Trouble

Fire, Part 4: Recovering in Burn Scars

Saturday, February 6th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Wildfire.

Previous: Questioning Wildfire

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Recovering Together

Before I began to lose mobility in 2014, hiking was just the cardio part of my weekly fitness regimen. I was still commuting to the West Coast for work, and with no time to explore our vast local wilderness areas, I hiked the same four or five trails close to town, week in and week out, year in and year out, just to stay in shape for hiking my beloved desert on sporadic vacations.

Back then, I was just maintaining capacity. But now, in recovery, I was trying to rebuild it, so I needed ways to measure progress. I needed to more accurately determine and record the distances and elevations I was hiking from week to week. It turned out that I really hadn’t lost much conditioning after all, and I quickly outgrew those short trails near town. Years of frustration made me want to achieve more.

The more challenging trails – longer and with more elevation gain – tended to be much farther away, in high mountains and wilderness areas – areas I might’ve explored from the start if I hadn’t been put off by that green blanket of forest. But now, wildfire had opened it up. While most people grieved the loss of trees, I was excited because now it would be more like the desert – I could see where I was, and I’d have long views over the landscape. And sure enough, all the challenging trails within a day’s drive of home turned out to traverse recent burn scars. My disabled body would be struggling to regain capacity in natural habitats that were struggling to recover from wildfire. Nature would be my teacher, my inspiration – what could be more appropriate?

During the past three years, I’ve hiked roughly 2,500 miles in burn scars, many of those miles bushwhacking or wayfinding on trails that have been abandoned, blocked, and overgrown. I’ve climbed over 600,000 vertical feet, my eyes peeled for differences in wildfire response between low-elevation grass-and-shrublands, mid-elevation pinyon-juniper-oak forest, and high-elevation mixed-conifer forest, as well as for large-scale patterns in landforms and landscapes visible from miles away. Wildfire has literally made me stronger and increased my endurance. But it’s also challenged my perceptions, helping me become a better observer, tracker, and pathfinder.

I’ve hiked burn areas in the Henry Mountains of Utah, administered by the Bureau of Land Management. In the White Mountains of Arizona, administered by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. In the Pinaleno and Chiricahua mountain ranges of Arizona’s Coronado National Forest. And in the Mogollon, Pinos Altos, Burro, and Black Range mountains of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.

These hikes have taken me, on multiple visits to each, through the burn scars of the Bulldog Fire (2003), the Horseshoe II Fire (2011), the Wallow Fire (2011), the Whitewater Baldy Complex Fire (2012), the Gomez Peak Fire (2012), the Silver Fire (2013), the Signal Fire (2014), the Frye Fire (2017), and the Tadpole Fire (2020), and the scars of older burns not on record. The majority of these hikes have occurred within federally-designated wilderness areas.

That said, I’m still just an amateur, and my study has only really begun, so what I have to share is in no way scientifically rigorous or complete. It’s just my experience as a beginning student of wildfire.

Landscape and Resilience

My first immersion in a mixed-conifer burn scar occurred unintentionally, during the summer solstice of 2018 in Arizona’s White Mountains. As mentioned in Part 2, this is a special, distinct landscape: a high plateau of vast grassy meadows separated by low meandering ridges and isolated peaks of dark volcanic rock. Much of the mixed-conifer forest blanketing those peaks and ridges had been burned in 2011’s Wallow Fire, and this was my first hike into its heart.

Making my way upstream along a narrow creek, in the shadow of a mature, parklike forest of old-growth pine and fir, I suddenly emerged into stark sunlight. A few living pines and many charred snags remained standing on the low slopes at my left and right, but most of the forest and any previous undergrowth had been killed off the slopes. Now, 7 years after the fire, only low bunchgrasses had been able to re-colonize those slopes, which were strewn with blackened logs.

The stream and its banks, on the other hand, cut a lush, bright green corridor through the ruins. I stopped and tried to visualize this little valley during the fire, with roiling, raging flames pouring down from above. Did the water boil? Did the stream provide a refuge – not only for underwater plants and animals, but as a wet, cooler corridor for riparian life to survive the fire?

Then I was yanked back to real time, noticing movement a hundred feet ahead. Three cow elk had crossed the creek and were moving from my left to right, east to west, wasting no time. I’d seen elk in these mountains several times over the years, sometimes in small groups grazing in roadside forest, sometimes in large herds spread across open meadows. I guessed these animals were moving from one distant location to another – to join a herd, or to reach an “island” of forage that had been left, or created, by the fire.

Suddenly, out of the ruins, I recognized a landscape consisting of habitats for both plants and animals, created by wildfire over time, as part of the fire cycle. The stream had provided a refuge. Landforms like mountains, ridges, meadows, and valleys had shaped the fire, and the fire had preserved or opened islands and corridors of habitat, redirecting the movements of wildlife. It wasn’t just a catastrophic event, a momentary disturbance that began with abundant life and ended with traumatic death. It was a passage in an ongoing story.

But when I applied these lessons to a completely different environment – the Sky Island of Arizona’s Pinaleno Mountains – they told a different story. In contrast with the little stream in the Whites, Sky Islands provide refuges on a macro scale – what ecologists call refugia, isolated remnants of habitat that were once widespread. Hiking in the higher elevations of the Pinalenos, I saw how the Frye Fire in 2017 had wiped out entire slopes of habitat for the critically endangered red squirrel, shrinking its already tiny refugium. These squirrels were uniquely adapted to and totally dependent on this small patch of high-elevation forest, which was truly an island separated by dozens of miles of arid, unforested hills and basins from its nearest neighbors in distant mountain ranges.

Unlike the elk, the squirrels were stuck here. They couldn’t escape and run long distances across open ground to another mountain range. The more of their forest was destroyed by fire, the fewer squirrels would survive. Rather than resilient survivors adapting to new conditions, they appeared as helpless victims, relics stuck in the past. There are no guarantees that all of us – or any of us – will survive what’s coming. The smaller and more limited your habitat, the more likely it is you’ll eventually go extinct.

But what about the squirrels’ habitat – the mixed-conifer forest on top of that specific mountain range? Just as the squirrels were “adapted” to and dependent on their forest, the forest depended on the squirrels. Regularly, year in and year out, the squirrels bury conifer seeds, which then become a seed bank ready to regenerate the habitat after a major disturbance, like wildfire. The loss of a single species, and the ecological work it performs, reduces the resilience of the ecosystem, and might ultimately result in the loss – the conversion – of its habitat, which might not be able to bounce back after a catastrophic disturbance.

