Guest Commentary: George Wuerthner's "On the Range"
Context Needed in Beetle Discussion
By George Wuerthner, 11-19-08
In the November 17th Science Section of The New York Times there was an article by Jim Robbins about the current pine beetle event occurring in the West.
There was a lot of good factual information in the piece about pine beetles and their basic ecology, and on the whole, Robbins did a good job of describing some of the concerns that people have about the beetle situation. Nevertheless, the tone and implied message conveyed an overly pessimistic and negative picture of beetles as well as wildfires. It was not so much that it had a lot of false statements as much as the way it was written. Taken together the various quotes, and background in the article leaves one with the perception that somehow beetles, as well as wildfires are “out of control” in the West’s ecosystems.
What is lacking is perspective and context. As a writer myself I recognize that space limitations often affect the detail that can be contained in an article. Sometimes you can’t list all the exceptions, nuance, and provide the full context for a piece. Robbins got a lot of ecological information in his piece, and in that regard he did a good job.
However, it seems to me that the real “news” here isn’t that we are having large outbreaks of beetles, but that such events are probably quite normal when looked at from an ecological temporal and spatial perspective. Those who are asserting these are the largest outbreaks in history are only going back a relatively short time—perhaps the past 50-100 years for the context and perspective. At least some beetle researchers I’ve talked with believe the current infestation (infestation is pejorative and not a good word to use here, but I can think of nothing more suitable) is not that out of the ordinary when compared to other large events from the more distance past.
We are seeing unprecedented drought and much warmer temperatures as Robbins noted in the article. But what he did not do is connect the dots. Such droughts mean that our forests are overstocked for current conditions, and the beetles as well as wildfires are doing us all a great favor by thinning them at no cost. Instead of portraying this natural thinning process as a problem, a more ecologically informed perspective might suggest that the beetles are creating forests that are more in balance with available moisture, and other nutrients.
Now the global warming that is occurring may be unnatural--due to human caused climate change--but that is the problem, not the response of the beetles, fires, and forest to that climate change.
Large beetle outbreaks and wildfires in particular, rather than being “destructive” as insinuated in the article are the major ecological influences upon these types of forest ecosystems. The real “news” is that what people think about forests and wildfires is not accurate.
For instance, dead trees do not necessarily increase fire risk, and in fact, green trees might burn better under severe drought conditions. And dead trees provide many ecological benefits—which were not even mentioned in the piece to balance the doom and gloom. This kind of information is really the “news” especially for the Science Section of The New York Times.
The piece also mentions fire suppression as one of the factors that has led to even aged stands of lodgepole vulnerable to pine beetle attack. (Pine beetle typically only attack larger trees so trees growing back from recent burns are not susceptible to attack.) Rather than fire suppression contributing to these large beetle events, what is more likely occurring is a significant proportion of lodgepole pine stands in the West created by past large fires and/or beetle outbreaks a century or more ago are now the proper size and age to support sustained beetle population growth. As Robbins does note correctly when they reach this size, and are stressed by drought, they are less able to extrude beetles attempting to lay eggs in the tree’s cambium layer.
One of the reasons that fire suppression is unlikely to have had much effect upon the region’s lodgepole forest vulnerability to beetles has to do with the typical fire regime of this species. Lodgepole pine typically burns infrequently at relatively long intervals between fires, and generally in stand replacement blazes.
Significant fires in lodgepole pine only occur when there is severe drought—conditions as we are experiencing now. So the idea that past fire suppression reduced fires in these kinds of forests is unlikely or at best probably has had little influence on total fires and acreage burned today. Lodgepole forests don’t burn simply because there are dead trees—whether those trees are a consequence of past fires or beetle attack. It takes specific climatic conditions to sustain a fire.
There is a widespread misuse of the Southwest ponderosa pine model fire regime which is too often indiscriminately to all forests. While Southwest ponderosa pine forests are characterized by frequent low intensity fires that may have been altered by fire suppression, this generalization should not be applied to other forest types like lodgepole pine which naturally have much longer fire intervals. Fire suppression simply hasn’t been effective long enough to alter the fire intervals in lodgepole forests.
