indigenous conservation without even examining it? And what do they mean by the “noble savage”?
This myth has had a murky history. To the extent scientists or academics are even aware of it, they attribute it to the Enlightenment-era Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But recently, in his book The Myth of the Noble Savage (University of California Press), Ter Ellingson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, has shown it to be the creation of a faction of racist anthropologists in the mid-19th century – the intellectual ancestors of today’s right-wing think tanks and reactionary academics like Harvard’s Steven Pinker.
It turns out the noble savage was actually never a popular fantasy in historical European culture. The racist academics presented the fake myth as a “straw man” which they could easily demolish – relying partly on Darwin’s new theory of natural selection – in order to condemn indigenous cultures and defend European imperialism and white superiority.
The mere repetition of the words Noble Savage sufficed to serve as a devastating weapon against any opposition to the racist agenda. The myth of the Noble Savage became a weapon in the Ethnological Society’s scientific-racist project of helping to naturalise a genocidal stance towards the “inferior” races. (Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage)
In this fabricated myth, indigenous people were falsely idealized as representing an original, wild, unspoiled state of humanity, living in peaceful harmony with nature. One of the worst mistakes a white European could make was to romanticize the noble savage – succumbing to irrational fantasies, idealizing nonindustrial societies and cultures, ignoring their negative traits and failings, fabricating valse virtues and successes.
In science and academia, the noble savage became a supremely effective insult, slander, and put-down for which there was no defense. If you said anything positive about indigenous people, you were immediately accused of romanticizing the noble savage, and you automatically lost all credibility. The slur was likely to cling to you forever, branding you as “too trusting” of anything that didn’t conform to institutional orthodoxy. Evidence of indigenous failures was welcomed, while evidence of indigenous achievements was dismissed.
Of course, none of my scientist friends had ever studied this cultural history. None of them knew what the original “noble savage” meant, let alone how it was manipulated by 19th century racists. My friends had simply copied the insult from elders and peers in academia – and sadly, I’ve even found them teaching it to their children.
Nor had any of my friends ever studied the conservation practices of indigenous cultures. From the way they heard the “noble savage” slur used in their milieu, they assumed there was conclusive evidence, somewhere, that all indigenous people had abused nature. When pressed, the best evidence they could cite against indigenous conservation was a widely publicized hypothesis that Pleistocene megafauna – mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, etc. – went extinct 8,000 years ago due to over-hunting by prehistoric humans.
As one of my friends noted, there are other isolated reports of indigenous over-harvesting. But scientists don’t cite these reports out of concern for objectivity – they cite them to discredit all indigenous people and those who seek to learn from them, and to dismiss evidence which challenges institutional racism and white superiority.
When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it…when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific “truths —then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for “real” knowledge creation or evaluation while Traditional Knowledge may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form. (George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Smithsonian Magazine)
The racist slander of the Noble Savage has ensured that seven generations of biologists have willfully ignored indigenous knowledge about the natural systems and habitats they presume to study, knowledge they’re only now beginning to catch up with.
The Ascent of White Men
The very things I admire about my scientist friends – their love of nature and commitment to field work and conservation – have given them a limited, inaccurate view of science. They’re lucky to make a living exploring beautiful natural areas, restoring habitat and collecting data to help preserve endangered species.
But growing up amid industrial farms, coal mines, oil and gas fields, and chemical factories, with a research chemist and rocket scientist for a Dad, studying the physical sciences and engineering and working in the electronics, communications, nuclear, entertainment, and internet industries – all that has taught me firsthand how the discoveries of physicists, chemists, earth scientists, geneticists, roboticists, and computer scientists damage natural habitats, pollute our environments, and endanger humans and wildlife.
It’s ironic that, while attacking me for “romanticizing the noble savage”, my friends have consistently romanticized science.
Scientists tend to judge non-whites by European standards, reserving their respect for “civilized” high-achieving Asians, and the few Blacks, Latinos, or Native Americans who’ve become scientific researchers, college professors, published authors, or national leaders. One of the most insidious prejudices in science, and our society as a whole, is the conflation of wealth, power, and technological progress with cultural evolution. In the 19th century, Europeans saw the increasing wealth and power they were gaining, through imperial conquest and advances in science and technology, as evidence they were progressing away from primitive savagery toward civilized Enlightenment. The defenders of European imperialism who introduced the noble savage as a racist insult also helped frame the theory of the “Ascent of Man”.