Wildfire Behavior: A Dance With the Land

Already familiar with the distinctive landscape of Arizona’s White Mountains plateau, I could imagine how the Wallow Fire had to follow the meandering forested ridgelines, or be carried by wind as sparks to cause “spot fires,” rather than just racing across those intervening grassy meadows. We all know that heat rises, and when I saw entire slopes turned to ash in the Pinalenos, I assumed fire had begun at the lower end and burned uphill. But it wasn’t until I started hiking the Gila Wilderness in early 2019 that I got a clearer sense of how landscape shapes wildfire.

In contrast to the high plateau of the Whites, or the Sky Island of the Pinalenos, the Mogollon Mountains are just the high western edge of a vast, tilted platform of ancient volcanic sediment that has been eroded over time into a maze of sharp ridges and deep, shaded canyons. The steep slopes between ridgetops and canyon bottoms are irregularly punctuated by talus, rock pinnacles, and cliffs, and these topographic and surface features break up the forest, redirect winds and airflow, and shaped the path and impacts of our “devastating” 2012 Whitewater Baldy Complex Fire.

Already, in 2014, I’d hiked to the sharp top of a ridge where I had one foot in the exposed ash of a moonscape and the other in the shadow of intact forest. I didn’t know if that sharp boundary was caused by the natural sharpness of the ridge or by the way the fire was stopped by the Forest Service. But in the Mogollons I could see how entire drainages between outlying ridges had been protected, either because the fire had burned uphill rather than sideways around a sharp corner, or because prevailing winds and hot air currents had been channeled by the landforms, driving the fire in corresponding paths.

At the time of the fire, these isolated drainages must have provided refuge for animals as well as plants, and the many exposed rock outcrops would’ve also provided refuge as the fire was forced to bypass them in its spread.

At the beginning of June 2020, while I was stuck at home recovering from an episode of severe back pain, dry lightning sparked wildfire in a remote drainage below a ridge near town that I’d been hiking regularly for many years. The trail followed the six-mile-long ridgeline, so I knew the forest up there well, and I knew that its steep north slope was choked with excess fuel – dense underbrush and deadfall.

The road through that area was closed, and my condition, and the surrounding hills, made it hard to see what was going on, but I followed updates on Inciweb, the government wildfire information website. I assumed the fire would burn uphill to the ridgeline, and I was saddened to think that I’d lose yet another forest hike. But as the online fire maps were updated from day to day, I saw fire behavior that was completely unexpected. The fire climbed straight north up to the ridge, then dropped straight north down the back side without running laterally. Then from there, it turned right and ran laterally to the east, while windblown sparks raced above it and landed at the east end of the ridge, where spot fires merged and became a new center.

After that, fire behavior seemed random, running and spotting in all directions until the fire boundary encompassed the whole ridge and all its outlying spurs and foothills. But whenever I zoomed my camera or used binoculars from a distant peak, I could see a lot of intact forest still standing, everywhere.

Two months later, the fire had finally burned out and the road had been reopened, and I hiked the entire ridgeline, discovering that the fire had made narrow runs both up and down the north and south slopes, completely consuming narrow swaths of vegetation while leaving the surrounding, seemingly identical slopes intact. It had burned laterally along some slopes, leaving the upper forest intact, with a sharp line between moonscape and lush forest. In some spots, it had burned individual trees down to the roots while leaving no trace of charring on surrounding vegetation.

Although I wasn’t sure why wildfires behaved so erratically, I now had a better understanding of what the authorities meant when they reported “patchy” fire damage. Media coverage, and occasional views of fires from a distant highway, had led me to believe vast areas of forest had been completely destroyed, but what I was now finding, in the heart of the burn area, was a complex mosaic of both new and old habitat – much more complex than the pre-existing forest. Rather than the simplicity of life vs. death, the fire had created a new diversity of habitats.

And it was not just the familiar cliche of “biodiversity” – many different species packed into a single habitat or region – this was a whole new paradigm. Many more distinct habitats, each with its own ecosystem, its own community of organisms, packed into the same area. And all the patches of the mosaic were small enough, and close enough together – typically connected to others of the same type in a network – that most animals, and the seeds of plants, could move back and forth between them, from shaded gully to gentle slope to steep ridge and mountain top, from exposed rock to grassland to shrubland to forest, sharing the best of all worlds.

The Wildfire Cycle: Aftermath and Repercussions

In 2019, as I recovered from my disabilities, gained capacity, and sought more challenging hikes, I tried to plan hikes that were farther away. There was little information online about trail conditions in the Pinalenos – it appeared that since the big wildfires there, neither the Forest Service nor crowd-sourced websites were updating trail conditions. There were no recent trip logs, and I got the sense that hikers were mostly avoiding that area – either because they knew the trails were bad, or they were just guessing.

I was interested in the biggest canyon on the south side of the range, because it was remote and had a perennial stream. The trail ran up the canyon for a few miles then switchbacked to the crest. It was long enough for a serious day hike, and offered a challenging climb. But what I found in that canyon blew my mind. It was something I’d only read about in John McPhee’s book The Control of Nature – a massive debris flow, resulting from the erosion that followed the 2017 Frye Fire.

This wasn’t ostensibly as dramatic as McPhee’s example – boulders the size of freight cars rolling out of canyons into upscale suburbs – but it was deep in the wilderness, and I wasn’t just reading about it, it was blocking my path. I’d lost the trail miles below, because post-fire floods had carved and completely re-shaped the stream bed. Then suddenly I emerged into a nightmare landscape where, quite recently, a huge pile of white boulders had rolled down from above, submerging the canyon bottom and its green riparian habitat. The skeletons of big pine and fir trees rose like zombies from the boulder pile, killed from the roots up, still bearing a dead weight of brown needles.

Forest was intact on both sides of this canyon – you couldn’t even see the wildfire burn scar from here. There was only one place these boulders could’ve come from – the burned slopes thousands of feet above. I laboriously climbed over the debris flow, which stretched a half mile upstream, and found that it ended in a cliff with a tall waterfall pouring out of a narrow gap high above, where these thousands of tons of boulders had to have rolled through, plunging nearly a hundred feet and crashing into the canyon bottom where they quickly spread out and piled up to create a completely new swath of habitat, a maze of fresh new niches to be filled with sediment, soil, plants and animals.