The other factors listed in Robbin’s piece—drought and warm winters—are the main reasons for this particular spectacular beetle outbreak. And these are largely factors controlled by climate—likely human induced global warming—rather than fire suppression.
Another factor that was not really addressed in the piece was the current condition of our forests is largely a reflection of either past fires and/or past beetle outbreaks. In other words, the extensive geographic extent of lodgepole of the proper age to make them vulnerable to beetles is a consequence of past events that created large stands of even aged pine.
There is data to suggest that previous beetle outbreaks every bit as large as and/or larger than the current one have repeatedly swept pine in the West. Put into that kind of perspective, the current events do not seem so extraordinary.
The problem is that we humans have such a short temporal viewpoint on ecological change. Events like large wildfires and beetle outbreaks that occur periodically, but only every century or two “seem” large because we are not witness to them but once every generation or two. That is why the Yellowstone fires seemed extraordinary to the country even though research has demonstrated that large blazes, often much larger than those in 1988, occurred in Yellowstone’s forests in centuries past.
Furthermore, just as a hundred year flood does a lot of the real hydrological work of a river in terms of channel morphology changes, these large fires and outbreaks of beetles are the major ecological force in their respective ecosystems. In other words, the small fires and outbreaks that occur on a more frequent basis really don’t matter because they don’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s the occasional, but rather uncommon large events that are the real driver of ecosystems. This perspective was regrettably missing from the article.
Third, the idea that dead lodgepole increases fire risk is also more nuanced than presented. In most of lodgepole pine forests it is too wet to burn most of the time—regardless of the fuels that are present. That is why lodgepole forests tend to burn on long intervals—because conditions that make them dry enough to burn readily do not occur frequently. Just because you have a lot of dead trees, doesn’t mean you will have a large fire or the fire risk is higher in those particular forest types.
Beyond that point, the overall fire hazard changes through time, and it is not as neat as presented in the article. Immediately following the attack and the red needle stage, flammability goes up. But what is the likelihood that there will be an ignition and that it will be wet enough for these trees to burn during that short period of several years. Well it turns out it is a very small probability.
Probability is an important factor in these discussions. The fact that you have a lot of red needles out there doesn’t translate into higher fire risk unless the other factors that contribute to large blazes like wind, drought, low humidity, and ignition are also present. Getting all these factors together on the same piece of land at the same time that the forest is dominated by red needles is extremely rare--which is why lodgepole pine forests do not burn very often.
But after the needles drop, and small branches break off the trees, the flammability goes down for several decades--so even with drought, wind, etc. the probability of fire actually goes down over that which might occur if the trees were green and alive. In reality, a standing dead tree is not likely to burn except under very severe fire conditions.
Under severe drought conditions, green trees are more flammable than dead trees (where the small branches and needles are gone) because they have flammable resins. Thus under extreme drought conditions, your green forests are more likely to burn than a sea of dead trees at this stage.
The bulk of trees killed by fire or beetles do not fall over for several decades. Even then, what increases flammability aren’t so much the dead trees, but the rapid growth of young trees that take advantage of the opening in the forest canopy and reduction in competition. Since it is fine fuels that sustains fire, not large snags, it is the young trees, grass, shrubs, etc. that rapidly fill up the ground and can carry a fire that leads to greater flammability.
Big logs, as most of us probably know from trying to make campfires, are not easily ignited . If you don’t have a lot of “kindling” under the logs, ignition from a match, spark or any other source, won’t get the log to burn. The larger the log, the more preheating require to get it up to the burning point and keep it there. You need a lot of fine fuels and small branches to carry and sustain a fire. It is the rapid growth of smaller trees, etc. that provides this small fuels, which can heat the larger logs to the ignition point and help to sustain the flames.
Fourth, the article unfortunately had a lot of dire stuff about mudslides, floods, etc. which may or may not follow a fire, but even if it does, even these events must be put into perspective. Research shows these kinds of natural events are relatively rare. And at least in some places, research has shown that the bigger and most severe burns actually have contributed to higher biodiversity, more fish, etc. than lightly burned areas. In other words, contrary to popular perception, severe wildfires might not be “bad” from a biodiversity and ecological perspective—even for things we care about like the quality of the trout fishing.
