Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range
Wildfires in the West: Myths and Realities
By George Wuerthner, 8-28-07
With most science, it takes a while for the latest research and observations to be published, and then be assimilated into the public consciousness. Typically new science does not entirely invalidate the old ideas, but provides new insights and nuances. I see that happening now with fire ecology and how fire issues are reported in the media.
One of the frequently repeated “truths” is that fires are more “destructive” than in the past due to fire suppression. By putting out fires, we are told, we have contributed to higher fuel loads in our woodlands that is the cause of the large blazes we seem to be experiencing around the West.
But like any scientific fact, the more we know, the more we understand how little we really understand. While fuels are important to any blaze, the latest research is suggesting that weather/climatic conditions rather than fuels drive large blazes. In other words, you can have all the fuel in the world, but if it’s not dry enough, you won’t get a large blaze.
On the other hand if you have severe drought, combined with low humidity and high winds, almost any fuel loading will burn and burn well. Despite all the rhetoric about “historic” fire seasons, including several years where more than 7-8 million acres burned, the total acreage burned today is actually quite low by historic standards. As recently as the 1930s Dust Bowl drought years, more than 39 million acres burned annually in the US. And long term research going back thousands of years suggests that the past 50-70 years may be real anomalies in terms of acreage burned as well as fire severity. It may be that the limited fire activity between the 1930s and 1990s was more a reflection of moister climatic conditions than due to any effective fire suppression.
Indeed, most fires just go out on their own with or without fire suppression if the conditions for fire spread are not conducive. Nevertheless, we take credit for putting out the blazes that may as well have gone out without any intervention at all. At a recent fire forum I attended, a forest supervisor admitted as much when he quipped that his agency was “very good at putting out fires in wet years, but not very good at putting out fires in dry ones.” He was acknowledging how weather/climate controls fire activity and the success or failure of agency fire suppression efforts.
There undoubtedly has been some fuel build up in a few ecosystems due to fire suppression, particularly low elevation forests such as those dominated by ponderosa pine where fires are presumed to have been frequent. However, most of the acreage burned in recent years has been either range fires influenced largely by the presence of the exotic and highly flammable cheat grass and/or higher elevation plant communities, which typically did not burn frequently. Stand replacement fires characterize these higher elevation forest communities. These forests types have suffered no fuel build up due to fire suppression because successful fire control hasn’t existed long enough to have affected the interval between blazes that typically dominates these forests.
What is missed in the “fire suppression” has created fuel build ups assertion is the fact that mixed to high severity stand replacement blazes are the “norm” for most western ecosystems including chaparral, aspen, spruce-fir, western larch, boreal forests in Alaska, lodgepole pine, and many other forest types. For instance, the lodgepole pine forest of Yellowstone NP typically burns every 300-400 years. Fire suppression has had no impact on fuel loading in these forests.
New research is even beginning to question the common assertion that low elevation forests dominated by ponderosa pine have all been affected by fire suppression. Researchers are finding more and more evidence for the occurrence of stand replacement blazes even in these forests—long before fire suppression could have had any influence on fuel buildup. In fact, it may be that all forest and plant communities will burn and burn well if we have the right conditions of wind, hot temperatures, and drought. The fact that recent fires are burning through clear cuts, thinned stands, and other forests that are supposed to be fire proofed, suggests that big blazes are, at least in some situations, the norm.
This has huge policy implications, especially in light of global warming. We are now entering a period of larger uncontrollable fires. Public agencies like the Forest Service will increasingly find that like the forest supervisor admitted, they are not good at putting out fires in dry years. Furthermore, presumed “solutions” put forth by logging advocates such as thinning programs are unlikely to work effectively in drought years. And since nearly all big blazes occur in drought years, these are the only fires that are worth worrying about.
Beyond the fact that we probably cannot control large blazes, it is likely a bad idea to try. In terms of ecosystem processes big blazes are needed—for the majority of ecosystem work by fire annually is done by less than one percent of all blazes. Despite tens of thousands of fire starts in a typical summer, the majority of all acreage burned is the result of no more than a few dozen fires.
We need to embrace large blazes and learn to live with them. Fire in the forest is not bad. Fire in our communities is. The real solution to the West’s fire woes is to reduce the fire risk of our communities through mandatory building codes designed to reduce the flammability of individual homes, and zoning that restricts sprawl in fire prone landscapes so that the inevitable large blazes can sweep across the land with a minimum of harm to humans.
