Fire

Fire, Part 6: Government and Wildfire

Wednesday, March 24th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Society, Wildfire.

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Wildfire Revelations

The Political Cycle

The political polarization we’re all seeing now – a society divided between liberals and conservatives – is nothing new. I was aware of it long ago, in childhood, growing up in small, rural communities far off the beaten path. Society was split into opposing but roughly equal halves, and since we were a democracy, electing leaders every four years, leadership alternated, back and forth between political parties, from the local to the national level, in a four-to-eight-year cycle.

But to a kid, those were the mysterious affairs of adults. My family was not politically engaged or active, and I entered adolescence at a time when young people were rebelling against the Establishment – all the established institutions of our society and culture.

The Vietnam War had been started by Kennedy, the cherished martyr, and was escalated by Johnson. Both were Democrats, but they were followed by Nixon, a Republican, who pursued it further, ordering the bombing of Cambodia, a country we hadn’t even declared war on. The older people who became my mentors, and continue to inspire me decades later, urged me to think critically, and to question all authority, regardless of what party or tradition it came from.

That became a mantra of the Counterculture, which launched a sweeping critique of our society, showing how the schools had indoctrinated us in a false view of history. We learned how our government engaged in global imperialism, our capitalist economy exploited and oppressed both humans and nature, science and technology served the military-industrial complex, and corporate media sold us a false view of the world. We began to explore and investigate alternatives, better ways to live – other cultures, past and present.

Howard Zinn summarized many of these revelations in his A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was president at the time, but his leadership had failed miserably when faced with both national and global crises, so the cyclical system followed up with Reagan, a Republican.

To my generation, Zinn’s book was redundant. The subsequent election of a third-rate movie star as national leader was nothing more than a cruel joke. We already knew our society was failing and our culture was bankrupt. We turned our backs on both and tried to invent something new, in our own backyard – the DIY underground arts scene of San Francisco. Punk music was our first inspiration. The nihilism of the Sex Pistols encouraged us to tear everything down and start over.

Now, decades later, mired in the capitalist economy and burdened with family responsibilities, most of my peers have abandoned the ideals of the Counterculture. They’ve joined the Establishment, chosing sides in the two-party system, in which both sides believe passionately in their country, but fear that the other is trying to destroy it. Liberals fear conservatives will establish fascism, rape the environment, and persecute minorities. Conservatives fear liberals will establish communism, restrict individual freedom, and take away their precious guns.

For various reasons, both sides tend to settle in enclaves where they become isolated from the opposing side. Each side gets its information from targeted national media – and social media communities – which present the world from their point of view. Urban liberals never interact with rural conservatives, so they may imagine they don’t exist, or are an irrelevant minority. Since both sides are ignorant of the other, they develop all sorts of misconceptions.

When the political cycle turns, and leadership flips from your side to the other, you become even more committed. Both sides send their children to private schools that present the world from their point of view. From generation to generation, the divide deepens and both sides become more entrenched.

The Romance of Fire Towers

In the early 1970s – the heyday of the Counterculture – I was in college, but hadn’t formally declared a major subject. I was working hard in the University of Chicago’s tiny studio art program and had applied to prominent art schools. But the economy was in a recession, and I was desperately poor and needed a career that would free me from dependence on the limited resources of my family.

My dad, who had moved to California after the divorce, started sending me applications to take a summer job as a fire lookout for the Forest Service somewhere in the West. Like me, he’d aspired to be an artist and musician. The high point of his life had been in grad school in the late 1940s, when he’d immersed himself in the postwar urban jazz scene during the invention of bebop by icons like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

But he knew I also shared his love of nature, and I think he hoped that the solitude and responsibilities of a fire lookout would help me make my decision – hopefully away from the temptations of the urban arts scene, which could only lead to the insecurity of an artist’s life.

Jack Kerouac, an aspiring writer, was a contemporary of my dad in the postwar jazz scene. While Dad was jamming onstage and capturing it in paintings afterward, Kerouac was working on a new style of writing inspired by bebop. While my dad moved on to start a career in science and raise a family, Kerouac hung in there, discovering Buddhism and yearning for a connection with nature.