To white people, human progress is proved by our ancestors’ assumed progression from Stone Age hunter-gatherers – the Noble Savage – to the metal-workers of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, to the Discovery of Agriculture in the Middle East, the Rise of Civilization, the Anthropocene, the European Enlightenment, and the rise of science. Despite our contemporary rhetoric praising diversity and tolerance, white people of European ancestry, including our most celebrated scientists, share a tacit belief in the evolution of culture from primitive to civilized, and the superiority of civilized people.
But the Ascent of Man is proving to be just another myth. There was no time when ancestral humans wandered carefree in a Garden of Eden, all their needs provided without having to work. Human culture did not take a quantum leap forward through a “Discovery of Agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, launching a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Some societies – our own, and the historical examples we admire (Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Inca and Classical Maya) – are simply unable to manage their aggression. They expand, conquer, dominate, and ultimately collapse.
But many others take the path of peace and thrive by reining in aggression. Like other animal species, nonindustrial humans have always studied their habitats closely and worked with plant and animal populations in complex and sophisticated ways.
Indigenous peoples have been pigeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturalist,” obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers and limiting their use of and impacts on nature to the two extremes of human intervention…and it has led to a focus on domestication as the only way in which humans can influence plants and animals and shape natural environments.
Anthropology has changed significantly in the past one hundred years…but the basic elements of the nineteenth-century view of California Indians is still with us. The term “hunter-gatherer” is still used and still implies an evolutionary sequence of progress. The notion of the evolution of human cultures remains implicit in the layout of many current human ecology and anthropology textbooks and is explicit in recent anthropological journal articles that refer to this progression as “the ascent of man.” (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources)
Rediscovering Native Tending
At the same time those white scientists and conservationists were ridiculing and bullying me on the topic of indigenous conservation and the noble savage, University of California botanist M. Kat Anderson mustered the courage to stand up to anti-indigenous racism in the male scientific establishment. Her book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, published in 2013, was a meticulous, comprehensively researched study of the ecological practices of dozens of tribes across dozens of widely varying natural habitats, from coasts to river valleys and interior basins, from deserts to alpine forests, from thousands of years ago into the present.
By virtue of their daily use of plants, California Indians acquired extensive and special knowledge of the life histories of plant species, and they understood how different harvesting strategies affected natural regeneration…These [indigenous] harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries, possibly thousands of years…During the course of their long history in California, Indians so exhaustively explored the plant kingdom for its uses and so thoroughly tested nature’s responses to human harvesting and tending that they discovered how to use nature in a way that provided them with a relatively secure existence while allowing for the maximum diversity of other species…When historical indigenous interactions–both harvesting strategies and resource management practices–are investigated in depth, we find that by keeping ecosystems in a modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological harmony with nature. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)
As I’ve found while researching Pictures of Knowledge, abundant evidence of indigenous conservation and sustainable resource management has long been embedded in the ethnographic literature, hidden from lay audiences and ignored by the broader scientific community. But in the wake of Anderson’s book, many similar reports on indigenous ecology have surfaced from around the world – North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa – confirming my insights and Anderson’s findings.
For instance, in the past two decades, archaeologists and environmental scientists working in coastal British Columbia have come to recognize evidence of mariculture—the intentional management of marine resources—that pre-dates European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, the ancestors of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Indigenous groups there created and maintained what have become known as “clam gardens”—rock-walled, terrace-like constructions that provide ideal habitat for butter clams and other edible shellfish…This resource management strategy reflects a sophisticated body of ecological understanding and practice that predates modern management systems by millennia.