George Wuerthner is the editor of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy published by Island Press and 33 other books on natural history and ecological topics.
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Comments
The thing that amazes me about George's pyromanticism is a total lack of social context. It may be true that few fires burnt in the higher elevations, but that's because Indians didn't head for higher elevations when they ran the country....there was no need. The induced-fire regime they enforced on the landscape for purposes of game and edibles management worked well enough at lower elevations so that it wasn't necessary to hunt high for supper. Vision quests, you bet. But routine ridgetop wandering, when an easier walk and more food was to be had down low?
Even the white man hasn't been mountain climbing very long, at least not for recreational purposes. If I remember right, the first person known to climb the Matterhorn did so early in the 19th century.
With new techology, of course, new horizons opened, away from the temperate parts of the planet into more unforgiving areas.
But the fact is, when man (of whatever color) is, or has been, capable of manipulating the environment for desired outcomes, that's been the case.
Bottom line, George is not being honest about the history of fire and its causes, nor does he give due justice to the social context of forests and wildfire.
So then, Dave, what you're saying is that the Indians embraced large fires?
And there are records such as at Wilkerson Pass in Colorado where the Indians would in fact set tactical large fires to smoke out their enemies or at least deny them feed for a pursuit.
It was a matter of pragmatism. In the tribal world, I think the realities of daily life and the yearly cycle forced a certain amount of practicalism on Indians. If you set a fire at the wrong time of the year in the wrong place, you didn't eat, or you had to sneak into enemy territory.
And you don't have to have a PhD to realize that fresh forage the spring after a fall fire with fat game prancing about is a good thing. So the next fall, the night before leaving camp, the clan says, Dang we ate good this summer, let's torch it again and see if we eat good NEXT year....
And I'm sure that bands caught in or near huge blowups probably discussed maybe preemptive burning, tried it, and then applied it.
At some point a knowledge base develops about the best timing and locations for fires over time, and is passed on from generation to generation.
If Indians can grow maize, build pyramids, irrigate, and all that, they are certainly capable of practicing forestry as well. Their induced fires were pervasive and deliberate in nature, leading to a landscape that was not natural at all, but an historical artifact.
There's reasons for the vast hordes of game that the white boys dang near extincted in the late 1800s...that's because before the smallpox and guns decimated the Indians, they were managing the landscape for a plenitude of huntable, edible game as well as HUMAN forage crops they desired.
They did such a good job it took whitey almost a century to blast it all away.
Go on any Northwest rez today and you'll see more game animals than you can shake a stick at. There's a reason. You'll also see a mix of modern and ancient vegetation management that us white trash should think about emulating.
The infrequency of fire at higher elevation has nothing to do with whether people visited the high country or not. There's plenty of lightning to provide a source of ignition for fires in the West.
Whether from lightning or human sources, most plant communities will not burn well unless you have drought conditions combined with wind. The reason fires tend to be infrequent at higher elevations in most years is the result of the greater moisture typically found at higher elevations.
Thanks for the column and for looking at the fire issue from many different angles. I'm not sure where Dave Skinner is coming from. On one hand he appears to be against all fires. But then he seems to claim that Native Americans were starting all kinds of large fires, so he seems to embrace those. Then I see in a recent column in the Flathead Beacon that his solution for the fires this year is for the Forest Service to do as much logging as possible after the fires and then replant the forests if necessary. Seems as if that will just create more problems in the future, including dense stands of trees prone to intense fires.
"The real solution to the West’s fire woes is to reduce the fire risk of our communities through mandatory building codes designed to reduce the flammability of individual homes, and zoning that restricts sprawl in fire prone landscapes so that the inevitable large blazes can sweep across the land with a minimum of harm to humans."
I couldn't get Dave's drift either. He seems to be in agreement with George, but I doubt that's his intent. But it's certainly true that the forests were in far better shape when the Indians were the only people here.
Here's an excerpt from the latest issue of The Economist:
"Another big reason for the change of approach is scientific progress. Jim Thomas, who is fighting a huge blaze to the north of Boise, says it is much easier to preserve buildings these days, thanks to improved chemical foams and fire-retardant wrapping, which resembles tin foil. But halting a forest fire in its tracks is as difficult and dangerous as ever. As a result, strategies have changed. The goal is no longer to stop fire but to limit property damage. A final reason is environmental: most scientists now think fires are beneficial to forests and the animals that live in them."
