Ancient Amazon Earthworks Seen by Satellite
Amazonia is not the “wilderness” many assume it to be. For thousands of years human beings have been residing in and cultivating (for agriculture) lowland and upland areas across the Amazon basin and beyond.
A recent article in National Geographic News provides a glimpse of earthworks built long before Columbus. Rediscoveries of the ancient croplands and city sites force us to re-evaluate notions of wilderness and to consider the long-standing, organized, cultural interactions and influences of humanity upon western landscapes.
The Nat Geo News article (below) cites Denise Schaan and William Woods, historical landscape geographers whose research we have posted (in small part) at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes. Among our Amazonia references are:
* William Woods et al. (including Dr. Schaan). 2009. Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision [here]
* Michael J. Heckenberger et al. 2007. The legacy of cultural landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for biodiversity [here]
* William M. Denevan. 2001. Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes [here]
* Charles C. Mann. 2008. Ancient Earthmovers Of the Amazon [here]
* William Denevan. 1992. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492 [here]
* Charles C. Mann. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [here]
Ancient Amazon earthworks seen by satellite
Another Post-Fire Cost-Plus-Loss Case
In the previous post we pointed out (again) that forest fires cause losses (damages) far in excess of suppression costs. Moreover, some of those losses continue to accrue long after the fires are out.
One of our favorite SOSF operatives sent us yet another example. The Sawtooth National Forest has proposed spraying a bark beetle repellent to save trees on Bald Mountain (site of the Sun Valley ski area) because a bark beetle infestation is expected following the 2007 Castle Rock Fire (48,000 acres) [here, here, here, here].
It won’t be cheap, and it may not be successful in preventing yet more damage to the forest. The repercussions from that fire, like so many others, just keep on coming.
Federal forest policy Forestry education The 2009 Fire Season
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More On the Real Costs of Forest Fires
The Santa Barbara Independent reported last week that two “trail gnomes” were charged with starting the Jesusita Fire last Spring [here].
More than seven months after the Jesusita Fire scorched nearly 9,000 acres of the Santa Barbara front country — destroying 80 homes, damaging another 15, seriously injuring numerous firefighters, and costing $17 million in its wake — two men have been charged in connection with the start of the fire.
The SBI also reported that prosecutors will “seek restitution” from the suspects.
What prosecutors do intend to do, however, is seek restitution on behalf of the victims of the Jesusita Fire, a pricetag that’s floating in the millions of dollars, considering the injured firefighters and destroyed homes.
That price tag has not been fully calculated, but one thing is for sure, the costs and losses from the fire vastly exceed the suppression expenses (which were closer to $18.6 million, not $17 million [here]).
In other news, mudslides resulting from the Station Fire [here] are threatening roads and homes in Los Angeles [here]:
As many as 90 vehicles were stranded after rocks and mud flowed down the hillside amid heavy rains along a 12-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway north of Los Angeles in an area where a massive wildfire burned earlier this year, said county fire Capt. Frank Reynoso.
The suppression costs of the Station Fire approached $100 million, but the damages (which are on-going) have not been appraised as yet. The damages, which include hospitalizations from excessive smoke, exceed the suppression costs many-fold.
In other news, the City of San Francisco settled a lawsuit brought by the US Justice Dept. on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service for two small fires on the Stanislas NF in 1999 and 2004. The price tag: $7 million [here]:
The city of San Francisco has paid $7 million to settle federal claims for wildfire damage to a national forest allegedly caused by negligent maintenance of power line rights of way.
The 1999 Pilot fire and the 2004 Early fire burned 5,698 acres in the Stanislaus National Forest in Tuolumne County.
The fires resulted from trees growing too close to the high-voltage power transmission lines of Hetch Hetchy Water and Power, owned by San Francisco, according to two civil lawsuits brought by the federal government against the city and its utilities agency.
What do these news items have in common? They all provide unimpeachable evidence that forest fires cause damages far in excess of suppression costs.
A Brief History of the Post-Cretaceous Forests of SW Oregon, Part II
Part II. The Forests of the Anthropocene
Intro
A discussion of fire ecology in Southwest Oregon that recently came to my attention contained another statement that troubled me:
A natural fire regime is a general classification of the role fire would play across a landscape in the absence of modern human mechanical intervention, but including the influence of aboriginal burning (Agee 1993, Brown 1995).
