Rhymes With Chiricahua.
Stephen J. Pyne. 2009. Rhymes With Chiricahua. Copyright 2009 Stephen J. Pyne
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Selected excerpts:
While the Chiricahua Mountains are famous for many reasons to many groups, they are rarely known for their fires. They should be. Some start from lightning, some from ranchers. Some are set by rangers, or are allowed some room to roam by them. Some are left by transients in the person of hunters, campers, and hikers. In recent years more are associated with traffic across the border with Mexico. The Chiricahuas have, at the moment, less of this than other border-hugging districts within the Coronado National Forest, but fires to distract, fires to hide, and fires abandoned by illegal border-crossers are becoming more prominent. All in all, it’s an interesting medley.
Mark Twain once observed that history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. These days it seems there is a lot of rhyming in the Chiricahuas as fires echo a fabled but assumed vanished past. This revival moves the Chiricahuas, among the most isolated of mountain ranges, a borderland setting for fire as for other matters, close to the core of contemporary thinking about managing fire in public wildlands.
The Chiricahuas –- actually a giant, deeply eroded and flank-gouged massif –- are among the southernmost of America’s Sky Islands, compact mountain ranges that both cluster and stand apart from one another, like an archipelago of volcanic isles. They are famous for their powers of geographic concentration. Their rapid ascent creates in a few thousand vertical feet what, spread horizontally, would require a few thousand miles to replicate. Here, density replaces expansiveness. One can see across a hundred miles of sky, and into half a continent of ecosystems. It is possible to traverse from desert grassland to alpine krumholtz almost instantly.
They are equally renown for their isolation, not only from the land surrounding them but from one another. The peaks array like stepping stones between the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Colorado Plateau; here, North America has pulled apart and the land has fallen between flanking subcontinental plateaus like a collapsed arch, leaving a jumble of basins and ranges as jagged mountains to poke through the rubble. The degree of geographic insularity is striking: they are mountain islands amid seas of desert and semi-arid grasslands. On some peaks relict species survive from the Pleistocene; on others, new subspecies appear. No peak has everything the others do. A Neoarctic biota mixes with a Neotropical one, black bear with jaguar, Steller’s jay with thick-beaked parrot. The Pinaleños have Engleman spruce. Mount Graham boasts a red squirrel. The Pedragosas grow Apache pine. The Peloncillos are messy with overgrowth and dense litter; the Huachucas, breezy with oak savannas. The Madrean Archipelago displays the general with the distinct: unique variations amid a common climate. They can serve as a textbook example of island biogeography. That observation extends to their fires as well. …
There is little question that lightning is adequate to kindle copious fires and that the extent of burning aligns smartly with the ebb and flow of atmospheric moisture. Connect the sky island dots with the volcanic edge of the Colorado Plateau, and the resulting circle will trace the epicenter for lightning-caused fire in the United States. Like a rocky outlier that catches the first swells of an approaching storm, the bulky, border-hugging Chiricahuas make first contact with the Mexican monsoon, the signature onset of the southwestern fire season.
This occurs annually. Regionally, there is a period of winter rains, followed by a long spring dry season, succeeded by summer thunderstorms as an inflow of moisture-laden air advances in a vast gyre from the Gulf of Mexico northward across the Mexican altiplano. The early storms, crackling with dry lightning, start the largest burns. As the rains continue, the land greens up, and although fires kindle in ever-greater numbers, they spread more weakly. …
But such observations are trivial. Of course fire obeys a logic by which wetting grows fuels and drying allows them to burn; that happens everywhere. Of course hot, dry, and windy conditions favor more fire than cold, wet, and calm ones; probably Homo habilis understood these dynamics. …
But if the obvious beguiles, it is the second-order reasoning that proves treacherous. If you look at such data by itself, you might well conclude that climate alone “drives” the fire regime. Such analysis reduces a complex poker game to a game of solitaire: you can only play the cards nature hands you. The reality, however, is that there is another player at the table, and he is the dealer.
Humanity is the Earth’s keystone species for fire, not only as a source of ignition but as a sculptor of landscape fuels. It is significant that this second source was present from the onset of the Holocene, or what is more aptly being called the Anthropocene. There has been no time since the end of the last glacial when the region lacked an ignition source both more promiscuous and more prescribed than lightning.