These published research studies now prove that Indigenous communities knew about mariculture for generations—but Western scientists never asked them about it before. Once tangible remains were detected, it was clear mariculture management was in use for thousands of years. (Nicholas, Smithsonian)
These reports continued to accumulate until finally, long after the Black Lives Matter movement made racism a hot topic in white society, the predominantly white scientific, academic, and conservation establishments were forced to respond. In September 2020, Scientific American published a formal apology for its long-standing role in institutional racism. And The Conversation, a fact-based online news source supported by Boston University, the University of California, Penn State, Rutgers, Tufts, Vanderbilt, and many others, formally acknowledged the racism inherent in the environmental movement since its origins in the work of icons like John Muir.
American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. (
Riches Squandered
I’ve described how I grew up amid the impressive earthworks of the prehistoric Hopewell culture. European culture is obsessed with monumental architecture – even the Black astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson used drone footage of skyscrapers to illustrate the highest achievements of mankind in a pro-science TV commercial.
But I also described how, 30 years later, I was even more impressed at finding stone tools, potsherds, petroglyphs and pictographs in my beloved Mojave Desert. My long, privileged education had revealed exactly how white Europeans built cities, skyscrapers, computers, and rocket ships. And my adventurous life had exposed the cost – global, catastrophic damage to natural ecosystems and traditional human societies. But the discovery that people had thrived in the desert, making everything they needed from scratch using local natural materials, with no lasting damage to their environment – that I found truly inspiring.
When the European ancestors of modern white Americans invaded North America, they encountered indigenous societies and natural habitats which had co-existed in dynamic equilibrium for thousands of years. Native cultures spanned a diverse ecological spectrum. Some – like the tribes Kat Anderson studied in California – were able to occupy the same habitat for countless generations, practicing a resilient blend of wild harvesting and agriculture that adjusted to changes in climate and other disturbances.
Unlike European colonists and modern Americans, these ecologically-adapted indigenous societies didn’t construct “permanent” homes, cities, infrastructure, or political boundaries in habitats where fire, flood, and other cyclical disturbances could be expected. When they encountered disturbances rendering local habitats unusable – like prolonged droughts – they adapted by migrating, carrying their resilient practices to other habitats where they could put down new roots.
A few native cultures, like the Cahokians of the Mississippi Valley and the Ancestral Puebloans of the Southwest, did come to rely more exclusively on agriculture, expanding and developing social hierarchies, seeking to dominate their neighbors and develop empires. Like empires in the Old World, these native empires rose and fell and faded away in a cycle of generations. None of these North American native empires survived at the time of European invasion.
Countless historical documents show that when they first arrived, and as they invaded westward, European colonists found natural habitats of almost unfathomable productivity which were the result of thousands of years of indigenous tending.
Every day of every year for millenia, the indigenous people of California interacted with the native plants and animals that surrounded them. They…achieved an intimacy with nature unmatched by the modern-day wilderness guide, trained field botanist, or applied ecologist…In the process, they maintained, enhanced, and in part created a fertility that was eventually to be exploited by European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs, who imagined themselves to have built civilization out of an unpeopled wilderness.
Coastal salt marshes were at one time much more extensive than today, forming important habitat rich in plant and animal life…Pure grasslands, including coastal prairies, valley grasslands, vernal pools, and montaine meadows, covered one-fifth of the state before 1850…Before dams and man-made levees, river boundaries surged and retreated with the seasons…Riparian woodlands, which before 1850 covered 900,000 acres in the Central Valley, teemed with animal life. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)
Artisans of Wildfire
There wasn’t much of that richness left for me to see, generations later, as I made my own way westward into valleys trampled and overgrazed by cattle, deserts and coastal hills blanketed by invasive plants, mountains ravaged by mining and clear-cutting of timber. But as mentioned in previous parts of this series, I did occasionally stumble upon beautiful “parklike” stands of native Southwestern forest which can result either from “natural” fire regimes or from indigenous burning to clear undergrowth and excess fuel. And in remote, hidden corners of the desert, I was sometimes surprised by lush stands of honey mesquite, which my Indian friends told me had been planted and maintained by their ancestors – like the native water sources which their people maintain today.