Here's the link: http://economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9687481
That The Economist should hold this opinion is encouraging.
George, the reason the Indians didn't induce fires on high ground is because it didn't matter much to them. Not a main food source, not a camping site, not a park.
As for whether or not things burn well, yes, that's a factor. You couldn't torch the Hoh valley in December 99.999 percent of the time. The same is true for just about any forest in a maritime climate in North America. Then again, you get in the Blue Mountains, it's hot and dry a lot of the year, as it is in the Siskiyous.
But that's not the point. If one has a fixed amount of moisture, and you have x number of stems or tons per acre, sucking up x gallons per month per stem or ton, if you reduce the moisture then the forest goes dry earlier. That's why the Fraser water yield study came out the way it did, and I'll bet it drove the Westerling results as well.
Now, let's pretend we are farmers and we have X water coming to us. Then the ditch company says, you are gonna get X times .5 next year because of "global warming" -- so do we plant our whole ground and get a crummy crop, or do we plant half of it, or do we change our crop? What is the rational response?
Same with trees. George claims we should just get ready for whacking large fires...in short, be the farmer who plants his usual ground knowing he's only got half water.
I would hope that others would think, hey, we have this trend, whatever the cause, deal with it.
Then there is the matter of what sort of fire you want. Fire is a disturbance, vegetation responds to disturbance. Whether the reaction is positive or negative (a human thing) depends on the timing, duration and intensity of the disturbance, regardless of whether or not the disturbance is random or deliberate.
Let's add the "inevitability" George wants to disturbance. How much fuel you have per square, and its physical structure, determines the duration and intensity of the fire disturbance. Is this to be a low-level fire that revives the understory and whacks down those pesky little trees clustering around those big pretty pumpkins, or a wall of flame that immolates and kills all woody material and sets the stage for brush for the next several centuries? What if cheatgrass or spurge is the most effective colonizer?
And this all boils down to a values judgment as to what is a desirable event. George desires big whackin fires so no evil logger will ever make a cent. That's his value system, and if society accepts his paradigm, the result will be a social artifact....not strictly natural since fire suppression itself, a social artifact, has set the ground for whacking big fires.
MTW, I would bet you would prefer fires in the wilderness of optimum intensity to maximize browse for what you would like to kill. The Indians did, and do, precisely that on their game grounds.
The result would be, yep, a social artifact, a result of a social decision.
Myself, I'd prefer we respond to the reduction in moisture by adjusting (as in reducing) the amount of vegetation competing for it. The remaining trees would be taller, healthier, prettier, and then we could think about using fire as the Indians do, in a controlled, systematic, beneficial manner.
Uncontrolled monster fires are not inevitable. Those of you saying so are wrong. And I think those of you who like black forests are bent.
And Pete, I'm especially sorry an economist like you wouldn't be looking at ways of optimizing social benefit from forested areas. The USFS doesn't cover its costs although state, private and tribes are able to do so.
Mmmmm. Thanks for the practice.
Some points:
(1) I still don't understand what sort of fire policy you'd like to see.
(2) Fire is a dramatic and essential ingredient in the West's ecosystems. Fires, especially in the higher-elevation forests, are characterized by infrequent stand-replacing events such as the 1988 Yellowstone fires that burned approximately one-half of the park. Veteran firefighters know the best way to fight such fires is to pray for an early snowfall.
(3) Unless you support enormous subsidies to remove fuel from high-elevation, low-productivity forests, huge, out-of-control fires are inevitable.
(4) Eight of the ten fastest-growing US states are in the West. Much new residential development is occurring in fire-prone areas close to federal public lands. We should avoid public policy that shelters people from the responsibility of these risks. We can learn from the barrier islands off the East Coast.
Hurricanes are an annual threat to these islands, just as fire is throughout much of the West. When hurricanes occur, federal disaster funds are made available to the property owners. This creates a moral hazard: island investors anticipate these funds when building. Consequently, they shift the risk to innocent victims--the general taxpayer. And they often rebuild.
People will continue to build homes in forests and in dry years fires will burn. Surely we don't want to replicate the "Barrier Island Pathology" of federal bailouts. The solution lies in making those who place themselves in harm's way responsible for reducing fire losses.