Another problem with the piece was the use of pejorative language. In my book Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy I discuss at length about how language helps to promote the idea that wildfires are “bad” by using words like “catastrophic”, “disaster”, “damaged”, and other adjectives used to describe wildfires. Such terms are really pejorative word since large fires are not deadly to the landscape or ecosystems as implied.
As mentioned at the beginning, most of the factual content of the article was accurate, but still the author weaved together a report that presented an ecologically inaccurate portrait of the situation. Context and perspective are critical to our collective understanding of ecological events, and without such information, we react with poor policy choices.
George Wuerthner is an ecologist, photographer and writer with 34 published books on natural history and environmental issues.
[End of article]As usual, George. As usual.
Not honestly discussed here is the fact that lodgepole has a fairly short lifespan, a bit over a century and a score. If the trees are to die anyway, then why not harvest them, leave enough slash to feed the next cycle, and go around again?
Never mind that lodgepole forests are often peckerpole jungles, not real productive in terms of game habitat.
Never mind that a dead lodgepole patch will burn like the dickens if adjacent stands torch off and spot.
Never mind that historic fires over time were for the most part not "natural" but human caused. Dense lodgepole thickets were, among other things, great ambush opportunities, and it was a simple survival technique to deliberately fire such areas when conditions were right.
Sure, we haven't had any 50 below cold snaps for a while, which are real helpful in killing beetles. Yet I cannot understand why anyone would advocate throwing up our hands and not adapting management to new conditions -- including drier forests that would do just fine with fewer trees fighting for available water -- when the history of the landscape for thousands of years is one of management for DESIRED, not random, resource productivity.
Dave:
We're never going to agree on things like logging, but there is one point that I have to take you to task on--your assertions that people were burning lodgepole pine forests all the time so they were not "natural" as you suggest.
The first is that Native American burning was largely confined to the areas around where they lived--which tends to be the lowest elevation valleys--and this is not the typical habitat for lodgepole pine. The area of greatest influence by human ignitions were the grasslands and lower elevation ponderosa pine forests. The higher you go up in the mountains, the less human ignitions were a factor.
The fact remains no matter who starts the fire, whether lightning or humans, a fire can't burn if it's not dry enough.
Since lodgepole pine tends to be found at higher snowier elevations, these forests often don't dry out enough to burn well except at very infrequent intervals. I actually suspect you know this about lodgepole pine, but you are creating a straw man so you can knock it down.
It is only when there is little precipitation in the spring, and very dry summers that most lodgepole pine forests dry out enough to burn with vigor--i.e. over an extensive area. The rest of the time you can go into these forests with a blow torch and you're not going to get them to burn and certainly the Indians lacked blow torches or anything approaching such mechanization.
As a "writer yourself" who recognizes space limitations...you should have stopped after the first paragraph! To make the claim, "thinning them is of no cost," is laughable unless you consider economic impact and property losses of no value. How about the damage to our water systems via runoff? Just call me normal but
I can't think of the fire and beetles as being a good thing.
Brad:
"How about damage to our water systems?" you say. That's another one of those assumptions that turns out to be flawed. Most burned drainages return to pre fire sediment loads within 1-2 years after a fire, if not sooner, depending on the fire intensity. But even severely burned drainages in Yellowstone returned to pre fire levels within two years.
On the other hand, logging impacts including sedimentation from logging roads last a lot longer. They "leak" sediments for a variety of reasons. That is one reason why salmon and trout have survived for millennium with fires (when we weren't here to fix things) and yet decline with modern forestry.
For an interesting look at the bark beetle issue and how it plays out in "healthy forest" logging projects, check out information about the Middle East Fork Healthy Forest project on the BItterroot National forest.
A short video introducing the MEF project is here
Some more specific info about bark beetles is in this video
Finally, this is a pdf after the logging was done.