The California landscapes that early explorers, settlers, and missionaries found so remarkably rich were in part shaped, and regularly renewed, by the land management practices employed by native peoples. Many of the biologically richest of California’s habitats were not climax communities at the time Euro-Americans arrived but instead were mosaics of various stages of ecological succession, or fire subclimaxes, intensified and perpetuated by seasonally scheduled burning. In a very real sense, some of the most productive and carefully managed habitats were in fact Indian artifacts. In many cases these landscapes experienced far greater degrees of managerial care and ecologically sophisticated manipulation than are found today.
It is likely that over centuries or perhaps millenia of indigenous management, certain plant communities came to require human tending and use for their continued fertility and renewal and for the maintenance of the abundance and diversity patterns needed to support human populations.
Countless studies have shown that fire has always been a primary tool in indigenous conservation, worldwide. In the forests of eastern North America, before the European invasion:
Over thousands of years, the American Indian became expert in using fire for various purposes, e.g., for hunting, to concentrate prey species in convenient areas, to encourage fruit and berry production, to keep the woods open along major corridors of travel, to fire-proof their villages, and other uses…Because of their farming and burning activities, Indians ensured that much of the eastern forests was in early successional habitats.
Indians often burned as frequently as twice a year, complementing lightning as an ignition source. Their burning extended the fire season beyond the “natural” lightning-fire season of summer. These frequent and often extensive fires, along with the wildlife foraging that fire encouraged, created and maintained open woodlands, savannahs, and prairies throughout the eastern United States.
In fact, much of the eastern forests at the time of Columbus could be regarded as a cultural artifact of Indian activities…The eastern forest at that time was a shifting mosaic of woodlands, savannahs, forests, and prairies, all in varying stages of succession. (D. H. Van Lear and R. F. Harlow, U.S. Forest Service)
In California:
Fire was the most significant, effective, efficient, and widely employed vegetation management tool of the California Indian tribes. The slow match gave them the technological capability to burn both small patches and extensive tracts of vegetation in a systematic fashion…In addition, most tribes had the ability to fell trees and large shrubs with fire for meeting cultural needs. They used this tool to create village sites and to convert riparian habitat and floodplain into farming areas in southeastern California.
Deliberate burning increased the abundance and density of edible tubers, greens, fruits, seeds, and mushrooms…enhanced feed for wildlife; controlled the insects and diseases that could damage wild foods and basketry material; increased the quantity and quality of material used for basketry and cordage; and encouraged the sprouts used for making household items, granaries, fish weirs, clothing, games, hunting and fishing traps, and weapons. It also removed dead material and promoted growth through the recycling of nutrients, decreased plant competition, and maintained specific plant community types such as coastal prairies and montane meadows.
Many wild plant populations accumulate aging parts (dead branches and shoots, leaves, cones, and seed pods) that may reduce plant vigor and productivity over time. Fires set by California Indians consumed this biomass and released some of the plant nutrients it contained.
Scientific studies have recently shown that nutrient movement can take a long time, relative to human life spans…In some ecosystems the nutrient storage compartment (e.g. the litter on the forest floor) can become a vault, locked against internal cycling…Like soil arthropods, bacteria, and fungi, fire is a mineralizing agent in forests and other vegetation types, but it works much faster than decay organisms and thus speeds up nutrient recycling and the return of sites to high productivity.
Freshwater marshes in the Central Valley of California were burned by the Wukchumni Yokuts, and in the Panamint Valley by the Timbisha Shoshone, to clear out old reeds, recycle nutrients, stimulate new plant growth, and provide open water for waterfowl…Deergrass, an important native bunchgrass for coiled basketry in central and southern California, was burned in chaparral, lower montane forests, and oak woodland plant communities by the Cahuilla, Foothill Yokuts, Kumeyaay (Diegueno), Luiseno, Sierra Miwok, and Western Mono tribes to clear away accumulated dead material and increase flower stalk yields.