I love the "forests are like a garden crop" analogy. Comparing my 400 square feet of garden space in my backyard to hundreds and millions of diverse wildlands (including many different species of trees, shrubs, flowers, insects, mushrooms, animals, birds, etc) seems like a stretch to me. While I can certainly grab the hose and dump a little extra water on my garden plot when it looks dry, do you really believe that we can have any impact on wildfire over the hundred and millions of acres of wildlands that evolved with it? I agree that we should do fuel reduction around homes, but I just fail to grasp where your confidence that logging can reduce fire spread and intensity is coming from. The research certainly doesn't support you 100% and if you just look at what's burning this summer in western Montana logged and thinned forests certainly have seen their share of intense fires.
You're looking at forests as plantations, right? What you think ought to be done is to go in and change the make-up of the forest, eliminate certain species, encourage others. That's a very big job spread over all the Western forests, and we don't have a good track record at that kind of thing. Humans often seem to get it wrong.
You're really promoting the use of industrial logging as the tool to accomplish this forest improvement, correct? Cut it down and replace it with the new improved version. But the case has been made repeatedly, and validated by the types of forests and rangelands burning this summer, that logged and roaded land, and rangeland, are equally vulnerable to fire. So what then is the advantage, vis-a-vis fires, in cutting over the forests? I guess the answer is just this: it's a boon to the timber industry.
The fires in Greece are burning over a land that has been managed much as you would wish. A large portion of the forest there is in the form of plantations, with an emphasis on commercially valuable species, with attention paid to fuel removal, and often with uniform
canopy heights. Olive groves, which have burnt like everything else, have spaced trees, no brush. But it's all burning.
1. Integrated fire and fuels management, again, take a look at the rezzes (IF they will allow you on the property) for an example. It's not pure industry, it's not pure woo-woo-nature or deficit hand crews, it's a very sophisticated and pragmatic mix that has pretty good bang for the limited tribal buck.
2. I agree, fire is a needed disturbance vector. But there is the matter of intensity, plus a larger context of limited habitat attributes that may not be available nearby and therefore would be better off retained through intervention.
3. I don't think subsidies from Ole and Inga in St. Paul are needed. Region Six data collected for the IFMAT 2 study by John Sessions showed the tribes coming in at 92 a thousand feet overhead, private and state in the 110 or so range, and USFS R6 at 1263 a thousand. That last is a pretty impressive subsidy for lousy results -- or in Baden Stroup Anderson terms, a concentrated benefit with a dispersed cost -- pure political economy in its worst form.
State, fed and tribal ownerships are somewhat different than private inasmuch as private grounds had a selection process for hi-site productivity as timber, whereas the SFT ownerships run the gamut of quality. So those entities can and do and mostly should practice cross-subsidy. If George wants migrant crews to hand-whack something special, then it makes sense to offer a commercial component within a project area (hey, ecosystems have no hard and fast boundaries) to pay for the loser work.
4. I agree partly. I wish all these yuppie liberals and commie trust-funders had "discovered" someplace else to "save." But there are lots of woods homes in the rest of the country, and a lot of people who dream of such a thing all their lives. You're the big libertarian famous writer....
I have little sympathy for toasty homes, especially when the owners are Sierra Club members supporting zero cut. Cedar roofs suck, too, yet that's a matter for mortgage and insurance brokers to deal with.
But the real issue is escapement. The simple fact remains that the Castle Rock fire threatening to burn Jon Marvel's pad didn't start in Ketchum and burn out into the forest, but the fire got a head of steam in the forest and is now running amok. If Jon had a kegger and started the Castle Rock, his butt would be in court yesterday. And when you talk firewise or whatever, if you can firewise a home, you can certainly firewise segments of forest landscapes to the point where at least a good stand can be made.
MTW, or Ben, if you look through a lot of historical texts and accounts, you will notice a LOT of references to a "garden" when it came to the North American landscape. When and where it made sense to cultivate (through torching), it was dang sure done by Indians. Stop ignoring history, please. Wildfire in your sense is ONLY those fires not historically set by Indians. The rest of the fires on the landscape, with their "natural" return intervals, were SET, at regular times. Call it managed fire, call it induced fire, but it is, for the most part, not natural at all except in those elevations and terrain where Indian presence was not routine, for those reasons I indicated above.