Why do USFS ecologists conflate natural fire with anthropogenic fire when the differences are enormous?
Historically speaking, in SW Oregon over the last 12,000 years or so, the incidence of anthropogenic fire has been thousands of times more prevalent than natural (lightning) fire. Furthermore, lighting fires are random in time and space whereas human-set fires are deliberate actions (planned, timed, executed) by intelligent people with intent (informed by successful experience) to alter the landscape.
As a consequence, anthropogenic fire has had a much more profound and dominant effect on SW Oregon during the Anthropocene than lightning fire. Human fires have shaped the vegetation for millennia. The “natural fire regime” touted by USFS ecologists is a pernicious myth, or more simply, crappy science.
What’s the Anthropocene? It’s a cute name bestowed on the latter stages of the Holocene by the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who considers the influence of humans on the environment in recent centuries so significant as to constitute a new geological era [here].
But human influences on the environment have been significant for more than a few centuries. For thousands of years, indeed the entire Holocene/Anthropocene (and much longer), people have been impacting the planet by setting fires. Anthropogenic fire regimes have dominated while “natural” fire regimes all but disappeared thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of years ago.
To grasp the enormity of this concept, we must first examine the onset of the Holocene/Anthropocene in greater detail.
A Brief History of the Post-Cretaceous Forests of SW Oregon, Part I
Part I. Before the Holocene
Intro
A discussion of fire ecology in Southwest Oregon which recently came to my attention contained the following statement:
These forest ecosystems have been evolving for tens of thousands of years, thus their species composition, structure, and ecological processes are essentially a product of their ongoing evolutionary and physical environments (Agee 1991, Waring 1969).
Technically speaking, from a paleobotany perspective, that statement is counter-factual.
The forest ecosystems of SW Oregon are new to the area. The oldest “native” tree species have been in residence no more than 12,500 years or so, and some less than half that.
The species composition is new; different species mixes occurred in earlier interglacials.
What’s an interglacial? To explain that we first have to explain the Ice Ages. But maybe we should back up even farther to start.
Transitions in the Tertiary
The Tertiary Era consists of the Paleocene (65-54.8 mya), the Eocene (54.8-33.7 mya), the Oligocene, (33.7-23.8 mya), the Miocene, (23.8-5.4 mya), and the Pliocene (5.4-1.8 mya) Epochs.
Global temperatures reached their highest post-Cretaceous levels at about the Paleocene-Eocene transition, and they have been falling ever since. Global temperatures were perhaps 25 to 30 degrees F higher than now. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was perhaps 5-10 times denser than now, and oxygen concentrations a third more than current levels. Earth was a greenhouse bursting with life.
But then the temperatures started to fall. Hypotheses for the temp decline are many-fold. Pangea was fractured and the landmasses were drifting apart. With less bumping and grinding of continents, volcanic activity waned. Consequently CO2 levels dropped. Antarctica drifted toward the South Pole, and ice began to build up, lowering global sea levels.
The falling temperatures in the Eocene were accompanied by annual dry spells, which we know as seasons. Seasonality favored pre-adapted deciduous trees from the paleo-boreo-tropics [here]. Mega thermal (heat tolerant) plant species moved toward the equator, and micro thermal (cold tolerant) species proliferated in the northern Hemisphere.
Climate and Weather Federal forest policy Forestry education Saving Forests
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Dr. Elaine Oneil On Forest Management to Reduce Risks of Climate Change
On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, held a hearing regarding managing Federal forests in response to climate change, including for natural resource adaptation and carbon sequestration [here].
Witnesses included Tom Tidwell, Chief, U.S. Forest Service, and Dr. Elaine Oneil, University of Washington. The testimonies can be downloaded [here].
Dr. Oneil’s testimony was excellent. Some excerpts:
“…The factors central to determining optimal carbon management under climate change are:
1. Each forest site has a carrying capacity which dictates the maximum amount of fiber, wood, or carbon that can be stored in that forest. Carrying capacity is determined by site quality, climate, and to a lesser degree the current species mix.
2. Once forests reach their site’s carrying capacity there is enormous stress on the living trees which manifests itself in insect outbreaks and disease, culminating in the death of some or all of the trees on site. …
3. Wildfire ignition is random, but the consequences of wildfires are driven by climate, and prevailing weather and forest conditions. Forests that have reached maximum carrying capacity, and which contain large amounts of dead trees, produce conditions for wildfires that are uncontrollable, with devastating consequences to the forest, the adjacent communities, and the budgets of land management agencies.