Fire helped to control the pathogens and insects that would otherwise compete for the same resources used by native people…Ruby Cordero (Chukchansi Yokuts/Sierra Miwok)…recalls burning to eliminate insects that attacked shrubs that were important for basketry…Many Indian tribes in California burned in oak…woodlands and tan oak…stands to reduce insect pests that inhabit acorns and overwinter in oak leaf duff…According to Kathy Heffner…all of the tribes she interviewed in northern California (Hupa, Wailaki, Tolowa, Yurok, and Karuk) burned under the California black oaks and other oak species to destroy the insect pests…Fungi and bacteria also have the potential to decrease substantially the mast crop of oaks…Fire may have helped to curb these pathogens as well…The Luiseno in southern California burned regularly as well to destroy insect pests and diseases that damaged native food crops…
An extremely important reason for setting fires was to increase forage for wildlife…It has been shown that pruning or burning vegetation increases the forage value for certain wildlife and that the number of larger game animals increases after fire…Today elders from a number of tribes substantiate that the practice of burning is highly beneficial to wildlife. The Sierra Miwok elder Bill Franklin learned about burning from his father and grandfather: “They said the Indians used to burn in the fall–October and November. They set the fires from the bottom of the slope to decrease the snowpack, get rid of the debris so there’s no fire danger and they burned in the hunting areas so there was more food for the deer…”
Fire was also used in hunting many kinds of animals…Fire was a tool used often for driving rabbits…Many tribes captured ground squirrels, a reliable food source, by smoking them out of their burrows with the aid of a fire fan or burning them out…The larvae of wasps and yellowjackets were a delicacy eaten by many tribes, and fire was sometimes used to find them…Similarly, tribes throughout California used fire to capture grasshoppers.
In forests and woodlands, thickets of shrubs and small trees tended to accumulate over time, creating a potential wildfire hazard. Aware of the danger uncontrolled fires would pose to villages and collecting sites, California Indians regularly fired the understory in forests and woodlands “to keep the brush down” and promote the growth of wildflowers and grasses. After repeated burning, the fires were of low intensity and crown fires uncommon in many areas.
Heightened species diversity, abundance, and density have been associated with regular, intermediate-density, spatially heterogenous disturbance. Based on this relationship, it can be hypothesized that the disturbance caused by California Indians’ use of fire in a variety of ecosystems, occuring at intermediate intensities and frequencies, promoted a maximally heterogenous mosaic of vegetation types and increased species diversity. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)
In the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest, the scene of my recent “burn scar” hikes:
In the last few decades, investigations of tribal traditions and research by historians, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and ecologists have revealed a wealth of evidence implying that fires ignited by Native peoples have influenced landscape vegetation for hundreds and probably thousands of years…Intervals between fires in these forests mostly ranged from an average of only about two years in parts of northern Arizona to twenty-five or thirty years at higher elevations and moist sites, with many areas averaging between seven and fifteen years. This pattern of frequent fires was instrumental in producing and maintaining parklike ponderosa forests with big trees and open, grassy understories. Fires thinned out saplings and shrubs and killed some of the overstory trees, particularly those with a scar exposing heart rot. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)
Next: Restoring Wildfire
Monday, August 29th, 2022: Black Range, Hikes, Hillsboro, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
Since mid-June, when this year’s massive wildfire burned through the habitat of one of my regular hikes, I’ve been yearning to go back there. But the Forest Service had issued a closure notice for that entire area effective until the end of the year.
The trail is really popular with Texans from El Paso, so on Saturday, on a whim, I checked the web page for that trail on the most popular online hiking forum, and found trip reports from a couple of weeks ago saying the trail had just been reopened. So this Sunday’s choice of a hike was a no-brainer!
I was especially concerned about the beautiful old-growth fir forest on the back side of the peak. That forest had survived the big 2013 wildfire as an island of lush alpine growth, and there were two ancient firs I really loved that stood on each side of the trail, like sentinals. During this year’s fire, the incident team had noted that the burn on top of the peak was low-intensity, so I was pretty sure my favorite trees had survived.
The weather forecast I quickly checked before leaving predicted cloudy skies and mild temperatures, so I reluctantly pulled on my heavy waterproof boots and packed the heavy, uncomfortable waterproof hunting pants. I was so tired of dressing for rain! But by the time I’d crossed town and entered open country, I noticed there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky ahead. Damn! Had I forgotten to refresh the weather page? It doesn’t auto-refresh on every platform – maybe I’d been looking at yesterday’s forecast.