That raises another point, about human presence. Guess what? We have the technology (and the vacation time) to be present on mountaintops, thanks to our affluence and good old REI and Black Diamond. We can log anything economic. And, just like Indians and any other human or advanced creature has done, we have manipulated our environment to suit our desires. Not a one of you won't crank up the gas or toss a couple more logs on the fire if you are chilly this winter. Heck, even bears and wolverines dig dens....bees make hives. It's, um, er, NATURAL.
There's no question that some in this discussion desire black basins for reasons other than "environmental." It's classic Clausewitian "deny the ground" warfighting, literal scorched earth. Fine. I disagree with it. If you want to hike in the Biscuit country or whatever, great. But I don't like having to wear a hard hat on a hike.
Finally, TZ, it seems to me that if the climate drives things, we ought to be good Darwinists and evolve with it. If the woods get too crispy for Doug fir, how about some ponderosas? Good plan!
Or if it becomes global cooling, how about some nice spruce or tamarack?
The Greek fires had many points of origin leading to allegations of arson. Let's wait and see what the cause was. As for it burning, well, fires happen, right?....and I will bet you that the Greek response will NOT be "oooo, get used to it, it's WONDERFUL." They are not gonna abandon Marathon or whatever opolis they've lived in for a gazillion years. They will take steps to address the problem now that it has scorched their fannies but good. I feel we should do the same here in America.
Again, fellows, thanks for the practice. I've had writers block for a while.
I think you're a master of obfuscation, Dave. Paragraph #3 is a masterpiece.
I forgot to add, I totally agree with you about wearing a hard hat in the forest.
Back in the fifties I spent summers on this ranch or that, and met a lot of the old boys that were still around in those days. They had been bona-fide cowboys aged 12 back before the First World War. They were stringy and kinda hunched over, could roll and light a smoke at a trot in a thunderstorm, climbed on any ole horse rode him like the Devil. If they saw somebody abusing a horse, why, they walked up and knocked him over, no word said. Then they'd take the horse. But they sure were scared of the timber. Figured a branch might fall on their head. This one guy, six foot two and rawhide, I remember riding with him through the Little Belts, back when there was still virgin timber, hadn't burnt in a long while, no thinning. Scary as Hell! He used to wear on old leather football helmet, no hard hats being handy. Yup.
I don't know about commie trust-funders though. I asked a couple of dozen of my trust-fund buddies if they were communists, and they just laughed. Said they were invested in hedge funds, stocks, bonds, and real-estate. Little worried about the economy at the moment, but they were still pretty ardent capitalists, seeing as how the capital market kept them in funds. But I'm sure there must be one or two commie trust-funders around, so you might not be completely wrong.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2007-08-29-cheatgrass_N.htm .
Here is the lead in to the story:
DENVER — Cheatgrass, a wispy Eurasian weed accidentally brought to the USA in the late 19th century, has become a 21st century headache across the West, fueling some of this summer's most destructive wildfires.
The largest blaze in Utah history, the 567-square-mile Milford Flat fire last month, raced across rangeland infested with the highly combustible, straw-colored plant. Bone-dry expanses of cheatgrass in Idaho and Nevada also stoked the 1,020-square-mile Murphy Complex fires, the largest to burn in Idaho in 97 years.
The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates 2 million acres have burned [in 2007] in the Great Basin, the West's expanse of sagebrush steppes vulnerable to cheatgrass fires.
SPOKANE, Wash. -- A fungus scientists have dubbed "Black Fingers of Death" may turn out to be the first long-range weapon in efforts to halt the advance of cheatgrass, a destructive invasive weed, scientists say.
The link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6600AP_WST_Black_Fingers_of_Death.html
Until and unless EVERYONE, including the enviros who think they see God every time they look in the mirror, takes these things seriously and is willing to do what it takes to get rid of the weed themselves, it is going to be a problem.
this is not a problem to be solved by lawsuits to make someone else provide a cure, it is something that needs to be tackled by everybody, while we still have a few forests left.
One sploosh of retardant and the world ends. That the world might get smoked due to lack of retardant drops never enters the picture. The intent of Andy's latest is not to save fish, but to make retardant use go away in order to make firefighting even more expensive and less effective. Period. Saving fish has nothing to do with it, considering the vulnerability of fisheries to sediment pulses from a landscape fire is far greater than that of an unburned watershed.