4. Wildfires generate enormous releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. From 2002-2006 wildfires across the entire US, including Alaska, released the equivalent of 4-6% of the US anthropogenic emissions for that same period. The average yearly emissions from the California wildfires alone were equivalent to the emissions of 7 million cars/year for each year from 2001-2007. Extreme fire conditions can render sites infertile or incapable of regenerating future forests, which effectively leads to deforestation.
5. If we apply the precautionary principle, the most risk adverse option we have at the present time is to thin forests that are at risk to reduce wildfire impacts, reduce insect mortality, and build health and resilience against extreme climate conditions that these forests are expected to face in the near future. The cut material can be used as biofuel feedstocks to support energy independence goals and meet renewable fuel and electricity standards. Even greater carbon benefits are possible if the cut wood is used in green building construction. Using life cycle analysis we can identify optimal carbon sequestration and storage options that include forests as part of the broader matrix of national carbon accounts; failure to account for the carbon interactions beyond the forest can lead to counterproductive policies.
6. Grassroots initiatives aimed at addressing forest health, wildfires, insect outbreaks, and sustainability on federal lands have begun. The goals of removing excess fuels and dead trees for use in bioenergy projects, while generating economically viable and sustainable jobs in rural communities and maintaining sustainable ecosystems are laudable. Policies are needed that integrate the knowledge and trust built by local initiatives, support national renewable energy goals, and recognize the inherent ecological carrying capacity of the land and how it might alter under changing climatic conditions. …
Whooie Hooey Kablooey
We are pleased and proud to post another perceptive essay by Dr. Stephen J. Pyne, Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour, in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].
Dr. Pyne’s contention in this essay is that fires in the Wildland Urban Interface (the WUI, pronounced “whooie”) have presented a special problem to the national fire community.
“Wildland-urban interface” is a dumb term for a dumb problem, and both have dominated the American fire scene for nearly twenty years. It’s a dumb term because “interface” is a pretty klutzy metaphor and because the phenomenon of competing borders it describes is more complex than that geeky term suggests. At issue is a scrambling of landscape genres beyond the traditional variants of the American pastoral. It is a mingling of the quasi-urban and the quasi-wild into something that, depending on your taste, resembles either an ecological omelet or a coniferous strip mall. That means it also stirs together urban fire services with wildland fire agencies, two cultures with no more in common than an opera house and a grove of old-growth ponderosa pine. It is an unstable alloy, a volatile compound of matter and antimatter, and it should surprise no one that it explodes with increasing regularity.
Dr. Pyne explains how the WUI (he prefers to use the words “intermix zone”) developed historically, how the main fire problem in the intermix zone is in California, and how the fire situation will be self-correcting in the long run.
The near future will likely resemble the near past. But it may well be that, just as reservations and frontiers clashed at their mutual peak, one rising and one falling, so the contemporary scene may be cresting. I suspect it has already done so. …
At some point the intermix will lose its inherent instability. … Either it will fall under the purview of one side or the other, or it will become a stable landscape in its own right. … Perhaps it may evolve into a new kind of vernacular landscape … Such a relocation of effort will place the problem within the realm of the built environment. Modern urban fire services will eventually follow urban migrants to the fringe. Wildland fire management will retire to the woods. …
The Genesis of Old-Growth Forests
Note: due to the crush of work I have accepted recently, I do not have time to prepare new posts for the next week or so. The following is a repost from May, 2008 [here, here, here].
by Mike Dubrasich
Iain Murray, the author of The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About - Because They Helped Cause Them, [here], wrote in Chapter 4 of that book:
With wildfires burning, it is useful to turn to the wisdom of the ancients. When the pioneers first entered the great forests of America, they found that the Native Americans had managed the forests for centuries. Their woodlands contained very few big trees—maybe fifty such trees per acre.
Apparently the Indians had set regular, low intensity fires which burned away accumulations of undergrowth, deadwood, dying trees and particularly small trees growing between the big trees. The larger trees were unharmed, because of their thick fire-resistant bark.
That in a nut shell is the way our old-growth forests developed. Frequent anthropogenic fire gave rise to open, park-like forests, largely uneven-aged at large-area scales. Forest scientists refer to such trees as “older cohort” because they are quite different than the even-aged thickets of trees (younger cohort) that arose following elimination of anthropogenic fire (aka “Indian burning”).