The highway was virtually empty of other vehicles, but I came close to hitting deer twice – our deer population has exploded again, and driving anywhere outside of town is super stressful. But on the plus side, as I was slowly winding up through the tall forest toward the pass, a bobcat crossed in front of me. I hadn’t seen one in years.
Since this is our most popular trail with out-of-towners, I always expect to meet other hikers, and today was no exception – within the first 2 miles I encountered a single middle-aged man heading back out. We exchanged brief greetings but that was clearly all he was interested in. Most people using this trail are simply heading for the famous fire lookout on the peak, but I’m here for the wilderness – I bypass the lookout and continue several miles farther on the crest trail.
This year’s fire had stopped its southward advance at the peak, 5-1/2 miles north of the trailhead, and its scar couldn’t even be seen until you reached the top. But the 2013 wildfire had turned most of the crest into a treeless moonscape, colonized in the intervening years by shrubs and annuals. After this year’s wet monsoon, I saw plenty of flowers and birds in that area.
And during the initial traverse through the old burn scar, I was a little encouraged to see some small clouds rising behind the crest to the north. Maybe I’d get some weather after all, to justify my preparations!
By the time I reached the end of the burn scar at a saddle below the peak, a storm was definitely brewing in the north. And it hit me just as I crossed the southeastern shoulder of the peak, quickly developing into a heavy hailstorm as I scrambled to change pants and pull on my poncho.
Climbing the final switchbacks to the peak, I finally came upon scars of this year’s fire. Here, they were simply small black bare patches in a sea of lush annuals – it looked as if windblown sparks had started spot fires that had burned out without spreading.
But when I traversed around the peak through the lush forest below the lookout, I became confused. This area alternates between dense stands of fir and small grassy meadows surrounding isolated stands of venerable pine, fir, and Gambel oak. Here, many firs had been killed while their immediate neighbors had been spared. As before, there were small black bare spots where ground fires had burned with high intensity, but hadn’t seemed to have spread. The more I looked, the harder it was to tell where and how the fire had actually burned, because most of the ground cover was grass and forbs, which could’ve come up after the fire.
Suddenly I came upon two blackened stumps, and realized my favorite firs had not only been killed – they’d completely burned down. It was so strange – firs only 40 feet from them hadn’t even been scorched.
The peak forest is an island. Forest on the slopes below it was destroyed in the 2013 fire, and the trail there is crowded with seedlings of thorny locust and aspen. Some of this survived this year’s fire – enough to really slow me down.
And at the bottom, a trail junction and saddle where some tall ponderosas had survived the 2013 fire, this year’s fire had burned hot. The tree holding the trail signs had been torched – its charred trunk lay on the ground, and the trail signs had apparently burned to ashes. I’d often stopped at this saddle for a shaded lunch or a few minutes’ rest, but it was a bleak place now.
Beyond the saddle was a bowl that had been turned into a chaos of fallen logs by the 2013 fire, and these logs had clearly provided fuel for this year’s fire. Now that those logs had burned, along with the new growth of shrubs, this year’s wet monsoon was quickly eroding the bare soil and washing it downstream.
Below the bowl is a narrow canyon, whose forest had been partly killed by the older fire. This year’s fire had killed all the rest, and this summer’s rains were alternately flooding the creek with debris and cutting it into deep gorges.
The trail through this canyon had been cleared of logs just last fall – 8 years after the 2013 fire – and now it was rapidly being eroded away. As usual, it was only my past familiarity that enabled me to follow it. Slowed down by all the fire damage, I only made it to the second saddle – a mile short of my destination. The rain had finally stopped, and despite frequent thunder from surrounding storms, I could pack away the poncho for the rest of the hike.
The rain had chilled the air here between 8,000′ and 10,000′, so I could climb the 1,400′ back to the peak without much sweating, which was a relief from the heat and humidity of so many recent hikes. And as usual on crest hikes, there were no flies bothering me!
The long descent gave me an opportunity to watch storms developing far away across the landscape, as well as to appreciate flowers and fungi I’d missed on the way up. Just below the peak, I surprised a small hawk from the slope just above the trail. It first thought to perch on a seedling right in front of me, then decided it was too close and soared away to a much farther branch, so I couldn’t get a good picture.