A year later, hiking through moonscape burn scars high in the Black Range and Mogollon Mountains near home, I saw how these erosional events start. I crossed deep vertical gullies created on upper slopes by headward erosion. After a catastrophic wildfire, when a stand of trees on a steep slope is killed, the soil and underlying rocks are no longer held in place by tree roots. Rain and melting snow literally drag loose sediment out from under the slope, and the resulting gully eats its way up the slope, broadening into a new canyon over time. Chunks of the mountain top are literally broken up and moved downhill.

Wildfire is not only shaped by existing landforms – it creates new landforms, through erosion and deposition. That’s an integral part of the fire cycle, as anyone knows who lives in a wildfire zone. One of the first things the authorities warn you about is flooding and erosion, which follow quickly in the aftermath of wildfire.

From my earliest forays into burn scars, I’d been blocked or hemmed in by thickets of oak and aspen and scratched by thorns. I was used to the tiny, non-threatening thorns of wild roses and raspberries, but it wasn’t until I began hiking the burn scars of the Silver Fire, high in the Black Range east of my home, that I became aware of, and focused in on, New Mexico locust.

Back east, I’d grown up with the thorny honey locust tree. A thicket of locust seedlings had provided my secret childhood hideout, sheltering me from neighborhood bullies. These New Mexico locusts in the Black Range burn scar had vicious thorns up to an inch long. Once I knew what they were, I found they were widespread in high-elevation burn scars. But whereas here in the Black Range, they formed dense thickets, in other locations they were sparse and far outnumbered by oak or aspen.

Plants use thorns to protect their foliage from herbivores like deer. Conversely, this would seem to imply that locust leaves are desirable forage for herbivores, and wildfire that removes the canopy of mixed-conifer forest provides a bounty of new forage for wildlife. I also learned that the flowers are edible, although after trying a few in the summertime, I wasn’t crazy about their raw flavor. But apparently their protective thorns enable them to become one of the three main invaders of burn scars.

Still seeking more variety and more challenges in my hikes, in early 2020 I ventured over into the Chiricahua sky island of extreme southeast Arizona. I was attracted to these mountains because they had more exposed rock to break up the monotony of the forest, but I knew the forest they did have was devastated in the 2011 Horseshoe II Fire.

There was also more up-to-date information on trails, in a website maintained by a single devotee. Based on his report, I headed up a trail that offered short access to the crest of the range. He said it had been cleared of deadfall the previous year, but after I summited a switchback slope and reached the halfway point, I entered a canyon where the trail was completely blocked by hundreds of living trees that had fallen down from above, seemingly all at the same time.

This was new to me, and when I contacted the website guy, I learned it was known as a blowdown.

When a tree topples and is uprooted, in one piece, it leaves a hole, and the underside of the root mass is exposed. I’d encountered that throughout my life of hiking in forests, but I’d never really considered all the ramifications. Sure, we all know that trees can blow down sometimes in a high wind. But why did this section of trees, on this particular slope, blow down all at once, when the forest around them was spared?

Maybe there was a problem with the soil – maybe as a result of the wildfire, or maybe developing over a longer time – and/or a problem with the health of these trees, that weakened their roots or their anchorage in the ground. A continuous stand provides wind protection for individual trees – a windbreak – and the opposing stand, across the narrow canyon, had mostly been killed off by the wildfire. Maybe that loss of windbreak had increased wind’s impact on these survivors. Maybe it was just a freak of wind, channelled by the landforms – this was a “hanging” canyon that ended abruptly at a downstream gap. Maybe even the strongest, best-rooted trees couldn’t’ve resisted that powerful gust.

Later in the year, hiking a narrow but flat-topped ridge near home, I came upon a smaller blowdown – a dozen tall, seemingly healthy ponderosa pines that had all toppled in the same direction, south to north, directly across the trail. The forest remained intact all around this new open patch.

The top of a peak or ridge funnels a prevailing wind, generally producing the highest wind speeds and forces, so here, it was easier to guess why trees had been blown down, but not why this patch had been singled out while their neighbors stood fast.

The cause would remain a mystery, but I now knew that within the fire cycle, living trees as well as dead trees could be blown down en masse, creating new openings in the forest, reducing forest cover and making way for new habitat.

Climbing Through Deadfall and Blowdown

At the beginning of my “recovery in burn scars,” I was dealing with my latest disability, a shoulder problem. It started as a sharp pain in my right bicep while stretching, but by late 2018 I had to pause my upper-body workouts, and just putting on or taking off clothes became a challenge – I couldn’t raise that arm more than 45 degrees without triggering severe pain.

Our local surgeon prescribed physical therapy, but that made it worse. Then he ordered an MRI and said I had a rotator cuff tear that could easily be fixed with surgery. But when I talked to others who’d had that surgery, I learned it had the longest and hardest recovery period of any orthopedic procedure. I live alone, but during the first 6 weeks, I’d need somebody with me 24/7, and I could expect waiting up to a year for recovery, which still might not be 100 percent.

So I decided to try to work through it – to take lessons from the failed physical therapy, and carefully, laboriously build strength in the tissue surrounding the rotator cuff, to hopefully compensate and recover more use of that shoulder.

It took months, but it worked. There were still limitations on what I could do with that arm, but I learned what they were, and was mostly able to avoid triggering the pain. And within those limits, I recovered virtually all my original strength and range of motion.

However, while working on the right shoulder, I discovered the exact same problem, just beginning in the left. And several months after recovering from the first rotator cuff tear, I was driving west across an uninhabited stretch of Utah, looking for a prehistoric pictograph site, when my whole left arm suddenly caught fire with crippling pain.

I had to drive with the right arm to the next exit, where I pulled off, took some meds, and rested. But the pain remained so severe that I had to give up on camping that night, and retreated to a distant motel, where I rested and treated the pain for a couple of days before driving home.

Fortunately, I knew what to do this time, so I started the whole upper-body recovery effort over again. And my lower body was fine, so I could still hike, as long as I used my recovered right arm for things like lifting my pack.

At the same time, I was beginning to outgrow the trails that had been cleared of deadfall in our local burn scars. I needed more distance in my Sunday all-day hikes. Those trails all continued for many miles into wilderness, but the continuations were all abandoned and blocked, either by fallen snags or char from the old wildfires, or by blowdown due to wind.