True old-growth forests contain older cohort trees. Those trees are remnants of the the former open, park-like forests that covered much of forested North America, and they may also be viewed as relics of our ancient culturally-modified landscapes.
In this 3-part series, I discuss in greater detail how our old-growth forests came to be here. The issue is important, because we must understand how old-growth forests arose in order to protect, maintain, and perpetuate them. If we value old-growth, and that seems to be a widely-shared value, then it is vital to understand their development.
Apache Burning in Lightning’s Epicenter
The Chiricahua Mountains in SE Arizona are one of the Madrean Sky Islands [here], volcanic massifs that rise above the Southwest desert basins and which include the Pinaleño, Pedragosa, Peloncillo, Baboquivari, Santa Catalina, and Santa Rita Mountains among others. The higher elevations harbor diverse ecological assemblages, such as pine and fir forests that are quite different from the Sonoran desert vegetation that surrounds them.
The Sky Islands are lightning magnets. Summer thunderstorms ride the Mexican Monsoon and punctuate the Sky Islands with the densest frequency of lightning bolts in the U.S. And yet, despite all that loose electricity and resulting fires, the vegetation of the Chiricahua Mountains has been dominated by anthropogenic (human-set) fire for millennia.
That historical fact is explored by Dr. Stephen J. Pyne, World’s Foremost Authority on Fire, in a new essay, Rhymes With Chiricahua [here].
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. …
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.
Choking Smoke From Catastrophic Fires Unhealthy, A-historical, and Unnecessary
The latest issue of California Forests (Fall, ‘09), the official publication of the California Forestry Association, is entitled “Forestry Clears the Air” [here].
Some quotable quotes:
From “Cause and Effect Meet in California’s Forests” by CFA President David A. Bischel:
… California experienced a 300 percent increase in severe wildfire in 2007 and a 315 percent increase in 2008. High-intensity wildfire can sterilize soils and lead to mass-erosion that washes sediments into would-be spawning gravels for fish. They are expensive to fight, too –- taxpayers spend more than $1 billion dollars annually to fight wildfire in California and only a fraction of that to reduce fuel-loads to prevent it.
Managing more of our public forestlands can help reduce wildfire severity and mitigate the health risks that come with wildfire and smoke. Northern California registered more than 90 unhealthy-air days due to wildfire in 2008. Wildfire smoke is filled with particulates that can lodge in people’s lungs, cause asthma, aggravate heart conditions and irritates the eyes, nose and throat. It suffocates wildlife and
releases greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide and methane.Last year, one-third of the fuel-reduction efforts planned by the U.S. Forest Service in California were blocked by activist lawsuits. High-intensity blazes that ripped through untreated areas subsequently destroyed owl nesting sites and tens of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat. They spewed great smoke plumes that settled on California communities rural and urban alike.
The Forest Service spends about 40 percent of its resources on administrative planning, litigation and appeals. Harvesting on California’s federal lands has decreased 90 percent in the last 20 years while firefighting costs have skyrocketed and our state has become increasingly dependent on imported wood.
While litigation has tied up our public lands, forests and the infrastructure to take care of them have taken a beating. In southern Sierra forests, for every tree growing, nearly three are dying. More than 500 trees per acre often stand where roughly 50 did before the Gold Rush and 8 million acres are at “very high” risk of severe wildfire. …
From “Does Anyone Care About Our Air?” by Rod Mendes, director for the Office of Emergency Services for the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Humboldt County, California. Full text [here].
For nearly four months last summer, thousands of Northern Californians sat shrouded in thick, brown smoke. Lots of people got sick. Many still have trouble breathing.
Smoke from wildfires that burned more than 200,000 acres blanketed Trinity and Humboldt counties and smothered roughly 4,000 people who live on and around the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.
No tribal lands burned, but lightning strikes ignited fires all over the national forests that surround Hoopa land. Those forests were dangerously overgrown, overstocked and choked with dead and dying trees. There was little effort made to extinguish the fires despite the public health threat. Instead, fires were encouraged to burn toward and into designated wilderness areas.
The smoke observed no such boundaries. It settled everywhere. …
Professor Honored for Outstanding Contributions to California Forestry
Press Release, California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, October 2, 2009 [here]
The California State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection presented the Francis H. Raymond Award for Outstanding Contributions to California Forestry to Dr. William Libby on October 7, 2009.