The work of my hikes seldom ends when I reach the vehicle. During a wet monsoon, or in winter snow, my gear gets soaked and filthy. I can’t relax back home until it’s stashed somewhere for next morning’s cleanup, and the next day begins with a cleaning session for hat, boots, pants, poncho, etc.
Monday, March 3rd, 2025: Hikes, Nature, Southwest New Mexico, Various, Wildfire.
Another trip back east meant it had been two and a half weeks since my last hike. Doc and I had agreed on a three-month rehab program for my knee, starting with 2-mile hikes and gradually working up. I’d done this before, and it’s not easy – two-mile walks don’t justify driving into the mountains, but it’s hard to get excited about walking around town.
Especially on Sunday, the day of my big wilderness hikes.
This weekend, I had a second goal – a thorough road test of the upgraded suspension and much bigger tires on my Sidekick. So I was looking for a short hike accessed by a road trip combining as many different conditions as possible, while minimizing the risk of hitting a deer and wiping out my investment.
Northwest turned out to be the only viable direction, toward the remote, rugged, little-known area I’ve been trying to explore during the past year. Since a two-mile hike lasts only an hour, and the round-trip drive was likely to take four, I needed a lunch plan, and the northwest trip offered three options, only two of which I’d tried already.
I compiled a list of eight short hikes along that route, most of which used the first mile of much longer wilderness trails I’d hiked many times before. The last and farthest hike depended on an abandoned trail that might or might not be passable, over and around a remote mountain I’d been obsessing over for years. It’s the high point of a small range rising amid terrain so rugged the peak tends to get lost and ignored by outsiders driving the highway across its shoulder. Surrounding peaks get in the way so it’s hard to even see the summit of this range from afar.
I’d driven the steep, rocky forest road, which climbs to within 200 vertical feet of the 8,970 foot summit, and I’d fallen in love with the views and the dark, spooky forest of firs and aspens that lines its deep, narrow canyons, where trees often fall and block the road for days or weeks. I assumed the road would normally be closed in winter, but this winter had been the driest in memory so I didn’t expect snow.
When I got up to start breakfast, I saw three deer in my backyard – two does and a yearling. By the time I headed out with my gear, they’d made themselves at home in a patch of sunlight. Better here than on the road, I figured.
Yet another sunny day with clear skies and a high forecast in the 60s.
There are dozens of options for a short hike – one main reason I’d picked this trip was because it combined high-speed highway, twisty mountain road, and rocky backcountry road to give the new suspension a workout. It adds a 2-1/2 inch lift, which was immediately noticeable in a number of ways: wind noise, buffeting in a cross-wind, loss of power on grades. I had to work the steering wheel more than before. But I soon got used to most of those changes, and had brought my headphones to cancel the noise.
Stock, this vehicle comes with excellent handling, so even with the modifications it still handles quite well. And my initial impressions about loss of power were disproved later in the day. The ultimate test will be the long, steep grade on I-40 west of Flagstaff.
The forest road to the summit did turn out to be open, but as usual, six or eight trees had recently fallen across it, then had been pushed or dragged to the side by other travelers. Since it’s regularly maintained, the road’s never been a challenge for the Sidekick, but the upgrades give me confidence that was always lacking before.
One of many neat features of this range is its sprawling summit plateau at 8,600 feet, with parklike ponderosa forest, grassy meadows, and not a single man-made structure apart from the old trailhead kiosk. This may be one of the least-developed mountain ranges in the U.S.
The map shows the hiking trail following an abandoned road that dead-ends just east of the summit, and from there, following a long ridge south toward a remote trail junction I’d bushwhacked to a few years ago. None of the trails in this area are maintained, and this trail is shown as a dotted line, meaning it may no longer even exist. I figured if it wasn’t passable I’d drive back south to one of the other options.
What I found was one of the worst burn scars I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t noticed it from the forest road, or the highway below, because firefighters defended the corridors, and lower peaks block a view of this summit ridge. The fire occurred in 2018 and was limited to the summit ridges and plateau of this tiny range, but it burned as intensely as any I’d found in our region.