After finishing On the Road, his first experiment in writing-as-free-improvisation, Kerouac got a job as a fire lookout in a remote Forest Service tower in Washington State. He hoped to use the solitude of the wilderness as an opportunity to advance his writing, to integrate Buddhism’s contemplation of nature with the urban music scene that inspired him, but the contrast was too jarring, and the solitude failed to stimulate his creative juices. He wasn’t able to write about the experience until long after he left the fire tower, in Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

But Kerouac became such a youth-culture icon that his brief gig as a government fire lookout helped romanticize the job for generations of young people. Forest Service fire towers have become linked with the Buddhist practice of pursuing enlightenment through passive contemplation of nature. This is especially attractive to writers, who need to sit still for hours, free of distractions, to do their work. But at the age of 19, solitary contemplation was the last thing I needed. I needed to immerse myself in society, not to withdraw from it.

Like Kerouac, my dad was an eloquent writer, and his letters and Forest Service job applications went into my archives, where they were destroyed last year along with thousands of other irreplaceable keepsakes, in the house fire that inspired this series of Dispatches.

Politics and Profit in the Desert

Eventually, after two decades of immersion in urban culture, my own search for connection with nature led me to a field office of the Bureau of Land Management in the California desert. The BLM is an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, which claims its mission is to “manage and sustain America’s lands, water, wildlife, and energy resources, honor our nation’s responsibilities to tribal nations, and advocate for America’s island communities.” I spent days in that office squinting at old microfilm records and talking to staffers about mineral rights, easements, and other arcane interests shared by rural landowners and federal agencies.

The land I ended up buying fell within a Wilderness Study Area, and friends notified me that the BLM had invited a group of “stakeholders” to meet and contribute to a Resource Management Plan for the area. The plan was not the government’s idea – it was demanded by conservationists concerned about the endangered desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, whose populations were barely hanging on in this and neighboring mountain ranges. Private landowners within the area were not considered stakeholders, so I just showed up and started adding my two cents from the peanut gallery.

Who did the BLM consider stakeholders in public land? The ranching community turned out to be the most important component. The area included only one vast grazing allotment, with one permit holder, but he came supported by members of his large family and a slick city politician, president of a coalition that had been thrown together to protect desert ranchers from environmental regulation.

In those meetings I learned how the U.S. government, through its agencies the BLM and the Forest Service, subsidizes private-sector ranching, by charging grazing fees far below market rates and relieving ranchers of most of the financial and management burden for the damage done to natural habitat by livestock. Subsidized ranching has persisted since the 19th century because of the long-standing, high-level connections maintained between ranching families and both political parties.

I also learned that the leaders of government agencies are political appointees, both in Washington and at the regional level, so local policy swings back and forth between pro-conservation and pro-development. At the time of the Wilderness Plan meetings, we were in the Republican phase of the cycle. George H. W. Bush was President, and our local BLM office manager was a pro-development conservative.

The BLM office administering the wilderness surrounding my land had only two rangers to patrol and enforce regulations on an area larger than some states. The rest of the staff was office-based, and as regulations expand, more bureaucracy is needed, increasing the disparity between field and office staff. When the BLM attempted to enforce environmental regulations against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in the early 1990s, he successfully resisted, mounting an armed uprising in 2014, which he won. Now an intimidated BLM allows him to operate outside the law.

The other commercial stakeholders in these desert mountains are miners. Like ranching, the business of mining is subsidized and largely unregulated. The government, again through its agencies BLM and Forest Service, allows mining companies to keep all the profit they take from public lands, with little or no responsibility for conservation or cleanup. The public land surrounding my place in the desert is littered with mine ruins, equipment, and materials abandoned by private businesses over the past century and a half.

The only other stakeholders invited to the meetings were the conservationists who’d requested the plan – represented by the Sierra Club – and off-roaders, who contribute to local economies through their purchase of permits, machines, fuel, camping gear, restaurant meals, and hotel stays. Of course, off-roaders are passionately opposed to environmental regulation, so conservationists were outnumbered three to one.

BLM had scientists on staff – botanists to monitor forage plants on cattle range, mineral experts to review mining claims. But when it came to the tortoise and the bighorn, the state had jurisdiction. Just as the federal government manages rocks and plants as commercial resources, the state manages wildlife, so wildlife biologists were brought in as consultants, from the California Department of Fish and Game. Privately, they referred to the BLM as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.”

Government agencies always claim that commercial users of public land are important because they pay fees which can then be used for conservation. A friend studying endangered desert bighorn sheep invited me to a trophy hunt once, almost 30 years ago. Sheep tags were going for $80,000 back then – probably at least 5 times that now – and rich surgeons and tech CEOs arrived in camp from all over the country. It was a big, multi-day event that began at sunset with huge steaks sizzling on a giant campfire grill at the base of the mountains. The next day, I was allowed onboard a helicopter for a preliminary survey of the range, trying to spot where to send the hunters for the best chance at a trophy.