Dr. Libby is Professor Emeritus of Forest Genetics, having taught forestry at the College of Natural Resources in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management between 1962 and 1994. His pioneering work in the field of forest tree genetics is internationally recognized and respected. Dr. Libby has practiced forestry on several continents and is well known for his work with California’s coast redwood and Monterey pine trees.
Though he officially retired in 1994, Dr. Libby has continued to educate and enlighten across the borders of country and perspective. He currently sits on the Board of the Save the Redwoods League with a focus on promoting research on redwood forest disturbance effects and the impacts of climate change on California’s coast redwood and giant sequoia forests. Dr. Libby’s observations on state and national forest policy are reflective of his insight and intellectual curiosity. His dedication in service to the forests of California and elsewhere is inspirational.
“Dr. Libby’s contributions to decades of forestry students and fellow researchers cannot be
measured,” said George Gentry, executive officer for the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.The award is named for Francis H. Raymond who was the Director of the California Department
of Forestry and Fire Protection from 1953 to 1970. Mr. Raymond was one of the primary
advocates for the passage of the Professional Foresters Law in 1973. Since 1987 it has been
awarded to a group or individual who has achieved excellence in forestry in California.
The Roots of Our Forest Health Crisis
The latest addition to the W.I.S.E. Colloquium Forest and Fires Sciences is The Forest Health Crisis: How Did We Get In This Mess? by Charles E. Kay. 2009. Mule Deer Foundation Magazine No.26:14-21 [here].
Dr. Charles E. Kay, Ph.D. Wildlife Ecology, Utah State University, is the author/editor of Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature [here], author of Are Lightning Fires Unnatural? A Comparison of Aboriginal and Lightning Ignition Rates in the United States [here], co-author of Native American influences on the development of forest ecosystems [here], and numerous other scientific papers.
In this essay, written for a general audience, Dr. Kay recognizes that our forests are in crisis from fire, insects, and disease. He explains that the common cause is too many trees! — which may be surprising to some but is well-known to most forest experts.
Today’s overstocked forests are a-historical; in the past* forests were open and park-like, maintained in that condition by frequent, seasonal, light-burning ground fires. Dr. Kay explains that most of those fires were anthropogenic (human-set).
* By the “past” I mean the entire Holocene and the tail end of the Pleistocene, before which there were very few forests in North America. Instead there was mostly ice or tundra, going back 100,000 years or so.
(Extra: Between 110,000 and 100,000 years ago there was another interglacial, the Eemian. Little is known about the forests of that warm interlude in the Ice Ages. The Ice Ages go back 2.5 million years. For roughly 90 percent of that time, North American forests have been mostly non-existent.)
(Extra Extra: the Ice Ages aren’t over. We passed the peak temperatures about 10,000 years ago. The Earth is headed, inexorably, for another glaciation.)
Human beings arrived in North America at least 13,000 years ago, before the climate had completely shifted and before the great migration northward of plants and animals. Hence humanity preceded most North American forests. Humanity brought fire with them, as well as 150,000 years of practice in how to make and use it. Holocene forests developed under the influence of landscape-scale, human-set fire. Dr. Kay explains that human-set fires, whether intentional of accidental, outnumbered lighting fires by many orders of magnitude.
The forests that arose under the influence of anthropogenic fire were open and park-like, with few trees per acre. Individual trees grew to phenomenal ages; old-growth development pathways were human-induced via frequent burning.
In the absence (over the last 150 years) of frequent, seasonal, anthropogenic fire, rapid “in-growth” has occurred. Thickets of new trees have seeded into the formerly open stands. The increase in tree density has fueled the crisis in forest health. Forests in the past (see * above) were healthier. By healthier I mean less prone to catastrophic fire, insect infestations, and disease epidemics. Today old-growth as well as young-growth trees are rapidly dying from all three factors. Forests are being converted to brushfields.
Restoration forestry does not seek to replicate the past but to learn from it. One lesson of history is that open and park-like forests are healthier. Another is that human stewardship via serious thinning, fuel removal, and subsequent frequent, seasonal, prescribed fire is required to abate our forest health crisis.
The first few paragraphs and some excellent forest photos (click for larger images) from Dr. Kay’s essay are appended below. W.I.S.E. invites you read the entire essay [here]. It is all that and much more.
