| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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The recent post Science Solipsism had some fun at the expense of William Bond of the University of Cape Town and his colleagues who said:
In a fire-free world, forest cover would double at the expense of grasslands and savannas... Fire is more than an unnecessary evil...Perhaps this article from last fall's Conservation In Practice, Burned, by William deBuys can illuminate just how absurd the ideas of Bond et. al. are in truth.
Consider for a moment the present condition of the east slope of the Jemez range: the Dome Fire (1996) adjoins the La Mesa Fire (1977), which adjoins the Cerro Grande Fire (2000), which adjoins the Oso Complex Fire (1998). The cumulative effect of these powerful fires, amplified by additional stand-changing burns on the southern slopes of the Jemez in the 1970s, has been to incinerate most of the continuous belt of ponderosa pine that used to wrap around the mountains.My emphasis. Read it all. It's not without defect but does a much better than passable job of identifying defects in old ways of thinking and offering more credible perspectives. A key point deBuys makes is that even though we know what needs to be done we are so tied up in poorly conceived policies that we can't do what must be done.Those who feed on irony can fatten here: the lumber-rich pine zone was the most economically valuable ecosystem in the range, and so it received the lion’s share of management attention and resources. In fact, the central goal of a century of intentional forest management in the Jemez Mountains was to protect and enhance the pine zone—yet the result of management has been to destroy it...
The physical culprits are well known. Overgrazing and fire suppression combined to increase stand densities by between one and two orders of magnitude. The fire-starved pine zone shrank as piñon and juniper crept upslope and mixed conifer species crept down. Logging did little to arrest either trend because of its focus on removing the biggest and best trees, a practice that often speeded establishment of over-dense, weedy cohorts. These were not accidental outcomes. The ultimate culprit was a way of thinking. Scientific forestry and the idea of land management developed from a view of the world and of nature that was mechanical. A factory was a big machine. A forest was a bigger one. The same scientific principles that rendered the factory floor more productive would also make the machine of nature more efficient. The first thing to do was to eliminate waste and superfluous movement by removing unneeded parts: floods in rivers, freshwater flowing to the sea, bark beetles and budworms, predators, prairie dogs, and other varmints, even porcupines. Get rid of them. Get rid of fire especially because it is disorderly and kills trees, which are the output we want. Granted that a lot of other cultural imperatives were entwined with the impulse to simplify, but the impulse remains the common thread.
We’ve learned from that experience, and maybe Cerro Grande has helped to burn away the last elements of that discredited view. We’ve learned that when we try to maximize production of a single variable from a complex system, we destabilize the system. Whether the cherished output is codfish, board feet of timber, or animal-unit-months of livestock forage, the result tends to be a system crash. In theory, an obsessive effort to maximize output of an endangered species would be no different.
First, the risks of prescribed fire in heavy fuels are great, maybe too great to be acceptable most of the time. Playing with fire is just what Mama said it was. Second, the scale of fire applications required to address landscape needs is many times greater than our present capacity to provide it. Consider the alignment of stars a federal burn boss must achieve: archeological clearance, interagency consultation on threatened and endangered species, environmental analysis, survival of appeals, clean air permit, crew and equipment availability, weather window. A 400-hectare burn can take a year or more of preparation and cost tens of dollars per hectare. Even then, its chances of occurring under optimal conditions are slim. Within the existing management paradigm, we may never offset, let alone reduce, the accumulation of fuel.deBuys speculates that a key to unpicking the knots that bind us, preventing effective practice even when those intimately involved have a functional grasp of requirements, is to find a new myth, a new totalizing view that encapsulates the very complex collection of issues and techniques that are involved in useful management so that those who are not experts can have some intuitive grasp and a way to fit the prescriptions of those who know into their view and so not thwart them.Third, Cerro Grande’s practical effect, regardless of policy changes, has been to close the hotter part of the burn window. With understandable caution, many managers meet their acreage objectives by turning landscapes temporarily black with mild, cool treatments while shying from burns that are hot enough to achieve ecological effect. The chain saw, on surface, offers an alternative to prescribed fire, and the years since Cerro Grande have been noisy with debate over what kinds of mechanical treatments to use and how intensively and extensively to use them. In a sane world, people would speak of tree cutting not as a substitute for prescribed fire but as a partner to it.
...the greatest challenge may lie not in devising hypotheses and protocols but in revising the way we see ourselves in relation to the lands around us. It may be that we need a new meta-story to describe how we live with nature—a new myth. Nothing in our vast inherited body of guiding stories quite seems to fit our present situation. For some years, I have queried classicists and ethnographers in search of a myth more complicated than simply a story about controlling nature, on the one hand, or wounding it, on the other. It seems to me what we need is a myth about responsibility conceived as both a burden and a blessing. Unfortunately, neither Prometheus, Pandora, Gautama, Loki, La Llorona, Changing Woman, nor anyone else appears to offer much advice. Perhaps we need to conceive a new Eden whose occupants, having bitten the apple, must forever tend the tree. And in this Eden, the tree would be forever growing and forever changing, and the Adam and Eve who tend it would understand that, while they can prune a little here and trim a little there, what they most need to do is to grow, change, and learn in harmony with the tree.I can't name a legend but I know the practice of those native to these southern Sierra forests and it is precisely one of mutual obligation, the need for people to actively tend the world, including burning it in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, for the good of the people, the forest and all the beings who depend on it. Every orchardman or grazier knows the unending performance pressure to prune now for fruits at harvest time, and graze when the grass is ready rather than too soon or too late. Every grower that deals with perennial crops knows this rhythm, the pulse of the world that must be listened to and must be served.
The problems deBuys notes come from the very structure of the system he seeks to manage: the idea of public lands managed by state employees according to rules and procedures established by remote political agencies responsible to constituents who have no knowledge of, or involvement with, the lands to be managed. What myth could solve that problem?
The 100 years of mismanagement that he cites that resulted in the destruction of the very resource they were supposedly preserving wasn't just a few bad policies. And though his analysis is cogent - "We’ve learned that when we try to maximize production of a single variable from a complex system, we destabilize the system." - I don't think he sees the implications fully. The problems began when the native populations who had in fact been managing the land for eons were finally destroyed and replaced by uniformed strangers who had no idea where they were or what to do, and who drew their orders and their pay from remote sources rather than having to depend for their lives on the quality of their work.
What our forests need is people to live on and from those lands, people who become native to their places. Not in a primitive sense, not fake Indians, but people who have the same codependency, who will do the perpetual tending required and reap the benefits of their labors. The very idea of public land is wildly mistaken. The past decade of repeated catastrophic failure is just a dramatic expression of the break down that happened 100 years ago and has been getting ever worse. It's not unique to the western US. We see the same patterns repeated in the developing world as indigenous populations are driven from their lands to be replaced by state employees who manage the "preserves".
The proper role of the state is to protect and serve the people in their efforts to sustain themselves and their places. When they are overwhelmed by powerful and intrusive interests that exploit those lands too harshly the effective state intervention is to aid those people, not replace them with strangers. The vast acreage owned by governments needs to be homesteaded. That doesn't mean cleared and farmed as it once did, it means appropriate use and tending. That won't earn a modern living so they must be assisted. The costs of doing so will be less than the current management costs and the results will be superior.
That doesn't seem likely to happen does it? Not soon at any rate. We should probably just get used to catastrophic fire.