In the popular rhetoric and public discourse, mining companies contribute to local economies, and ranchers are seen to represent a precious, dying way of life preserving traditional values like self-reliance, responsibility, hard work, honesty and integrity. Likewise, hunters have long been praised as the original conservationists. In my Indiana hometown, the Conservation Club was a group of hunters that protected habitat for deer, pheasants, ducks, and other game species.

But just as our educational system largely ignores the role of capitalism and imperialism in our history, the mythology of mining, ranching, and hunting whitewashes reality. Mining companies destroy natural habitat and pollute local air, soil, and water, and rarely are required restore, clean up, or compensate local communities for the damage. Minerals they take from local habitats are sold as commodities on global markets, where profits go to distant shareholders.

In the desert, the government allows ranchers to run cattle in wilderness areas, trampling soils, spreading invasive plants, spreading disease to wildlife, and fouling native water sources. Whereas in traditional subsistence cultures, livestock are kept to feed and clothe the local community, in capitalist society, they’re sold as commodities in regional markets, for the sole profit of the rancher. And our society provides ample evidence that capitalist markets produce gross inequality, poverty, and conflict.

Rather than taking a holistic, ecosystem approach to conservation, hunters typically work to promote a single game species. Quail hunters in the desert build and maintain concrete “guzzlers” to collect and store rainwater runoff, which can then be accessed only by quail. Likewise, the rich hunters who can afford a bighorn tag use helicopters to install water tanks and piping deep in wilderness areas to artificially sustain sheep populations in drought years.

Since scientists are hired by government agencies as specialists supporting these commercial resources, they generally consider mining, ranching, and hunting as necessary evils – they’re just happy to be paid to collect and study data in their fields of study. But most of the agency scientists I met inspired me with their love of the desert, its natural habitats and wildlife, and how incredibly hard they worked to protect them.

My curiosity led me to meet many more conservation scientists over the following decades, to the point where they now make up as much as half of my friends. I’ve spent dozens of days and nights with them in the field, climbing rugged, trackless mountains under the blistering summer sun, trudging thigh-deep through wetlands in the middle of the night, collecting data essential for groundbreaking studies to protect endangered species. All these scientists believe in what they do, while conducting a running battle against “democracy” – the political cycle – and the extractive focus of their powerful commercial constituencies.

All of the land administered by BLM in the desert had been taken by force or fraud from indigenous people. There were still plenty of those people living in the desert, but none were represented on the BLM staff or in the scientific community. Nor were there any Hispanic BLM staffers or scientists, although Hispanics made up at least a quarter of the local population. Segregation and tacit discrimination were typical in California as a whole, so none of my new agency contacts or scientist friends seemed aware of, let alone concerned about, the disparity.

Politics and Profit in the Southwestern Forests

California’s desert mountains, administered by the BLM, are largely unforested. But the taller and wetter mountains surrounding my new home in the Southwest provide habitat for large stands of evergreen conifers and their deciduous allies, so my weekly hikes follow trails through land managed by Jack Kerouac’s old employer, the United States Forest Service.

In contrast with BLM and Interior, USFS is an agency of the Department of Agriculture, which claims its mission is to “to provide economic opportunity through innovation, helping rural America to thrive; to promote agriculture production that better nourishes Americans while also helping feed others throughout the world; and to preserve our Nation’s natural resources through conservation, restored forests, improved watersheds, and healthy private working lands.” Note how Ag’s rhetoric is more honest than Interior’s, putting economic values up front. And anyone should be able to infer that as part of Ag, USFS is likely to treat forests as crops.

In contrast with the white-administered California desert, the southwest New Mexico Forest Service more closely reflects our local demographics in its inclusion of Hispanic staffers. Latinos are avid users of the forest: campers, hunters, fishermen, and woodcutters. The same can’t be said of Native Americans – the Apaches resident here before the American invasion were all driven away to distant reservations, and I’m not aware of any native involvement in USFS. Now that we’ve put them out of sight, natives are out of mind.

I’ve met and talked to USFS staff regularly and frequently since I moved here. In fact, our whole community is actively involved with the Forest Service, from ranchers who run cattle on public land, to commercial logging operations, to hunters, fishermen, campers, and hikers who use Forest Service roads, campgrounds, and trails, homeowners who live in the forest, and businesspeople who benefit from tourist revenue.