Three months into recovering from the second rotator cuff tear, I decided to try an unfamiliar trail. For half of its distance, it traversed a north slope through a forest turned into moonscape by fire. It was early February and snow on that north slope was about 8 inches deep. The trail was mostly clear of deadfall, but at one point I reached a log lying across the trail at chest height. The easiest way to get past those is to wrap both arms around the log and swing underneath, but when I tried that, it felt like I was tearing my left arm off at the shoulder. I screamed, dropped into the snow and lay there a while, breathing hard.

Fortunately the pain receded by the time I finished hiking, and it didn’t seem to have reversed my recovery. But as I began to push farther on uncleared trails, my hikes became less about walking, and more about climbing over, under, and around obstacle courses created by the trunks and branches of fallen trees. My recovering upper body was getting almost as much of a workout as the hips, knees, and feet that I’d spent years trying to restore.

This reached a climax in December 2020, when I decided to try a trail I’d been wondering about for 14 years, ever since I’d moved to southwest New Mexico. It was the crest trail that traversed the heart of the “moonscape” burn scar of the Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire, connecting the highest peaks of the range. Trip logs from recent hikers said it’d been cleared of deadfall the previous summer. But what I found was nothing short of apocalyptic.

Used to hiking 7 or 8 miles into the wilderness before turning back, I only made 4 miles on this trail, and to get that far, I had to climb over, under, or around up to 2,000 trees that had fallen in the past couple of months. Why now, and why so many? I remembered we’d had high winds in November. And maybe the timing was just right, just enough time had passed since the fire, and the grip of all those dead but still-standing trees had weakened just enough to let them fall. Trees in a stand provide wind resistance – windbreak – for each other, and as more fall, there must be a domino effect.

My recovered shoulders got their ultimate workout. And I saw just how much a high-elevation mixed-conifer forest could be physically transformed after high-intensity wildfire.

I’d seen big herbivores like deer and elk making their way through deadfall with no problem. Jumping hurdles is as intuitive for them as walking. I’d learned how a wide variety of animals make use of human trails, which often begin as animal trails anyway. A mountain lion had preceded me on that deadfall trail, and I could see that with its lower profile, it had an easier time because it could simply slink under most of the fallen logs that spanned the trail.

I began to think all these blocked trails, in the wake of wildfire, might even be a good thing, because they’d help keep humans and their invasive species – dogs, horses, cattle, and the non-native seeds carried by all – out of recovering habitat. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

Mature forest habitat provides many services and resources – soil stabilization, shade, nesting sites, tree seeds, and leaf litter, to name a few. But after high-intensity wildfire destroys the evergreen canopy, sunlight can reach the ground, and grasses, annuals, shrubs, and deciduous trees will invade, providing a bounty of rich forage for rodents, birds, and herbivorous mammals.

Invertebrates like ants, termites, and wood borers gain masses of new habitat in rotting logs, and bears find sugars in the sapwood and a potential bounty of insects and larvae when they tear off the rotting bark. In the long run, nutrients from rotting logs, processed by fungi, insects, and bears, replenish the soil.

Each time I suffered a disability – the onset of pain, the loss of strength and mobility – I feared it would be permanent. But so far, I’d found that in my body, as in nature at large, each loss was not an end, but the beginning of a new cycle.

Next: Wildfire Revelations

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Fire, Part 5: Wildfire Revelations

Saturday, February 20th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Wildfire.

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Recovering in Burn Scars

Wildfire and Habitat

Throughout these Dispatches on wildfire, I’ve been using the word habitat as if we’re all familiar with it and understand it in the same way. But is that true?

In ecology – the study of relationships between living organisms and their environment – habitat means, to quote Wikipedia: “the array of resources, physical and biotic factors, present in an area that allow the survival and reproduction of a particular species.” Your habitat is the area around your home where everything you need comes from: air, water, food, shelter, healthcare, etc.

But because many organisms range widely for the resources they need, habitat can be hard to pin down. We’re most familiar with birds – they can seemingly go anywhere. For some migrating birds, their habitat would seem to be an entire hemisphere of the earth. Whales, of course, also migrate thousands of miles. But even a colony of ants can live in a forest and harvest food from a nearby meadow – and vice versa.

As Wittgenstein observed, language is a game. The meanings of words are not prescribed in advance by dictionaries; words acquire meaning during use, and dictionaries are compiled after the fact to report on the usage of words in society.

Experiencing firsthand the changes wrought by wildfire in the Southwestern landscape, I’ve groped for words to describe and share my experience. When biologists, conservationists, and land managers get together in the field, I’ve always heard them refer to a forest, a grassy meadow, a desert, a stream corridor, or a seashore as a type of habitat – for example, “You’ve got that forest habitat next to a sagebrush steppe.” In that usage, habitat doesn’t refer to a single species and its needs, it refers to a physical area hosting and providing the needs of a distinct community of countless different species – from bacteria and fungi to trees and large mammals – whose interactions with each other and the nonliving components of that area constitute an ecosystem. That area, that type of habitat, has boundaries, beyond which it ends and other, adjacent types of habitat begin, and it’s defined in terms of the recognizable features that distinguish it from other, adjacent habitats. For example, a forest bordering on a meadow, or an ocean bordering on a coast.

Biologists are not really supposed to use the term “habitat” in that vernacular sense, as a place defined by a geographical feature, or an alliance of dominant vegetation, hosting a distinct community of species. But we need a word for such a place, and we grope for something more accurate.

Wildfire makes this need even more urgent. Within hours, a wildfire can turn a forest full of trees and the animals that depend on them into a smoking, ash-blanketed moonscape. The forest provided habitat for countless species, but what do you call the empty moonscape? And when, after monsoon rains, the ashy wasteland is gradually replaced by clumps of annual wildflowers here, stands of ferns there, isolated thickets of aspen here, scattered oak seedlings there, with birds and other animals moving back and forth between them – what do you call the new landscape? The theory of succession says that the new regime is transitory. Over time, species will grow and spread, competing for light, space, water, and nutrients. The perennials all start small, but some will end up dominating others.