From The Forest Health Crisis: How Did We Get In This Mess? by Charles E. Kay. 2009. Mule Deer Foundation Magazine No.26:14-21.
THE WEST is ablaze! Every summer large-scale, high-intensity crown fires tear through our public lands at ever increasing and unheard of rates. Our forests are also under attack by insects and disease. According to the national media and environmental groups, climate change is the villain in the present Forest Health Crisis and increasing temperatures, lack of moisture, and abnormally high winds are to blame. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Sahara Desert, for instance, is hot, dry, and the wind blows, but the Sahara does not burn. Why? Because there are no fuels. Without fuel there is no fire. Period, end of story, and without thick forests there are no high-intensity crown fires. Might not the real problem then be that we have too many trees and too much fuel in our forests? The Canadians, for instance, have forest problems similar to ours but they do not call it a “Forest Health Crisis,” instead they call it a Forest Ingrowth Problem. The Canadians have correctly identified the issue, while we in the States have not. That is to say, the problem is too many trees and gross mismanagement by land management agencies, as well as outdated views of what is natural.
What Is the Proper Place of Fire Science?
In a new essay proudly posted with permission at W.I.S.E, Dr. Stephen J. Pyne of ASU, World’s Foremost Authority on Fire, asks this question: What is the proper place of fire science, and other sciences, in dealing with real world problems with cultural origins and implications?
The essay is The Wildland/Science Interface by Stephen J. Pyne (full text [here] or selected excerpts at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here]).
The real world problems under scrutiny in Dr. Pyne’s essay are the hazards imposed by Sky Island forests (chiefly wildfire) on the astronomical observatories located there, or conversely, the hazards (multiple biological impairments including fires) imposed by the observatories on the forests.
Four Sky Island peaks host observatory complexes as well as isolated forests with endangered species. The political battles over scopes vs. squirrels have been surfeit with favor as special interests have engaged in decades of funding frenzy. In the end, however, the big dog hogged most of the gravy:
One science, astronomy, and a nominally science-supporting institution, the UofA, turned to politics to overturn the claims of another science and its non-governmental auxiliary. The winner was the more powerful: Astronomy meant Big Science. Conservation biology only acquired a name in 1978. Deep sky met deep biology, and sky won. …
But nothing has been done about the wildfire hazard, and wildfires have threatened all the observatory complexes, and continue to do so year after year.
Pyne’s observation is that neither Branch of Science, astronomy or fire science (pyrology?), despite the $billions spent on those sciences, has been able to ameliorate the problem, and in fact have arguably made the wildfire problem worse.
The critics of fire suppression often point to graphs of increasing expenditures and swelling acres burned to make a case that more money fighting fire doesn’t reduce either costs or burned area (Figure 1). … [T]he rising expenditures are just as likely to be the cause of increased burning. The more we spend, the less control we get. A fire suppression-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground.
This same logic can be applied to fire science. … An objective measure of applied fire science – analyzing science as science would natural phenomena – would probably show mixed results much like that from fire suppression. The more we spend, the fewer practical outcomes we get. A fire research-industrial complex is pushing up costs without regard to results on the ground. …
For all practical purposes, both astronomy and fire science (and Science in general) have failed.
Wakimoto Discourses On Anthropogenic Fire
Dr. Ronald H. Wakimoto is Professor of Forestry at The University of Montana, Missoula. He received his B.S. in Forestry and M.S. and Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science from the University of California at Berkeley, studying under the legendary Harold Biswell.
Dr. Harold “Doc” Biswell was a pioneering advocate for the study of the ecological role of fire, for the use of prescribed fire in land management, and for fuels management. Dr. Biswell passed in 1992. Ron Wakimoto was one his last graduate students (I believe Dr. Biswell was already emeritus at that time). Ron’s Ph.D. dissertation (Wakimoto, R. H. 1978. Responses of southern California brushland vegetation to fuel modification. UC Berkeley, 278 p.) is well known and respected in forestry circles. Both men advocated prescribed burning and fuels management in chaparral and other vegetation types to mitigate and ameliorate the hazards of severe and catastrophic fire.
I was an undergrad at Berkeley in the early 70’s and had the occasion to meet and talk with both Ron and Harold. I have studied their research papers in the intervening years. My feeling is that a great many extreme and tragic fires could have been avoided if federal, state, and county officials and land management agencies had taken their advice. I still feel that way, in that future tragedies could be avoided if we listened to these great forest scientists and took better care of our landscapes.