My interactions primarily involve reporting invasive plants and the abuse or violation of regulations that I’ve encountered while hiking, like the cattle that regularly trespass into wilderness areas, and the rogue woodcutters that vandalize trails so they can illegally take motor vehicles deep into roadless areas, where they illegally harvest live trees in response to the voracious public demand for firewood. I also, rarely, run into trail maintenance crews. Contrary to popular belief, the federal government provides almost no funding for trail maintenance, and most trail work is done not by the Forest Service but by citizen volunteers from local non-profit groups.

Like in the desert, the U.S. government allows ranchers to run cattle all over our local wilderness areas, and ranchers are never held responsible for trespass or damage to protected habitats. By law, the Forest Service, not private ranchers, is responsible for fencing and repairing damage caused by livestock. But of course, the federal government doesn’t provide adequate funding for that. So laws and regulations are only enforced sporadically when private non-profit groups like the Center for Biological Diversity take the government to court and force compliance.

Forest Service staff dutifully note my reports on invasive plants and tresspass cattle, but admit that because of underfunding and understaffing, there’s generally nothing they can do. When I report illegal or abusive activity by commercial users like ranchers, woodcutters, or hunting guides, I’m consistently treated as an annoying troublemaker. Impatient Forest Service staff point out that commercial users are high-value – they pay fees that go directly into Forest Service salaries – but as a mere hiker and taxpayer I’m so far down the scale that I don’t count.

During those early meetings with BLM in the desert, and in the three decades since, I’ve gotten to know both government agencies and their constituencies pretty well. The old desert rancher and his family, decent people with values, knowledge, and skill that I respect. Agency staff who are typically friendly and hard-working, but frustrated by the short terms and high turnover in political jobs. Scientists who are passionate about conservation. Hunters who work hard to maintain native habitat.

In a society increasingly divided between liberals and conservatives, the majority rule of “democracy” perennially flips back and forth between opposing camps. Government agencies, led by political appointees, function cyclically, each new administration trying to reverse the “damage” of the previous cycle.

In our capitalist culture, with its worship of free enterprise, everything is measured by its economic value. Natural resources on public land are seen primarily as commodities to be extracted and sold for private profit. Taxpayer-funded government agencies support private businesses. Significant conservation is only achieved under legal pressure from private non-profit groups.

Heroic Firefighters, Romantic Lookouts

As I described in Part 5, our wildfire season starts during the pre-monsoon months of May and June. I moved here at the beginning of May 2006 and began spending several evenings per week with new friends at downtown watering holes – the corner bar and grill and the wine bar across the street. The stars of both scenes were Forest Service firefighters who’d just arrived from all over the country and would be stationed here for the season. They were young, athletic men, daredevil adrenaline junkies, and our women, young and old, clustered around them and hung on their every word.

Shortly after arriving, I started commuting out of our tiny local airport. The Forest Service has a permanent fire station there, where firefighters are based, and I saw how fleets of planes, helicopters, and trucks, as well as busloads of personnel, accumulate every season. Our monsoon was late that year, but it started with a big storm that turned the gully cutting through downtown into a raging orange river. And the hunkiest of that season’s firefighters was captured on the front page of our newspaper as he kayaked on that dangerous flood, all the way out of town to where it finally spread and dissipated miles out on the alluvial plain. The women swooned.

Five years later, a woman I was interested in took me to a talk, a book launch, by a local author, Philip Connors. Connors was a handsome former copy editor on the Wall Street Journal. Stuck in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, he’d fallen for the romance of the Forest Service fire tower. He’d followed Kerouac’s example, getting a job with the Forest Service as a fire lookout in a tower on a high peak just east of my new hometown, where he hoped to gain enlightenment, and a marketable story, through the contemplation of nature.

He’d spent several seasons there, and one of the big East Coast publishing houses had just released his memoir, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. It was getting rave reviews in the national press, and would go on to win the National Outdoor Book Award. Connors was our new local hero.

But not much of a public speaker. Facing a devoted crowd of young people and retirees, he struggled to enliven the months he spent in that tower – attempting to protect government trees from wildfire, reflecting on his limited life experience, occasionally spotting bears and other wildlife. Connors was no Kerouac, but he seemed like a nice guy. I could see how working on Wall Street could make you long for a different view out your window.

But I never romanticized fire lookouts in the first place – mountains should be sacred, and it saddens me when people violate their peaks with towers and antennae. And Connors’s experience as a solitary, passive observer compared poorly with the decades I’d already spent busting ass all over the desert with conservation biologists, learning about ecology, helping to save endangered species, and working to restore natural habitats.