From the creation, too, hominids have indirectly affected vegetation. They could do so by foraging, hunting, and generally fussing with the landscapes, usually with fire as a catalyst. The Southwest Pleistocene was a veritable Serengeti of megafauna, and fast-combusting fire had to compete with slow-combusting grazers and browsers. Then the megafauna – the mammoths, the Shasta ground sloths, the bison and Glyptodonts – all disappeared. More and more it appears that the newly arrived humans were a catalyst in that vanishing act. They did not have to hunt every individual to extinction; they had only to add another predator to a crowded menagerie and to magnify the climatic impacts of warming through their own landscape burning. They shifted the fulcrum of climate. Much as an atlatl can add lethal leverage to a spear, so a favorable climate adds heft to human fire-setting, and anthropogenic ignition expands the power of climate to affect landscapes. The elimination of megafauna liberated fine combustibles: the species that seized on the resulting surplus was humanity, which consumed it by fire, and through fire, reconstituted the landscape.
For thousands of years, amid all the climatic wobbles that ended the Pleistocene, those fires followed prescriptions that fire history would characterize as aboriginal burning, which is to say, an alliance of torch and spear. Across almost all terrains and climates a common pattern emerges, as people brand the land with strips and patches, what might be termed lines of fire and fields of fire. The lines are corridors of travel; the fields, sites of recurring burning to assist hunting, to promote forage, and to harvest bulbs, grasses, nuts, honey, medicines, and the like.
The resulting matrix is elastic. Tight terrain and a hostile climate might confine fires to distinctive blocks: they burn where lit with little outward spread, leaving a sharply etched mosaic. Where the landscape is open and rolling, the winds strong, and drought or dry spells frequent, the fires spread widely, and the mosaic becomes mobile not only in place but over time. Ignitions, moreover, move out of lower elevations into upper realms as flames spread under the influence of slopes as well as winds. In such circumstances the power of the torch can exceed the grasp of its handlers. And where people can amplify the amount of combustibles by removing faunal competitors, their power magnifies still further. …
The Apaches exhibited a mix of calculated fire practices and fire littering. They put fire into the Chiricahuas through abandoned fires, signal fires, and fire hunting. They set patch-burns for gardens and foraging. They set fires to encourage rain. They used smoke to lure fly-maddened deer. They kindled hostile fires. They set diversionary fires. They burned along their major corridors, which then, when conditions favored, moved up slopes and into protected niches, creeping and flaring as conditions warranted, not unlike the raiders who originally kindled them. …
The dynamic of Chiricahuan fire regimes reflected this unstable interaction. When the rains came early and heavy, aboriginal fires fizzled out, and when drought followed a bout of wet years, fires blitzed well beyond campfire ring and fire-drive. Overall, in places routinely visited by people, anthropogenic fires crowded out those of lightning; people burned first and preemptively seized the fire scene; they preferentially defined fire’s regime. …
On all these counts controversy has flared, and it typically pivots on how much agency to grant humans. The critics claim the hard, high ground of science, dismissing outright appeals for human agency or herding them into disciplinary reservations where they are fed the lean rations of anecdote. Climate change, not spears and torches, must have driven megafauna over an evolutionary cliff. Climate change, not longhorns and shovels, must be responsible for squeezing fire out of mountain and grassland. Behind the conviction lies an insistence that one or the other cause must dominate.
The motives behind this reasoning are not difficult to discern. They are, first, often concerned less about the past than the future. If the protected sites are not “natural” but cultural landscapes, then the passage is open for people to reintroduce not merely fire but hunting, and then grazing, and ultimately to follow a slippery logic that must lead to trailer parks and casinos and “wisdom sitting” on slot machines. But the outcome can also challenge science because it says the numbers generated from tree-ring scars are not simple “proxies” of climate but indices of people and climate interacting in complex ways. That muddies not only the chronologies but the epistemological status of fire science, not to mention its funding. And not least, perhaps, is that old yearning for an Unmoved Mover. If people have shaped everything, there is no escape from our postmodern selves. The landscape becomes a Mobius strip. Granting agency to a few lightning bolts seems a small price to pay to keep Nature’s God, however secularized, in His heavens.
Yet a simpler explanation may also be at work, which points to timing, a coincidence not of climate but of culture. It is an accident of history that formal scholarship came to bear on the topic during a period when the human presence as a fire-lighter has been stripped away and human agency as a fire-fighter had became prominent. The debate about the relative power of nature and culture centered on lands deliberately emptied of most human activities, and for which almost all human fire practices were banned, save the relentless task of suppressing whatever fires might start. It was a kind of reverse reservation system, one intended not to keep people in but to keep them out. …
This discourse –- there was not enough resistance to warrant calling it a debate — was both skewed and curiously scholastic. It ignored, for instance, the most fundamental of the facts before it: that the vacated “wildlands” existed because of cultural decisions that transcribed political values onto raw geography. These were wildlands free to express natural causes because people had chosen to make them so. Had public lands not existed, or had they not been moving toward a wilderness model of management, much of the debate would have been even more fatuous. And by restricting itself to certain kinds of evidence, the participants lacked the power to resolve their evolving discussion. Like the San Pedro River, the reasoning suddenly entrenched itself, and any new waterflow had to follow that deepened discourse. …
Naturalists (and anthropologists) arrived much later, after the old regime had become scrambled; for the most part, after the cultural landscapes of the Apache had been suppressed, then sequestered, and finally dissolved. The only fires that persisted came from lightning since all lightning’s competitors were gone.