Sure, a splash in the wrong place kills fish. But that stream can recover with structure in place in a shorter time than if the stream gets cooked, then blasted by mud, and is heated during the long interval it takes for structure to return and riparian vegetation to regrow.
As for only a few forests left, it's really an amazing thing to go up Marias Pass and see how much dead stuff has been created in the past 20 years. Skeletal sticks everywhere, for miles. Sure looks like we are getting to the bottom of the woodpile there... Never mind the North and South forks, and now the Thompson, plus the Bitterroot. Soon the East Fork, too, thanks to you.
There's been a lot of research on fire impacts upon streams in recent years and the results as not what you might think. Not surprisingly since fires have been around as long as fish, the impacts from fires are minimal. There's a lot of good scientific evidence that intact watersheds recover quickly from fires. There may or may not be a "pulse" of sediment into watersheds depending on the rain/snow patterns in the months immediately after a blaze. But whether there is a flush of sediment or not, these effects are short lived. Within 2-3 years, sediment rates usually decline to pre-fire or lower conditions.
And sediment pulses normally only affect first and second order streams. By the time you get to a river the size of the Bitterroot or Flathead the negative effects of fire-induced sedimentation are typically absorbed by the volume of water.
Furthermore, other analysis shows that the nutrient pulse resulting from fires tends to increase productivity in streams, particularly at higher elevations which tend to be nutrient poor.
In addition, the opening of canopy by fire can also increase biological activity-i.e. bacteria that traps free nitrogen that enrichs aquatic ecosystems.
Finally fires create and contribute woody debris to waterways which accounts for up to 50% of the fish habitat in small to medium size streams.
And by the way, logging does not emulate these kinds of effects which is why fish populations are declining over much of the West due to human management of the landscape. Again recent research reviewing fish populations around the West has shown a consistent pattern. The most intact watersheds, and healthiest fish populations are found in unroaded, unlogged, and wild landscapes.
You do raise the point, George, of stream order. Yep....by the time you get to a river, the negative effects of retardant drops are mitigated by the volume of water.
As for population health, I think the lack of angler numbers in areas lacking road access is a factor in "health." Fewer fishers, mo fish. Simple, and not necessarily a result of "nature" -- it would be interesting to see a cross study of a roaded stream for all attributes, say structure, clarity, nutrients, cobble conditions with an unroaded stream. How many hooks in the water would be an illustrative data point.
You call Judge Molloy's ruling retarded, but all he asked the Forest Service to do in 2005 was complete an environmental analysis of the retardant. That's hardly even much of a ruling. The agency, up until now, has refused to do this analysis.
Fire retardant contains ammonium nitrate and has been linked to massive fish deaths in polluted waterways. Some types of retardant, when exposed to sunlight and water, produce amounts of cyanide that exceeded Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for freshwater organisms.
Do you figure we might be able to use our technology to produce a fire retardant that is less toxic for fish, wildlife and firefighters? That's what the lawsuit is about.
Your suggestion on how to gauge health of fisheries based on attributes such as structure, waterway function, etc. are exactly the perimeters and criteria that are used in the studies that I am familiar with. It is not a matter of access and/or fishing pressure. This is particularly true of salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest where angling pressure, even commercial fishing, is insignificant compared to the effects of watershed degradation resulting from logging, grazing, and other human exploitation of the land.
The effects of logging are particularly noticeable in Alaska. The watersheds in unlogged drainages have been able up until now have sustained regulated exploitation of fish populations by sport and commercial fishing without apparent decline in fish productivity. However, in many logged drainages on the Tongass NF in southeast Alaska, there has been a decline in fish runs typically attributed to logging impacts since that is the only variable that has changed (i.e. no fires, no grazing, no hatchery fish, no dams, etc.)
The cause of cheatgrass spread is not the issue, the issue, like always, is the RESPONSE. Making cows (hooved locusts, I see you take your lead from Jonny Marvelous and the George W that is not President) go away won't make cheatgrass magically disappear and cause Paradise. Had cheatgrass never come over in the first place, it would not be an issue, any more than Dutch elm disease, smallpox, horses, thistle, blister rust, yada yada.
Of course, that raises Andy's old point about the spotted owl...if it didn't exist, it would have to be invented. Yep. Cheatgrass is just another angle for cow haters, that's all.
And let's say we hadn't invented cows, and BISON (and elk) are the vector, like they are for brucellosis. Elk Free By 93?