Connors’s book begins by repeating the official gospel of contemporary wildfire management, a story of past mistakes being steadily corrected by science. From its inception until the most recent generation, the Forest Service tried to prevent or suppress all wildfires, in order to protect the natural resources – the trees – as well as the recreational features, private property, and businesses within or adjacent to its boundaries. Then, during the past four decades, there was a gradual shift.

New science claimed that forests evolved with fire and needed it to maintain diversity and productivity. Agency policy abandoned prevention and suppression and refocused on reducing built-up fuels and restoring natural fire regimes in fire-adapted habitats. More evidence of Progress: thanks to science, European culture was learning from its past mistakes, and the future would be a better place.

In our area, as in most fire-adapted habitat throughout the West, land users, homeowners, and media are regularly notified of “prescribed burns” planned by federal agencies in pursuit of the new management policy. And in remote rural areas like my new backyard, wildfires are sometimes allowed to burn without intervention when they don’t directly threaten human lives or property. Thus, environmentally-concerned city dwellers are reassured that the new policy is being successfully implemented.

But at the same time, ever larger, apocalyptic mega-wildfires occur, often near big cities, at what has come to be called the wildland-urban interface. A century of fire prevention and suppression resulted in widespread accumulation of fuels, while cities were sprawling and urban refugees were building farther and farther into fuel-rich forests. So that now, despite the official policy, most wildfires threaten lives, property, and the respiratory health of city-dwellers. The new policy of fuel reduction and prescribed burning requires little manpower, equipment, and expenditure, while the old romantic, military model of firefighting continues to expand, deploying billions of dollars worth of “assets” – armies of heroic firefighters, bulldozers, trucks, helicopters, and airplanes.

Throughout the fire season, we watch the hotshot caravans passing, the helicopters beating overhead, dipping to siphon water out of the giant plastic “pumpkin” tanks temporarily set up along rural roads. Somewhere out of sight in the backcountry, bulldozers cut fire breaks across natural habitat, lines of suited firefighters light backfires with gas-filled driptorches, aircraft dump water and bright red chemical fire retardant on native forests.

Marketing the Military Model

My desert friends and I subscribe to the annual BLM California calendar and the weekly BLM California News.Bytes newsletter. The calendar features beautiful landscape photography, and the newsletter keeps us abreast of events on public land in the desert.

But while Trump was president, the BLM newsletter bragged about his contributions to both the economy and conservation. And now, only two months into the Biden presidency, News.Bytes brags about overturning Trump’s legacy and employing the “best available science” to advance conservation. Regardless of the party in power, information we get from the government can’t be entirely trusted. It’s always going to function partly as PR – as advertising for the current administration.

In July 2017, a wildfire in California’s Sierra Nevada threatened the hometown of one of my favorite families – ironically, an ecologist, his botanist wife, and their kids. Home and business owners threatened directly by a wildfire rely on emergency phone alerts and daily public briefings by the law enforcement types who lead the military-style firefighting response. But I’d spent quality time at my friends’ place and was desperate for up-to-date information, so I turned to to InciWeb, the website maintained by government agencies involved with wildfire.

Government response to a wildfire starts when the agency with local jurisdiction names the “incident” (usually after a nearby landmark) and assigns an Incident Commander, who then puts together a team. Information – news, announcements, maps, photos, and videos – starts appearing under the new incident page of InciWeb.

My friends’ home escaped the fire, but I became an InciWeb addict, tuning in every morning during each year’s wildfire season to see what was burning in my region and my friends’ regions. I learned the idiosyncracies of the bureaucratic systems. In the bilingual Southwest, incident commanders routinely misspelled the Anglo place names that are assigned to new fires, and those misspelled names became the permanent incident titles in the public record: Brigham became Bringham, Vicks Peak became Vics. Information on InciWeb was good PR for the agencies – they could impress the public with how hard they were working for those tax dollars – but some incident teams did a better job than others.

After a serious wildfire erupted in a popular wilderness area near me last summer, the original incident team uploaded almost nothing to InciWeb for several weeks. Then they were suddenly replaced by a completely different team, which immediately started uploading a torrent of updates, maps, photos, and videos.

What kind of picture did all this government information portray about the actual fire? Sure, there were detailed maps of the perimeter, but as we saw in previous Dispatches of this series, a wildfire boundary is largely meaningless.