MESSAGE
Comment By Mickey Garcia, 11-19-08I don't know George. You seem to be characterizing the Lodge Pole ecosystem as an almost asbestos ecosystem where infrequent catastrophic fires burned vast areas of even aged Lodge Poles killed by Beetles. That's hard for me to buy into. Do you know how many lighting strikes hit the ground in Lodge Pole country annually and result in ignition? Long before Humans came on the scene the Lodge Poles had evolved into the Best Lodge poles they could be, a fire dependent species with a large percentage of cones that won't open without the heat of a fire. Before man, Lodge Pole country consisted of a mosaic pattern of mixed age stands less susceptible to catastrophic beetle kill simply because nature is a pyromaniacal, lady trying to start as many fires as possible every year with lightning. I know that ecology is the study of a multiplicity of complex interacting variables and sometimes it can be confusing. Nice to see that you're still kicking!!!!!
Comment By Geo., 11-20-08Hey Mickey thanks for the comment on lodgepole. But like Tevia in Fiddle on the Roof who listened to two people debating and said "you're both right" I think you're right, but I am too. It's a matter of temporal and spatial scale.
On one level you are correct, but there is another level that is overlaid on the situation you describe. It is like someone who asserts that floods happen every spring on our rivers--and they do. But there are also hundred and five hundred year floods that are semi imposed over the annual floods.
In other words there were always small fires here and there. And yes you're correct that would create a mosaic of different age stands of lodgepole, but imposed over that pattern is another one of much larger, but less frequent events of either large fires or large beetle outbreaks that might affect millions of acres at a time. Keep in mind Yellowstone, for example. There were a bunch of smaller fires in Yellowstone all through the time it was a park, with the largest being a 30,000 acre fire. But in 1988, we had the conditions that were perfect for a very large fire that swept through 1.5 million acres. When the conditions for a big fire exist, it burns through all ages of trees. So in 1988 we found that the fires burned through the big old trees with a lot of downfall, but they also burned through young stands that typically don't burn--even clearcuts outside of the park with trees only a few feet high burned up. So under certain conditions, the generalization is thrown out the door.
But, here's the kicker. Neither fires or beetles kill all the trees. Even in that Yellowstone fire, there is a mosaic of burn patterns affected largely by wind. When the wind was blowing, the fire burned through all age trees, but when the wind died down, the fire would pass over large patches, and you had many survivors and/or patches that didn't burn at all.
The small thing for beetles. Beetles seldom kill 100% of the trees, except over very small areas. In the typical beetle outbreak you get around 30-50% mortality--though it often looks like a lot more. There are sometimes more complete mortality, but that typically only affects small patches. If you look at a million acre "infestation" of beetles, you'll find a lot of patches of green trees, and of course, younger trees that are not killed because beetles only attack the larger trees. So you'll have the surviving older trees, plus all the younger trees that were untouched.
So when someone like me says there are huge areas of "even aged" pine, I am generalizing. In other words, a large percentage of trees will be of a similar age over a large area, but it doesn't mean it's all a monolithic stand.
Up to the point of population collapse, the more beetles there are, the hungrier and more powerful they become, eating everything in sight. The fewer beetles there are,the more selective they become about which trees they attack. To reach the critical mass that they have presently they needed enough trees of the right age class to infest to begin with. For Decades before the 1988 Yellowstone fire the Park Service had been putting out fires in Yellowstone. Had all these previous fires been allowed to burn themselves out, it is doubtful that the 1988 fire would have been so catastrophic.
Comment By Dave Skinner, 11-20-08Now wait a minute. Go on up to Red Bench and there's lodgepole up the vazoolia on the FLATS. Never mind that the fire did, youbetcha, kill every stick. Much of the North Fork is like that now, after Moose, Robert, Wedge. One hundred percent toast.
And Mickey, you're not registering "before humans" properly at all. Lighting tends to strike the same places more heavily than others, it's a matter of simple physics. I mean, there are Electric PEAKS but no Electric Flats.
The landscape has a lot of human influences all over the continent, even in the Northeast where oak has been replaced with species that would never survive the set fires of Indians, fires set because Indians liked oak mast, and the animals they hunted liked it too.
All the native plants in the Lodge Pole ecosystem evolved their reproductive and anatomical characteristics as a response to natural environmental conditions long before humans including indians entered the ecosystem. Lodge Pole pine evolved in a world where fire was very likely and regular regardless of terrain. The tree became dependent on fire for its reproductive success. My point is that for fire dependent and fire adapted plants, fire is as important as air, water, temperature, and sunlight in sustaining ecosystem balance.