Dr. Wakimoto has been at The University of Montana since 1982 teaching and conducting research in wildland fire management. He teaches academic courses in wildland fire management, fuel management and fire ecology. Dr. Wakimoto currently conducts research on the social acceptability of fuel management treatments, smoke quality and quantity from smoldering combustion, fire fighter safety, crown fire spread and the fire ecology of the Northern Mixed Prairie.
Yesterday Forest Service retirees meeting in Missoula were privileged to receive a discourse from Dr. Wakimoto on anthropogenic fire. I wasn’t there (sadly) but received this report over the ether:
Forest Service reunion in Missoula explores myths, realities of wildfires
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian, September 9, 2009 [here]
For most of his life, Ed Heilman has been thinking about wildfires and what to do about them.
The Missoula man retired from the U.S. Forest Service after 35 years as director of fire management in the Northern Region.
So Heilman listened with skepticism to what University of Montana professor Ron Wakimoto had to say Tuesday about Native Americans and their historic use of fire.
Then the Missoula man chuckled at himself.
“He changed my mind today,” he said of Wakimoto. “And that doesn’t come easy, by the way.”
Wakimoto is part of a heavyweight lineup of speakers and panelists at the 2009 Forest Service Reunion at the Hilton Garden Inn, which started Monday and runs through Friday morning.
His topic was billed “Fire in the Forest: Myths and Realities” and among the myths he dispelled was the notion voiced in 1959 by Raymond Clar of the California Division of Forestry.
Clar wrote that it was a “fantastic notion” that Indians systematically used fires to improve the forest.
Wakimoto said there has been “a tremendous amount of research” in the past 50 years to prove they did.
They set fires to clear trees to improve hunting prospects, to enhance the production of berries and medicinal plants, to improve grazing lands for their horses. They did it to clear lodgepole pine blowdown, to clear space for campsites and to remove cover that enemies could use to sneak up on them.
While white settlers viewed the land they claimed as wilderness, it actually bore extensive marks of management by fire over the centuries. As early as the 1750s, Wakimoto said, New York and other colonies were passing laws to outlaw Native Americans’ use of fire.
“Think about it. There was that much fire,” he said.
Heilman read the book “California Government and Forestry” in which Clar made his assertions soon after it was published, and he still has a copy.
“That was kind of the start of my foundation, you might say,” he said. “In all these years I believed it. I thought the Indians set plenty of fires, whether accidental or to get even with somebody. But ecology? Come on now.
“It turns out there was a deliberate pattern to it. And I don’t doubt Ron. I would take his word over Clar’s.”
Federal forest policy Forestry education Politics and politicians Private land policies Saving Forests
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Why Spend Money On Fire Suppression?
Today yet another Government Accounting Office report on fire suppression costs was issued. It is Wildland Fire Management: Federal Agencies Have Taken Important Steps Forward, but Additional, Strategic Action Is Needed to Capitalize on Those Steps GAO-09-877 (49 pages; 1.33 MB) [here].
It the fiftieth or so such report from the GAO on that topic since 1999. Like the others, it is useless.
GAO-09-877 decries all the funds spent on firefighting. They are just too much, according to author Robin Navarro, Director, Natural Resources and Environment, GAO.
Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, federal agency officials,and others have expressed concern about mounting federal wildland fire expenditures. Federal appropriations to the Forest Service and the Interior agencies to prepare for and respond to wildland fires, including appropriations for reducing fuels, have more than doubled, from an average of $1.2 billion from fiscal years 1996 through 2000 to an average of $2.9 billion from fiscal years 2001 through 2007. Adjusting for inflation, the average annual appropriations to the agencies for these periods increased from $1.5 billion to $3.1 billion (in 2007 dollars).
The report then blathers on about this funding problem and offers less than the usual non-solutions. USFS Chief Tom Tidwell acknowledges the report in an appended letter, stating:
The Forest Service generally agrees with GAO’s findings and confirms the validity of this draft report, which contained no recommendations for further actions.
Now, that’s a non-responsive response if there ever was one, but who can blame him? Trading blather is what bureaucrats do.
Nowhere in this GAO report, or in any of the preceding 50, is a fundamental question asked: Why spend any money on fire suppression at all?