That takes time – decades and human generations, in the case of this former forest – and in the meantime, what used to be distinct, homogenous habitat is an unstable, transitional mosaic of patches. Countless plants and animals begin using it immediately after the fire and increase in numbers and complexity from then on. The “new normal” is evolving, but it still provides habitat for these species.

Thus wildfire forces us to talk about habitat that’s divided into a mosaic of patches that are ever-changing and shared between countless species that overlap in some sort of dynamic network. Just as we defined the previous, larger, homogenous and stable area by its most recognizable features, we define each evolving patch by the features that are temporarily dominant. The more we strive for precision and follow the mandate of reductive science to focus on individual species, the more wildfire forces us to take a holistic view.

Desert Fires, Forest Fires

Across my four decades in the Mojave Desert, I can think of only three memorable wildfires. The small one I woke up to in 1989, described in Part 2, is the only one I know firsthand. The other two, the Hackberry Fire of 2005 and the slightly smaller Dome Fire that decimated our most famous Joshua Tree forest in 2020, consumed less than 200,000 acres. During that same period, the forested mountains of Arizona and New Mexico have experienced dozens of mega-wildfires consuming millions of acres. Whereas the prehistory of wildfire in the desert is poorly known and controversial, the forests of the Southwest are widely acknowledged to be adapted to and dependent on wildfire.

During my lifetime, the frequency and intensity of wildfire have increased in both habitats. Most “environmentally-conscious” people now assume that climate change is at fault, simply because media authorities have oversimplified climate change into the scapegoat behind all our environmental problems. But fire suppression, not climate change, is the main reason why more forests burn now than in my youth. Wildfires would’ve been common decades ago if our government hadn’t prevented and aggressively fought them.

Anyone can recognize that a warmer, drier climate will dry out both living and dead vegetation, increasing the risk of fire. But the desert and the forest pose very different risks.

Yes, reductive science tells us that the loss of forest reduces absorption of carbon by the “biosphere,” accelerating climate change on a planetary scale. But Southwestern forests are meant to burn, and the resulting habitat mosaic can be more diverse and productive than the artificial uniformity we created through fire suppression. The forest needs wildfire to restore its balance.

Not so in the desert. As I described in Part 3, unlike the Southwestern forests, desert habitats are being degraded and lost at an ever-accelerating rate due to invasive plants – and of course, due to urban and industrial development – particularly the misnamed “green” energy. Wildfire in the already extremely arid desert will explode in future decades as our rapidly increasing demand for electricity – misbelieved to be a “clean” source of energy – sparks more infrastructure fires, and as more and more invasive plants spread by our “green” electric vehicles provide more and more fuel for high-intensity wildfire, clearing more and more native habitat and replacing it with degraded, biologically impoverished land dominated by aliens.

We Europeans were wrong to call it a desert when we first saw it, because back then, it was a diverse, productive wonderland. Now, we’re making the place fit the name – a wasteland created by our expansion and innovation, a victim of civilization and progress.

Forest Reborn in Fire

Science doesn’t really answer all our questions or provide a definitive explanation for what happens in nature – science provides simplified abstractions that can mislead us into thinking nature is orderly and can be controlled by us.

In the ideal, theoretical, stable habitat, with a stable climate, stable landforms, and a stable ecosystem or community of organisms, scientists tell us that wildfire occurs in a pattern they call the fire regime. Within that theoretical regime, wildfire occurs in fire cycles, meaning that fires repeat at more or less regular time intervals. Each fire is followed by a more or less predictable sequence: flooding, erosion, deposition, plant invasions and colonizations, a period of decomposition, competition, and instability, eventually leading to a stable state in which the habitat and community are just waiting for the next fire.

In this theoretical model, climate – the yearly cycle of weather, from wind and cloud cover to precipitation, temperature averages and extremes – enables specific communities of organisms to settle into specific niches where, working together, they establish distinct habitats and ecosystems, adapting to wildfire and further shaping its regime – its pattern – and its cycle. This is ecology in the broadest sense – living and nonliving, earth and sky, ephemeral phenomena and stable pattern – working together to achieve what in my field of science – the science of motion and change – was called a dynamic equilibrium.

A particular fire regime, and its corresponding cycle, are of course determined by habitat, which is in turn determined by landscape, its geological foundations, climate, and evolutionary history. Regardless of climate, mountains create elevational zones of habitat, from the desert basins to the arid grasslands, the mid-elevation, fairly open forest of trees with spreading crowns, and the high-elevation mixed-conifer forest of tall, slender trees creating a more or less solid canopy. Mountains create corridors and niches of habitat via their rock substrate, their peaks, ridges, rock outcrops and cliffs, and canyon bottoms. Patches of fast-burning fuel – accumulations of dry or dead vegetation, especially from invasive plants – provide a ready-made path for wildfire, diverting it away from slower-burning patches. Both habitat and landforms create the potential for fire and shape its spread.

Within a distinct habitat and ecosystem, the fire adaptations of species, and the conditions of individuals – their relative age and health – determine how they react to fire, and how fire may cull weak or unhealthy individuals while protecting the population. The thick bark on the trunks of mature pines and firs acts as insulation, protecting the sapwood inside. Mature trees shade and kill their lower limbs, which fall off, denying surface fires a “ladder” of fuel to climb to the crown. This is particularly effective for ponderosa pines, which have thick branches that could offer substantial fuel.

Succulents like agave, yucca, and cactus, which we think of as natives of the open desert, thrive in the fire regime of forests because their stored water and underground mass cools and protects them from total destruction in a wildfire, so that even if their thick leaves are completely killed, the plant’s hidden heart can still bear fruit.

In southwestern New Mexico, we may reference the four seasons of our European cultural legacy for convenience, but those are not the seasons we get. Our windy season, in March and April, dries out the land, increasing fuel for wildfire. May and June, the buildup to the Southwest monsoon, bring heat and dry lightning in the mountains. Most of our wildfires start in May and June.

If we get a good monsoon, starting in July, rains will start to suppress the fires. Climate is the pattern, weather is the expression, preparing the land for burning, lighting the fires, then putting them out.

We all know how wildfire can be started by lightning strikes. But did you know that rocks falling against each other can spark wildfire?

Humans start wildfires through carelessness – like the campers in Arizona’s White Mountains who left their campfire smoldering and started the largest wildfire in the history of the Southwest. Or by malicious intent, like the arsonist(s) who destroyed the forest on the little peak I hiked near town.