Most of the photos posted on InciWeb are of firefighters and equipment, bureaucrats briefing the public, or dramatic sunsets seen through smoke. Most of the videos are of aircraft dropping water and chemicals. Heroic firefighters, our tax dollars hard at work, and a bit of entertainment to hook the audience. Almost nothing about the unfolding, localized ecological interactions of the fire with habitat and wildlife, the natural adaptations and responses.

War on Wildfire

Aggression and violent conflict are so fundamental and essential to our society and culture that most people believe them to be universal human traits, just as they accept the polarization of society as a necessary evil of the democratic process.

But human societies don’t universally frame every problem as an enemy to be battled and conquered, the way we do, in our War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Crime, War on Cancer, War on Obesity, and most recently, the Battle Against Climate Change.

European history, the history we were taught in school, is a 2,000 year series of wars, revolutions, city-states, nations, and empires, one following the other. Europeans fought so many wars no one can keep track of them. The need to compete, to dominate others and the earth, is so fundamental to European culture that few of us are even aware of it. In media and the public discourse, people in our society are always said to be “fighting” one thing or another.

Conflict and violence are so fundamental to our culture that they bias our view of others. We romanticize indigenous people as brave warriors, overlooking examples of peaceful cooperation and coexistence. But anthropological research has uncovered many societies, throughout history and around the world, that prevent or manage conflict without violence. These societies don’t respond to challenges like climate change by fighting or waging war – they cooperate, resolve differences peacefully, and adapt to changing conditions.

It’s now widely acknowledged that the War on Drugs was a mistake. We’ve obviously never won the War on Poverty, the War on Cancer, or the War on Obesity. The War on Crime has resulted in mass incarceration of dark-skinned minorities. Does anyone really believe the War on Climate Change will be more successful?

And what about the War on Wildfire? We’re clearly not winning that one. According to official policy, we’re not even supposed to be fighting it. The Forest Service is supposed to be managing forests sustainably, but it’s clearly not working. As in all our wars, our rhetoric is not matching our accomplishments.

Maybe it’s time for a closer look at how we reached this state of crisis between our society and its environment, and this level of denial between rhetoric and reality.

Next: Americans and Wildfire

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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

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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. (Prakash Kashwan, editor, The Conversation)

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

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Art File

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022: Fire, Restoration Projects, Stories, Trouble.

Shed in the Hills

I’ve described before how the rising cost of living in California had driven me relentlessly from larger lodgings, where I originally had room for art and music studios, into smaller and smaller places, finally ending up in a tiny studio apartment with all my creative work and equipment far away in storage. It wasn’t until I moved to this remote small town in New Mexico that I could afford enough space to get all my work and gear together, and it still took me years to pull a lifetime of art and music out of boxes and set up studio space to continue that work after the dismal hiatus of struggling to survive in California.

Part of that process was finding a readily accessible way to store my thousands of works on paper and canvas – by me and others. For a decade and a half most of those paintings and drawings had been packed away in boxes, portfolio cases, and mailing tubes and stashed in various basements or garages. I needed a big flat file.

I was registered on an online community forum maintained by a couple of older men, 60s hippies who were fixtures in the local progressive subculture. At the end of July 2008, I posted my need for a file, and immediately got a response from one of those guys. It turned out his ex-girlfriend had left him a big flat file made by a local cabinetmaker from local pinewood. But it was stored in a shed way out in the mountains, an hour’s drive from town, and he didn’t have a vehicle that could move it.

So I bought it from him and drove him out there in my pickup truck. It took all day – we had to stop first at a rural settlement on the river to pick up a key, then we slowly drove for miles, winding back into the hills on a rough, narrow gravel road, finally reaching the shed. The file was so heavy that we had to remove all the drawers first to lift it into the truck.

But of course, once I got it home, I was faced with how to get this big wooden box into my house by myself.

First, I borrowed a dolly from a neighbor, and improvised a ramp from a sheet of plywood so I could roll the cabinet off the truck. Then I had to take my front door off the hinges and unscrew all the weatherstripping from the jamb in order to just barely scrape the file through the doorway.

Once I’d walked the awkward thing past my vestibule, put it back on the dolly, and rolled it into place, I could carefully reinstall all the drawers into their ball-bearing slides.

The cabinetmaker had put a huge amount of work into this file – precisely cutting, planing, and joining the pine planks for the sides, building the drawers from scratch, cutting perfect rabbet joints at all the corners. But for some reason he had neglected to finish it, leaving it topless, so John had given me a heavy sheet of particle board to put over it. I covered this with a Mexican blanket so it wouldn’t look so shabby in my living room.