That question is a very worthy one, and pertains, and ought to be considered when contemplating this issue. After all, the feds are not the only governmental body to fund firefighting. Every state has a fire suppression budget, as do all the counties and cities in the USA. You can’t go anywhere in this country, or to most other countries on Earth, and not find a fire department.
There must be some reason for that. Every government, large and small, in democracies and dictatorships, funds fire suppression. It’s a universal function of government. Every government, benevolent or tyrannical, envisages some need for firefighting. Every government allocates funds for that purpose, and must make some sort of analysis as to how much spending is appropriate.
That’s the unaddressed question behind all the blather in the GAO report. How much funding for fire suppression is appropriate?
And that begs the fundamental question: Why spend anything at all to put out fires?
In economic terms, the question is better stated in technical language: What is the economic utility of fire suppression?
It’s a heck of a question, and one that ought to be asked to the GAO, and to every Congressperson, and to Chief Tom Tidwell and the USFS, and to every government official, large or small, who oversees and/or makes allocation decisions about money spent on firefighting.
There is an answer, a valid, rational, and logical one, and it is obvious if you think about it.
The economic utility of fire suppression funding is the reduction in potential damages caused by fires.
Fires damage stuff. Homes are valuable commodities, as are the possessions within homes, and fires can burn homes to cinders, destroying all that valuable stuff. It is cheaper and better to spent a few dollars on putting the fire out than on letting it burn and doing many times more dollars worth of destruction.
Fires can kill people, and people are also valuable, at least to themselves and sometimes to their families and friends. It is better to extinguish a fire before it harms human lives. Animals are valuable too, and societies large and small see utility in putting out the fire before the pets and livestock succumb.
Even tyrannical dictators value their stuff, the opulent palaces, garages full of limousines, etc. Your average tyrannical dictator had to go to some effort to murder his way to the top, and he is generally less than enthusiastic about having his ill-gotten gains combusted when he gets there. So even murderous thugs see a need for a competent, well-equipped fire department close by the palace grounds.
The thinking worldwide is to spend some amount on fire suppression so that a greater amount of damages are prevented.
One way to phrase this thinking, in technical economic language, is that the economic utility of fire suppression is to minimize the cost-plus-loss from fires.
That language is not difficult to understand. The cost is the fire suppression expense, and the losses are the damages that fires inflict. The total of those is cost-plus-loss, and the idea is to make the total as small as possible.
It is a balancing act. If the fire suppression outlays are too small, the damages mount up, and the total cost-plus-loss can be huge. If the fire suppression outlays are profligate, there may be few damages, but the total sum can still be large. The trick is to find the most efficient amount of suppression that achieves the least amount of damages so that the total cost-plus-loss is as small as possible.
That’s the REAL calculation that governments face and must solve. Unfortunately, the GAO is off on some sidetrack and does not even acknowledge fire damages, let alone express the need to minimize them. They never heard of cost-plus-loss. Their only desire is to reduce suppression expenses. But that’s not the goal of fire suppression funding. The goal is to minimize cost-plus-loss. The GAO doesn’t get it, has never got it, and probably never will get it, sad to say.
It is not clear whether Congress gets it, or the USFS, or anybody except maybe insurance companies, economists, accountants, homeowners, foresters, the peasantry, and assorted riffraff like that.
In order to educate and inform the otherwise ignorant hoi polloi and ruling elites on this very important concept, some folks put together the Wildland Fire Cost-Plus-Loss Economics Project and wrote a paper about cost-plus-loss [here].
We (I was one of the authors) pointed out that the losses (damages) from wildfires are anywhere from 20 to 50 times greater than the costs (fire suppression expenses). Therefore, when contemplating fire suppression funding, it would behoove the ruling elites to consider the losses, to tally or otherwise estimate them, in order to arrive at the efficient funding amount. If total cost-plus-loss is not considered, then the goal of fire suppression funding cannot be achieved, unless by accident, which is unlikely.
However, to date the GAO has not glommed onto the concept, and neither has the Forest Service or Congress. Our ruling elites continue to skip down the garden path in blissful ignorance about what it is they supposed to doing and why.
Hence the question posed in the title of this essay. You know the answer to that question now. Wouldn’t it be revealing and possibly helpful in some respect to ask your Congressperson the question?
Try it and find out if they know the answer. And if they don’t know, as is likely, please inform them. You have only yourself and your stuff and your family and your town, forests, watersheds, neighbors, landscapes, nation, and planet to save.