Our advanced technologies are simply too complex for us to control and keep safe. A driver pulls onto the weedy shoulder of the road to take a call, her hot exhaust pipe catches the weeds on fire, then she drives away, oblivious. Small engines are used millions of times every day at the urban-wildland interface – chain saws, weed-whackers, lawnmowers – generating sparks that can cause wildfires.

Recently, some of the most destructive fires at the urban-wildland interface have been started by arcs or failures in electric power distribution systems. As we try to slow climate change by transitioning from fossil fuels to electric cars, the increased demand on electrical infrastructure will spark more wildfires.

Indigenous people have always started wildfires to increase the productivity of habitat, and Europeans have belatedly appropriated indigenous practices in North America. Fires with a non-human cause burn according to non-human constraints of landscape, habitat, and weather. Humans may schedule, locate, and direct their fires – a prescribed or controlled burn – for defined purposes like “fuel reduction.”

Once a fire has started, it develops a life and history of its own. It’s intuitive for us to think of fire as a thing – even a living thing – but in the reductive domain of European science, fire isn’t a distinct thing, it’s an ephemeral state or property of the “matter” which is burning at the moment. The flames consuming a tree, and the flames consuming its neighbor, are not considered a continuous entity or phenomenon. From the perspective of physics and chemistry, it’s all just atoms, molecules, and energy.

But in the real world, fire is most definitely a living thing. A wildfire is born, it grows, it travels. It may merge with a neighboring fire, like two cells fusing. Like living organisms, it’s always dying even as it grows and thrives – embers blackening and cooling in one place while flames blossom in another. Fires that spread from a center die from the inside out, an expanding ring of flames surrounding a blackened core.

But the movements of fire are directed by landscape, weather, and habitat. In mountains, in still air, a fire will burn uphill. But air is seldom still in mountains, and fires generate their own winds. Strong winds may carry sparks for miles to give birth to spot fires, children isolated from the parent. While moving, a fire may encounter fast-burning fuel that draws it forward. Or it may hit an obstacle – a patch of wet or slow-burning vegetation, a cliff or rock outcrop, the sharp crest of a ridge, a river, pond, or lake. The obstacle may stop the fire, force it to detour, slow it down, or simply reduce its intensity. Obstacles or patches of low intensity provide refuges for plants and fleeing animals.

Depending on cause and habitat, a fire may spread through soil – a ground fire – through surface vegetation – a surface fire – or from treetop to treetop – a crown fire. But these are just convenient abstractions – the reality is much more subtle and complex.

A fire is said to make a run – burning a path uphill, downhill, or across country – directed by landforms, temperature gradients, wind currents, and the availability of fuel. In a complex landscape, it moves like an amoeba, an amorphous being, drawn to patches of available fuel.

Burning vegetation generates smoke, clouds of particulates and gases that warn animals, trigger reactions in plants, release nutrients, and rise into the atmosphere, affecting weather.

Fire doesn’t just consume trees and other plants. Fire interacts with other living things, like any other partner in the ecosystem. Plants come prepared with their adaptations, like the thick bark and limbless trunks of the mature pines, and the water-filled leaves of the succulents. Heat rising from a surface fire in a fuel-rich forest may kill all or most of the leaves and needles above without burning the tree. A tree whose vegetation is killed may die from the top down, its roots rotting until the skeleton is eventually toppled by wind.

A hot crown fire burns downward. If the burning ends at the lowest branches, a standing char – a blackened trunk – is left and may stand for decades. If the trunk keeps burning to the ground, the fire will follow the roots underground, until all the wood is consumed, leaving tunnels in the soil.

Like plants in the forest, animals are said to be adapted to wildfire, meaning they respond to warnings – smoke, the sounds of burning, the sight of flames – by fleeing or taking cover, taking advantage of natural refuges created by variations in landforms, water features, and vegetation. Birds fly away, reptiles hide underground. Some individuals may perish, but the population generally survives.

In the immediate aftermath of wildfire, we see loss, destruction, blackened skeletons, ground covered with ash. What we don’t see is potential new habitat prepared by the fire’s release of massive amounts of raw nutrients. An unhealthy excess of fuel buildup, purged. Unhealthy individuals and populations, cleansed. Fire-adapted roots and seeds, stimulated by fire and waiting, below the ash, for the next rain to sprout.

Many plants of our Southwestern forests are so well-adapted to wildfire that when their aboveground parts are completely consumed, they immediately and aggressively expand underground and re-sprout. Quaking aspen, gambel oak, and New Mexico locust respond this way, filling in burn scars with impenetrable thickets.

Burned agaves, including our narrow-leafed beargrass, immediately re-sprout from unburned root stock, along with ferns and mosses.

Nutrients released into the soil directly by wildfire, and later by the decomposition of fire-killed vegetation, encourage the growth of sprouts from the underground seed bank which is always present, waiting to take advantage of disturbances like fire.

When a stand of trees and other vegetation is killed and largely consumed by high-intensity wildfire, the ground that was held in place by roots is now vulnerable to erosion. When it rains after a fire, floods full of ash and sediment rush downstream. Like terrestrial plants and animals, fish and other aquatic organisms are fire-adapted and sense coming changes. Some are killed, but others take refuge or are washed downstream, to return later when conditions are right.

We think of erosion as merely loss of ground, but in nature, erosion opens new habitat, and floods and landslides move old rocks, soil, and dead vegetation downhill, where they’re eventually deposited to form more new habitat. Erosion can expose buried seeds. In general, erosion and deposition are a form of natural tilling – agitating, turning, and mixing the soil, releasing buried seeds and nutrients. Major erosional and depositional events, like I found in the Pinalenos, create new landforms, which themselves shape new habitats and microclimates of the living earth.

Wildfire releases new chemical nutrients directly, through the burning of soil, vegetation, and dead organic matter, but the process continues for decades after as organisms killed by the fire are consumed by decomposers like fungi, insects, and gut bacteria. The snags and char of fire-killed trees hold precious resources, the product of decades of hard work by the plant. Decomposers process these resources and make them available to the broader ecosystem.

The old notion of ecological succession says that, if environmental conditions – the fire regime – persist, the post-fire undergrowth and thickets will eventually be succeeded by some form of mixed-conifer forest, completing the fire cycle. Pine and fir seedlings will sprout from an existing seed bank, or from seeds carried by birds and buried by squirrels, and eventually grow to shade the shorter trees, which will die out, and you’ll end up with a replacement forest.