After the Fire

Just as it was hugely liberating and inspiring to get my music, instruments, and recording gear out of storage after all those years, it was a revelation to rediscover my art. And soon I began a new series of work, filling the drawers of the file to the brim.

But my house fire in August 2020 put another stop to my creative work. I had to quickly remove those thousands of art works, re-pack them in boxes and portfolio cases, and move them back into storage.

Contractors moved all my furnishings out of the house in preparation for interior cleaning and repairs – all except for the file, which was too much of a hassle. It wasn’t until almost a year later, when the flooring subcontractor prepared to refinish my oak floors, that we absolutely had to get the flat file out of the house. So I again removed the drawers, took off the house’s front door and weatherstripping, and with a couple of young construction workers muscled the big thing out of the house and into a tight space in the already nearly full casita in back, in between my bed frame, fridge, and gas range.

In the process, one side of the cabinet was chipped. I salvaged the wedge-shaped piece of wood and quickly stashed it somewhere I thought it would be safe and retrievable, for however far away in the future it would take to fix this thing and get it back in the house.

Working Around It

The flat file and its separate drawers were now taking up space in the casita, along with most of the other furnishings of my house. I had moved back into and was camping out in the main house, but it was now the middle of winter, and I needed at least one room of that casita as a workshop, to start completing the interior of the house and make repairs to items like the flat file.

I cleared out the workshop as much as possible, but the flat file cabinet had to stay there while I put in the wiring – it was too big to fit through the casita’s other doors. So I worked around it, moving it from place to place as needed.

Repairing the Chip

Finally, at the end of March, I was ready to start fixing up the flat file. But by now I’d completely forgotten where I put that missing wood chip. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it – I would simply have to fabricate a new piece and glue it in. But how to match the original knotty pine? Knotty pine is no longer available, especially here.

Fortunately I had an old piece of scrap pine hanging around that had similar grain and color.

Refinishing the File Cabinet

The body of the file was quite worn, not to mention smoke damaged. But getting the old finish off took two days of heavy sanding, and in the process I discovered it had never been sanded to begin with – the surface was extremely rough under the finish the cabinetmaker had applied.

Like many things around here, it was paradoxical – the unfinished, imperfect product of a lot of obsessive labor.

I also found out early that sanding in the workshop raised far too much dust, and applying the finish indoors generated too many fumes. So I rolled the cabinet outside on my new dolly and applied three coats of polyurethane, sanding between each coat, covering it with plastic every night and uncovering it every morning.

Making Feet & Corner Guards

The base of the cabinet was the crudest part of it – inconsistent with the rest of the thing, the base was made out of rough, construction-grade two-by-fours. I wasn’t going to have that sliding around on my newly refinished oak floors, so I had to make feet, to which I would attach protective felt. I made these out of scraps of oak from another project, plus I cut corner guards to protect the vulnerable bottom edges of the cabinet, where the chip had come off earlier.

Moving It Back Into the House

Like a fool I was determined to get the cabinet back into the house by myself, and it did not go well – after taking off door and weatherstripping again, there was still only about 1/16″ clearance between the sides of the cabinet and the door jamb, and I ended up scratching up my new finish in a few places. But those were easily repaired.

Installing the Feet & Corner Guards

Reinforcing the Cabinet

I spent weeks puzzling over how to make a top for this cabinet. It would have to span over a yard of open space without warping, and there was no room to add bracing within the existing cabinet – the top would have to be framed above the existing front, sides, and back.

Plywood wouldn’t do – it should be solid wood – equivalent, if not superior, in quality to the expertly joined sides. But I didn’t have access to a broad selection of cabinet-grade wood – our local lumber yard only stocks a limited selection of “project boards” in poplar and oak up to 12″ wide. And I didn’t have the tools or setup to match the joinery of the sides.

Meanwhile, I realized that the top would need to be removable! A fixed top would prevent access to the drawer slides inside the cabinet, and they are mechanical parts that can wear out and break and need to be replaced. I decided to make the top hinged at the back with a continuous piano hinge.

A removable top added even more complexity to a project that just seemed to keep growing. And whereas a fixed top would reinforce the whole cabinet, a removable top would place stress on a structure that didn’t seem to have enough bracing as is. The top front crosspiece was so flimsy you could bend it up and down with one hand.

So I cut a couple of oak boards as cross braces for the body of the cabinet – they would just barely fit above the top drawer, and would stabilize the cross member in front, as well as to prevent warping of the sides. They would also need to be removable to facilitate getting your whole body inside the cabinet to work on the slides!