What happened to the people happened also to their documentation: they got shoved into reservations outside the mainstream of fire science. Researchers examined them as they would dendrochronology, as packets of data, oblivious to their context or character. …
It’s a classic case of the absence of evidence not indicating evidence of absence. In fact, there are more eyewitness records of anthropogenic ignitions than of lightning. If one demanded the same standard for both fire causes, we would have to dismiss natural fires as trivial. …
Dendrochronology easily segued from measuring the width of tree-rings as an indication of climatic fluctuations into chronicling the abundant fire scars branded onto them. Fire scars thus became a proxy for climate. The emerging annals confirmed what seemed self-evident to anyone who had studied the region over the past few decades: climate was the primary fact and force of change. And since lightning was an expression of climate, the primordial order of fire followed the syncopation of spark, rain, and drought.
Fire was natural – that much was obvious. What made it natural was its origin in climate, and if fire’s presence had diminished as an ecological enterprise over the past century, that was because people had unwisely meddled in nature’s economy. Those interventions could not endure. Irruptions of cattle and experiments in fire exclusion would pass, and climate would assert its supremacy in the end.
By the time The Changing Mile saw print, America was fast spiraling toward its great cultural revolution on fire. The origins of that reformation are several, but for the public wildlands, the irrefutable argument was, fires are natural, and parks and wilderness areas ought to promote them as they would other expressions of the Wild. …
By 1968 the National Park Service had officially reformed its policy in an effort to promote more burning; a decade later, the U.S. Forest Service followed. By 1995 all the federal agencies had a common policy, reemphasized in 2001…
As large patches of land –- Saguaro National Monument in the Rincon Mountains, the Gila Wilderness in the Mimbres Mountains –- allowed more room for lightning-kindled fire, something of a long chronicle of jostling burns emerged as empirical evidence that nature, and nature alone, could establish fire regimes, and that nature alone ought to do so. The mechanisms were doctrines of prescribed natural fire, later renamed wildland fire use, and bestowed with other euphemisms that disguise what the public is inclined to consider as let burning. …
Although deliberate prescribed burning had become an acceptable practice, it was generally regarded as a best-of-evils surrogate. It was a transitional phenomenon that would fade away as nature, under the implacable impress of climate, reclaimed more and more of its former dominion. Human ingenuity, arrogance, and mechanical might could not resist such indomitable forces as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation or the Mid-Atlantic Decadal Oscillation that, in the Southwest, chose to express themselves as fire. People could not exclude fire because they could not control climate.
This is the authorized version of how and why fire has reasserted itself. People have backed down from their idiotic and impossible attempts to stem the climatic tides, and have begun some measure of atonement by deliberately reinstating fire to amend for the years lost. Given time, climate will purge away the contaminants introduced by ranching and firefighting. A purer Nature will reclaim the landscape, under the distant direction of that Unmoved Mover, climate.
The contemporary Chiricahuas, however, suggest another narrative. To the impossibility (and undesirability) of excluding lightning fire they add the impossibility (and undesirability) of excluding anthropogenic fire. The core issue is not whether fire is present or not but fire’s regime, and for this people as nature’s species monopolist over ignition must return along with lightning. What is interesting about the Chiricahuas is that each is active, both as an expression of official policy and quite in defiance of it. These fires can no more be stopped without ecological unrest than can lightning’s. …
But the most interesting reintroduction is occurring outside official channels altogether. The Chiricahuas and neighboring Peloncillas have reestablished themselves as a portal for unauthorized human traffic across the international border – a veritable Mexican monsoon of border-crossers who carry fire as much as contraband. The variety and geography of the burns eerily echo the old Apache suite: abandoned cooking and warming fires, accidental fires, fires set as distress signals, fires kindled to divert attention away from illegal activities. The Border Patrol has proved no more effective in stemming such ignitions than the Forest Service was, over the long run, with lightning. In the end, both have proved unable to shut down the fires, an d perhaps are unwilling to do so at the costs demanded. Officials can’t turn off lightning, and they can’t control people who are by definition renegades and “illegals.” Fire has returned. The restored rhythms are restoring the old rhymes. …