Deadfall, blowdown, and thorny regrowth blocked the trail almost continuously, and in several cases had to be detoured around. I was only able to fight my way through because enough tread remained for cattle to follow – there was no evidence of other hikers going this way since the fire, and the cattle had become my trailblazers.
After an hour and a half, when faced with yet another solid thicket of thorns, I gave up. One thing I love about this range is its steep slopes, dropping abruptly to canyon bottoms two thousand feet below, so if you can see through the trees you get spectacular views. The burn scar did give me good views to north and south, but if I wanted to hike this trail farther someday, I would need a machete.
As usual, on the way back to the trailhead I paid more attention to details of habitat. I was particularly impressed by the color range of a native ground cover with holly-like leaves. I’d surely seen it before, but in this winter burn scar it was the most colorful thing in the landscape. And although this range doesn’t have much exposed rock, the loss of trees had revealed strange, isolated, stratified dolmen-like outcrops.
It ended up taking me over two hours to hike a mile and a half, and it was time for lunch, in the village a half hour down the highway. The three eateries that are open Sundays close at 2 pm, 3 pm, and 7 pm, and I’d never arrived early enough to try the first – which turned out to be the best. This is the historic heart of anti-government and pro-Trump sentiment, but the cafe was playing 60s psychedelic music, and when I was the last diner left at closing time, the bearded chef, his hair in long braided pigtails, brought out a slice of cheesecake “on the house”. First time I’d had one of my favorite desserts in years, maybe decades.
Since I still had a hour or more left for hiking, my plan was to do one of the partial hikes on my list on the way south. On the way back from the village, I spotted the burned ridge I’d hiked in the morning, peeking from behind intervening mountains – the first time I’d ever been able to identify this range from a distance in this dense, confusing mountain landscape.
The trail I’d picked for the afternoon hike is well-maintained, and one of the most spectacular in our region. The first stretch climbs above a vast grassy mesa, one of our most distinctive landscape features.
Combined with the morning bushwhack, the day’s hikes ended up totaling three and a half miles, and I could tell my knee would be complaining that night. My body and soul crave the mileage and elevation, so this two-mile thing is going to be hard to stick to.
When I got home just after sunset, one doe and her fawn were still in my backyard, so I chased them out, and they crossed the wide street to my neighbor’s small front yard, surrounded by a hedge. These seem to be strictly urban deer now – a whole new breed, comfortable around people, thriving on pavement, surrounded by city traffic, more than a mile from undeveloped habitat. Dystopia is no longer a fantasy of the future.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2025: Hikes, Nature, Pinos Altos Range, Southwest New Mexico, Wildfire.
After a week’s hiatus, here’s a short Dispatch from a short hike (still rehabbing knee).
Pics are dull under a cloudy sky, but after the hike I added up all the wildfire scars seen today and realized it’s actually kinda interesting.
The hike begins at 7,200 feet elevation, at the eastern foot of a long east-west ridge, in the narrow, pine-forested canyon of a seasonal creek. It traverses through pleasant, open ponderosa forest thinned by a 2020 fire that started at the west end of the ridge and mainly burned on the crest and the north slope – but surprisingly sneaked around to burn at low intensity at the southeast end.
The trail climbs the east end of the ridge toward an isolated outcrop of striking, bulbous white rock, where you next enter a gentle, exposed slope lined with ferns, locust, and scrub oak that is the small scar of a much older high-intensity wildfire that killed all the pines in this spot. That wildfire opened up dramatic views to east and south.
Climbing to the north side of a rocky peak, the trail briefly re-enters intact forest, which is where I turned back today, at a little over 8,100 feet elevation. But through the trees, I could see west toward the high-intensity burn scar of the 2020 fire. Temps were in the 60s today, but I found patches of snow in shaded spots from 7,000 feet upwards.
Turning back and emerging from the forest, I could see south across the canyon toward the apocalyptic moonscape left by a 2014 fire, and west to the Black Range, devastated by high-intensity mega-wildfires in 2013 and 2022. I’ve hiked all these burn scars extensively.