Building a Top for the File

We didn’t have any cabinet-grade wood panels available locally to cover the entire top, but I finally figured out a way to combine two different woods without more expensive tools. In addition to the oak boards, the lumber yard had a few 24″x48″ cabinet-grade pieces of birch plywood with a nice surface grain, and I was lucky to find two pieces that were book-matched.

I used the oak as edge binding and to join the two pieces of plywood down the center. I still didn’t have long clamps, but I managed to get enough pressure using bungee cords, and a doweling jig, to get reasonably fine joinery.

Being all hardwood, the top ended up really heavy.

Installing the New Top

Once I’d decided to hinge the top, I worried for weeks about how to align the hinge. Both the cabinet and the top were really heavy pieces, and the hinge would need to be attached with the top open, in such a manner that the top would be aligned with the cabinet when closed.

And the fit was not perfect – the original cabinetmaker hadn’t cut the sides perfectly straight, and I hadn’t thought to plane them earlier. Ultimately, searching online, I found adhesive-backed felt tape to line the interface between top, sides, and front. This would help keep dust out. I ordered it the week before I left for Indiana, and it was waiting for me 6 weeks later when I got back from the hospital.

To align the hinge properly was extremely complicated and took three tries, drilling a few holes at first, mounting a few screws, setting the whole heavy thing upright, relocating some holes and screws, lowering, removing and reattaching, etc.

And finally, I discovered that my house floor is uneven, and the cabinet flexes as it’s moved around the floor, so that in some positions, the hinged top is out of alignment, whereas in other positions it’s perfectly aligned. So I gave up and accepted imperfection.

I also realized that the cheap piano hinge from our local Ace is not really sturdy enough for the weight of this top. But it took me so long to install it, I’ll leave it as is for now, letting the next owner worry about that.

Refinishing the Drawers

I kept thinking I was almost done, until I realized the drawers still needed to be sanded and refinished – all 8 of them.

First I had to remove the wooden pulls – they were originally unfinished, and I decided to spray paint them black.

Refinishing the drawers took over a week, partly because I first sealed them with Danish oil to deepen the color, and I had to wait a day and sand between each coat. I had to keep moving them from place to place after each of the 4 coats, to keep them from running and sticking together, and to keep them free of dust from another project I was starting in the shop.

Installing the Drawers

Finally the drawers were ready! I assumed the project was done – what a huge relief! The last big piece of furniture repaired and restored to my house, almost two years after the fire!

I carefully carried each drawer from the casita, up onto the back porch, through the kitchen, and into the living room. When they were all there, I started by inserting the bottom drawer into its slides. These drawers have always been a tight fit, needing several firm pushes to get all the way in. But after the second firm push, one of the drawer slides exploded and ball bearings shot out across the floor.

I wasn’t finished after all. And thank god I’d made that top removable!

So I order a new set of slides for the bottom drawer, and waited another week for it to arrive. And meanwhile, I finally found that missing chip from the side of the cabinet. It was in the bottom of one of the drawers. If only I’d found it months ago, I would’ve saved a couple days of work fabricating a new patch, and the cabinet would’ve ended up looking better. So it goes.

But how to prop up the hinged top so I could work inside the cabinet? I hadn’t included that in my design yet, and there wasn’t much room to work with inside the cabinet. After a few days of design experimentation, I came up with the solution you see below, which works great.

I knew I had to prop the “lid” of the cabinet up in some way. This could be done either with a metal rod – like on the hood of your car – or with a wooden dowel, or a wooden “strut” with a rectangular cross-section. I wanted to avoid metal, which would come with its own challenges. Initially I figured a rectangular strut would be best, because I could attach it to either the underside of the lid or the top of the cabinet with a hinge. But the hinge would have to have a flush profile when the lid is closed, and mortising to achieve that would add work.

Also, I’d need to design some kind of socket to secure the loose end of the strut. Ultimately I realized a removable dowel would be the most elegant solution with my limited resources. I could easily fit an upper socket into a corner inside the lid so it would be flush. The lower socket would simply be a hole cut into the front cross-member of the cabinet, with a metal plate on the underside forming the bottom of the socket. When not in use, the dowel strut could sit in brackets attached to the middle cross member of the cabinet – a neat solution that would keep it inside the cabinet without interfering with the top drawer. I would make these brackets by carefully bending metal mending straps that I already had in my collection of surplus hardware.

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