Maybe that fungus stuff will do the trick, but since it's not really natural to the ecosystem, are you going to file litigation once the proposal is made to try it out for real?
And I can just imagine the years of delay if in fact an apparently benign fire sauce gets developed...."Oh, this hasn't been tested on the Outer Limitarian Dreadlocked Mungwort, Your Honor!"
Pshaw.
Here's where a little ecological/historical knowledge is part of the answer to your response. There were, for instance, no native elk in Nevada except for the Jarbridge area and perhaps one or two ranges in that extreme northeastern part of Nevada. Similarly bison range only extended into northeast Utah and eastern parts of Idaho. There were no known bison herds in historic times native to Nevada, western Utah, eastern Oregon, etc. where cheatgrass dominates today.
That is why crypto gramic crusts were able to survive in these regions--they were not trampled by big herds of wildlife. So it's not so much the kind of animal--it's the fact that there never any significant number of animals using these grasslands in recent times that has to do with the spread of cheatgrass in the Great Basin.
There are elk in Nevada now. If they are not in "historic" areas, due probably to the existence of water infrastructure, would you eliminate them?
And regardless of whether few animals used those habitats in the past, animals use them now. Are all of them to go away in your future vision?
Matt...again, you seem to be fixated on blaming the things you don't like for results which nobody likes, whatever side of the eco-anthro fence they stand on, even the fence straddling weasels that supposedly determine the outcome. Fine. Blame all you want, the question is: What will be the response to cheatgrass and other infestations?
Do you have one? If the fungus works, will you still fight fang and claw to eliminate grazing or other multiple uses? Of course you will. And I will not be surprised if you or others of your, um, persuasion, drag the NEPA process out as long as possible, including litigation of any form that induces delay and expense, when the time comes for an EA or EIS on the effectiveness of black-finger on cheatgrass.
If the solution was a Cheatgrass Death Star that zapped it and nothing else, at a net cost of a penny per acre, would you oppose that too? Yes or no?
I have sent George pics of land that is grazed and covered with good grass, and wildflowers, I am going to run across the road and take photos of the nasty weeds on the BLM land over there. It has never been grazed, and it covered with cheat grass, weeds and scrub sage.
Here is an article from Range Magazine on managed land.
hwww.rangemagazine.com/features/winter-06/gardeners.pdf
I am not aware of the specifics. Most of the larger geographical studies I've seen included all drainages which is the only way to get a meaningful representation for generalizations, so would of course be older logging units. SMZ likely has improved water quality and other factors. However, even more recent logging units with SMZ requirements have problems, particularly with mass slope failure attributed to roads. There are no commercially viable logging methods that I know of that mimic natural systems--though obviously there are better and worse ways to log.
The elk residing in Nevada are found primarily in the higher elevations mountain areas, not the valleys where cheatgrass and livestock dominate. It is these lower elevation grasslands that are most vulnerable to cheatgrass invasion. The reason cattle and/or sheep are a problem in the Great Basin is because they are a new disturbance element for which the ecosystem is not adapted to deal with.
I have no doubt the BLM site you are going to photograph may have weeds. However, that doesn't invalidate the generation that livestock free sites (as opposed to no grazing by other native herbivores) are generally in better ecological condition than those grazed by livestock. Statistically this is well documented by many studies, not just a few. In ecological science that is about as good as it gets. Duplication of similar results across many landscapes with many different soils, grasses, etc.
It's what I call the 99 year old grandmother who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day syndrome. I.e. you can find an occasional smoker who lives a long and apparently healthy life, but that doesn't invalidate the generalization that if you smoke a lot, you'll likely live a shorter life than a non-smoker.
So when I say that livestock free areas are generally in better range condition than livestock grazed sites that doesn't mean you can't find some grazed sites in excellent condition or all livestock free sites are always in good condition.
George, I know you are a total acolyte of Arne Naess's "deep ecology" so for you there will NEVER be anything that works as well as "natural systems." Your sponsor Doug Tompkins will never allow it.
Even the absolute best managed system, with the fattest cows, fattest fish, tallest grass, greenest trees, happiest hikers, whatever...will NEVER satisfy you, never fit your notions. Fine.
I wish I could wave a wand and give you about five million acres, where you and your buddies could all move, put an electric fence around it and see if anyone inside is alive after five years of "sustainable" living with "deep ecology." I doubt it.
The world has gone mad.