But now, with global climate change and massive, high-intensity wildfires, many forests are in danger of stand replacement and forest conversion. We’re told this is a bad thing, because forests help absorb the carbon emitted by our machines, protecting the earth from further climate change. But fire’s removal of the forest canopy opens light and space and liberates nutrients for lush forage – grasses and annuals, the foliage of deciduous shrubs and trees – attracting both herbivores and the predators that depend on them.

Patchy Burns, Biodiversity, and Mosaics

A decade ago when our big local wildfires started, and I anxiously followed the news, I was shocked and saddened by the scale of destruction that expanded daily, reaching hundreds of thousands of acres. Then, after a fire finally died down and damage surveys were reported, I was encouraged when authorities claimed only “patchy” damage.

It was only recently, during my weekly hikes in burn scars, that I began to understand. As described above, living fires tend to grow and move like amoebas, shaped by landforms, weather, and habitat. Even the most intense wildfire leaves patches of lower intensity and unburned habitat, so that the reported acreage of a large wildfire, measured by the outer boundary, is typically meaningless.

The giant Wallow Fire in Arizona’s White Mountains started at the southern edge of the range in the Bear Wallow Wilderness, where the high plateau is deeply dissected into ridges and canyons. So at its origin, the fire was diverted by terrain and missed large patches of forest. But when it reached Escudilla Mountain at the opposite, northeast end of the plateau – an ancient volcano with broad, rounded slopes of volcanic sediment that were not dissected by deep ravines – the fire found no barriers and engulfed the entire massif. Escudilla is older than the rest of the range. The modern fire’s growth and movement were determined by processes that formed the earth’s surface 20 to 40 million years ago.

There, and in similar terrain of New Mexico’s Mogollon Mountains and Black Range, wildfire completely eliminated mixed-conifer forest from entire slopes. Those mega-patches may recover slowly via natural succession, or they may be replaced by very different habitat.

What’s important – the potential for recovery – may be largely invisible, hidden underground. A moonscape may be replaced in only a few seasons by a stand of ferns and Gambel oaks. A formerly continuous stand of mixed-conifer forest will be replaced by a mosaic of forest, shrubland, and grassland.

The scientific study of patch dynamics theorizes that the smaller the patch, the less diverse. This would suggest that a continuous forest stand covering many square miles is much more diverse than the small patches of forest remaining after a patchy burn. But how can that be?

The original uniform mixed-conifer forest has been replaced by a mosaic of dramatically different patches: new grasslands, new shrublands, new eciduous forest, and remaining conifer forest. Each new patch can support a community that’s dramatically different from the original. And the proximity of different patches provides more opportunities for organisms that cross boundaries, like birds, herbivorous mammals, and their predators. Patch dynamics only studies plants, but plants are only one of the five kingdoms of life.

Southwestern forests may sometimes appear pristine because they lack the invasive plants which have taken over other Western habitat like deserts and overgrazed grasslands. But the forests we’ve known in our lifetimes are not natural. Before Europeans came and began suppressing wildfire, it’s likely that Southwestern forests were much more complex.

Adaptation and Resilience

Like habitat, adaptation is another word we understand poorly and use ambiguously, if at all. Biologists say plants and animals are adapted to particular environmental conditions, as a result of evolution. But that implies a passive, static, stable end state. In the traditional model of evolution, random genetic mutations make some individuals more successful than others, and those individuals thrive and produce successful offspring, while the less well-adapted die out.

European anthropocentrism has motivated an ongoing cultural effort to prove that humans are exceptional and qualitatively different from other animals. In the beginning, God gave us dominion over nature, but now, in a more secular society, we look for scientific evidence of our superiority to justify staying in charge. Some scientists say that our big brains represent a quantum leap in animal intelligence. While other animals are slaves to instinct, we alone possess consciousness and self-awareness, we alone are aware of our own mortality, we alone laugh, we alone think and reason, accumulate knowledge and wisdom, and pass it on to our offspring. We alone use tools, developed language and art, and so forth.

But in parallel, other scientists continue to debunk these Eurocentric misconceptions. Among humans, as among other animals, the vast majority of behavior is involuntary, driven by habit, not by reasoning or even by conscious intent. Our addiction to the groupthink of social media, in which peer groups reinforce unexamined beliefs, is a troubling reminder of this. We are typically no more aware of, or in control of, our behavior than a cow heading out to pasture.

But like us, other animals are capable of breaking their habits. Animals can observe, think, make decisions on the fly, learn, remember, and teach their offspring. Both animals and plants are often capable of migrating to new habitat when they lose theirs. This is not static adaptation, this is actively adapting in real time to disturbances, to changes in environmental conditions. And in line with conventional evolutionary theory, natural populations are provided with ongoing mutations that promote continuing, involuntary, unconscious adaptation of the species. Species in nature are not just adapted, they’re adaptable – or to use another newly fashionable term, they’re resilient.

A few years ago, after decades of fearing a takeover of desert riparian habitat by tamarisk, I stumbled upon a remote canyon where tamarisk had become established in some kind of surprising equilibrium with native plants. Very old tamarisk plants with trunks a foot in diameter stood isolated throughout the canyon, at respectful distances from traditional natives like seep willow and honey mesquite. All seemed stable and thriving, and I could see no new seedlings or spreading thickets of tamarisk. Maybe it was a freak of climate – maybe momentary conditions in the distant past had allowed the old invaders to get established, but subsequent conditions hadn’t enabled new seedlings. Or maybe it was a glimpse of the future.

We all seek stability. But in nature, catastrophic disturbances occur in cycles, and stability and sustainability always go hand in hand with change and adaptability. Plants and animals don’t expect to maintain the same conditions for their offspring in the future. They expect their offspring to be able to adapt to changing conditions.

Rising Temperatures and Drought

From year to year and season to season, higher temperatures and reduced precipitation cause whatever moisture is stored in living vegetation, dead organic matter, and soil to evaporate, resulting in drier and better fuel for wildfires. Prolonged heat and drought stress living plants, lowering their defenses against wildfire or killing them and adding to the fuel. We can all tell that climate changes during our lifetimes, from cool and wet years to hot and dry, back and forth, seemingly erratically. How do we sense when the effect of climate on our habitat puts it, and us, at risk?

People in traditional societies stayed in one place from generation to generation, accumulating and passing on long-term knowledge and wisdom about the local habitat they depended on for their livelihood, including long-term climate trends. But our hyper-mobile society pressures us to relocate over and over again, so we’ve lost that local, community-based perspective on climate. We’ve become dependent on news media and distant experts.

Weather forecasts can prepare us for local conditions during the next week, but to compete in the consumer economy, news media distract us with sensational events on a national or global scale, like a “polar vortex” producing mega-storms thousands of miles away, resulting in catastrophic urban damage and human suffering. Excepting those temporary system failures, our universal industrial infrastructure ensures that we’re largely independent of climate. No matter how hot and dry it gets, we can live in Phoenix or Las Vegas, keep ourselves cool with air conditioning, and turn on the tap to get water delivered from an invisible reservoir hundreds of miles away.

When I moved to California’s Bay Area in 1976, to attend grad school, I was told the region was in a drought. That was my first experience with drought, but since I didn’t know the region without drought, it didn’t really mean anything to me. The foothills behind the school greened up a little in winter, but spent the rest of the year covered with dead, tan-colored vegetation. Water still came out of the tap, and since I lived in an apartment, I didn’t have to worry about watering the lawn.

Eventually I learned that the California climate came in cycles. There were multi-year droughts, and then eventually there would be a wet winter or two. But civilization’s industrial infrastructure protected us and ensured that droughts caused little hardship – they were actually kind of fun. We could compete against each other to use less water and feel more righteous.

After falling in love with the Mojave Desert, I met scientists who told me that the desert, depending on the same winter storms as the coast, had its own cycle of multi-year droughts broken by wet winters. As I immersed myself in the desert’s regional climate, habitats, and ecosystems, I developed a sense of when the land was “hurting” from drought.

I also learned that, unlike back home on the coast, weather in the desert was highly localized. Precipitation totals from both winter and summer storms tended to be so low – only a few inches per year on average – that deviations of a quarter of an inch made a big difference.

The topographic relief of a mountain range compresses wind-driven air, “squeezing” rain or snow out of clouds, so that storms often form directly over mountains, and mountains tend to get much more precipitation from passing storms than valleys. But in the desert, each isolated mountain range, separated from its neighbors by miles of low basins, can receive widely differing amounts of precipitation, both from individual storms and throughout the year. One mountain range can be suffering while its neighbor is doing okay. When I call friends in the desert to ask about weather, they give me different reports on different mountains.

We approach our desert mountain wilderness on highways through broad basins at middle elevations, where the landscape is thinly carpeted with the delicate foliage of our iconic shrub, the creosote bush. The tiny, waxy leaves glow a vibrant green when it has enough water, but shrivel and take on a more muted brownish tint in drought, and we desert lovers can tell that from a distance, at a glance.

Our first destination is usually a natural water source – a more or less perennial spring or seep. We know the amount of water present on the surface is directly dependent on annual precipitation. Living through both summer cloudbursts and winter storms from the Pacific, I learned that it’s the long soaking rains of winter that restore life. Water from summer cloudbursts quickly flushes downhill, evaporating along the way. A long, steady winter rain is absorbed by soils, plants, and fracture zones in the rock, where the water may be released slowly at natural springs and seeps for use by wildlife during coming seasons.

During the four decades I’ve been exploring the desert, more and more water sources I assumed to be perennial have dried up. Drought is deepening, and wildfires will be more destructive.

Scientists collect data with their instruments – thermometers, hygrometers, rain gauges, etc. – store the data in databases over time, and analyze it to measure climate change in specific regions. But weather stations are rare in the desert. There’s none in the entire mountain range where my land is located, so there’s no data – either current or historical – on temperature or precipitation there.

Field biologists try to detect the local impacts of climate change via surveys of plant and animal populations, sampling and analyzing, for example, seed germination rates, nutrient value of forage at peak times, survival rates of offspring, and mortality rates per population. Climate stress may also be inferred from secondary impacts like disease, parasitism, and of course wildfire.

My new home in southwest New Mexico has a distinct regional climate regime, depending equally on winter storms and summer monsoons, whose moisture comes from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. Old-timers spoke of the monsoon starting like clockwork after the 4th of July, but in my first year, it didn’t start until the end of the month, and it’s never been dependable since. Sometimes it barely comes at all. We don’t talk about drought as much as about a “good” or a “poor” monsoon, and a wet or dry winter. After 15 years, I seem to remember only two or three good monsoons, but those remain my definition of our climate.

A neighbor who grew up here told me they used to regularly get 16″ of snow in a winter storm, but since I moved here fifteen years ago, we’ve never had more than 8″ in town. I haven’t measured or kept records on temperature, rainfall, or snow accumulation, but the past few winters have seemed unusually warm and dry, and monsoons have been poor.

Whereas the monsoon is our iconic season, it’s the winter snows that restore our mountain forests. In the cooler climate of our region’s past, snow accumulated at high elevation throughout the winter, then melted slowly in March and April. This allowed soil, dead organic matter, and living plants to soak up the moisture. Now, in a warming climate, when snow falls, it quickly melts and moisture runs off before the system can absorb and store it. In the dry and windy season that follows, wildfire is provided with more and better fuel.

Our mobility has robbed us of the local experience and wisdom that could help us judge what’s happening, while media distract us with images of distant disasters and experts warn of global processes too complex and abstract to be locally useful. We’re left with generalized anxiety about climate, and a desperate hope that the authorities will protect us.

We civilized humans may accept that climate is changing, but unlike animals, we’re not adaptable – we’re not resilient. Despite abundant evidence that our societies are conflicted and dysfunctional, we cling to the irrational hope that our leaders will fine-tune our vast industrial infrastructure, so we and our children can continue to enjoy the same standard of living, jumping on a freeway to visit family or shop at a distant store, running air conditioners in Phoenix, turning a faucet to get water from a distant reservoir. Meanwhile, out of sight and out of mind to most of us, that infrastructure destroys more natural habitat and sparks more wildfires.

Beauty of Wildfire

Everyone in the American West has overdosed on TV footage of wildfire, usually shot from the air at night, and from that, we may imagine we know and understand wildfire. But the fire cycle has a complex and often subtle beauty that’s not limited to the momentary apocalyptic vision of flames burning at night.

Next: Government and Wildfire

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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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