Comment By bearbait, 11-21-08Is the lodgepole ecosystem not the argument against global warming? After all, lodgepole grows where it is too cold for P pine and doug fir, and maybe in a little bit drier micro site. And then you get above lodgepole and get into spruce and balsam, true firs, hemlock. So if the global climate change deal was as sure as claimed, we should be losing lodgepole to P pine and doug fir incursions, and drought should be moving lodgepole up the hill to higher elevations, and pushing the other species higher into the rocks. If only wind did not limit vegetation.
I also thought lodgepole cones would dispense seeds by sunlight heating them on south slopes, and in clear cuts. In fact, I have seen lodgepole reprod in areas not burned, but having been salvage logged for beetle kill. It does not require a fire to have lodgepole reproduction. But a fire does help.
As to fire, the idea that fire is an ecosystem builder and a needed force in the forest is fine, from a silvacultural standpoint. However, wildland fire does produce prodigious smoke and particulate outputs, as well as causing the loss of mineral topsoil, and now we find, vast tonnages of soil sequestered carbon and nitrogen, along with the obvious carbon loss in the incinerated vegetation. If production of green house gases is to blame for global warming, and wildland fire is producing all this carbon loss, and putting giga tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what is the rationale to not fight fire, and to extol the virtue of forcing the public to walk or drive an electric car to "save" the world from climate change? How can you remove hydro power dams, shutter coal fire electrical production, deny the construction of nuclear plants, but still allow WFU and AMR to be the fire policy for that half of the West that is public lands? What is the logic of all that? Is there not a modicum of hypocrisy in holding that position?
The USDA PNW Forest Research group has a long standing soil research investigation ongoing in the BabyFoot Lake Research Natural Area. There were hundreds of soils plots in the area that had been measured for many factors, elemental to structure to weights of components to indexed life forms and organic matter. And then the 2002 Biscuit Fire burned over a portion of the plots, with enough unburned to fortuitously provide a diversity of fire effects that could be measured. And we are now being told that 30 tons/acre of carbon was lost from the soil, and perhaps as much as 10 tons/acre of nitrogen. And, an average of one inch of mineral soil poofed into the smoke plume. Gone. Blown away in the fire. So that needed fire, is also a great and not accounted for center for production of greenhouse gases, particulate matter from incomplete burning and lofted mineral soil. So I beg to question the future of this earth when the output of wildland fire exceeds all man caused contributions for the year. And then I have to ask why a thinking science community, a concerned regulatory arm of government, in concert, would strive to allow any and all wildland fire to burn that might ignite in any given year, knowing that those fires are at cross purpose with auto emissions limits, coal fired electric generation, back yard barbecues, two cycle motors, wood heat, and disallowed slash or field burning. All that we strive to limit in our technology driven culture is wiped out by unlimited wildland fire, our savings in air quality squandered by USFS and others in neglecting fire fighting. Hundreds of thousands bicycle to work and school to save the world from global climate change brought about by greenhouse gases, and our government can carry out a policy to allow unlimited and unfought wildland fire at will, and that fire producing more greenhouse gas than all other combined human activity is insane policy at the least. There is no logic to it. Do the math. WFU and AMR do not add up. Do not do one iota of global climate change prevention.
But, when did anything government does make sense, and now that we are hard into an economic meltdown, burning up the forests to save them makes less sense than ever. You can't limit greenhouse gases and allow unlimited fire. Can't. Won't work. Can't get there from here. The numbers don't add up.
I was eik hunting in an area where a great fire had burned maybe 100- 150 years ago, and there were some surviving shasta red fir, a ponderosa and a sugar pine here and there, all 300 to 400 years old or more, but no reprod from their cones. The demise of the stand by fire had removed the thermal cover for understory reproduction, and their kind had been replaced by lodgepole, now being beetle killed. The next fire will kill them as well, if only that ground fire and bark litter under each tree will fuel a hot enough spot to kill the roots. But the lodgepole indicates times are colder now, than when the true firs and pines were dominant. Or at least that site is colder without the cover of a mature true fir and pine transition forest. So where are we, really, in this discussion of fire? Do you really have the answer, George, or are you still asking questions?
Bearbait
Some good observations and questions there.
A couple of points. Lodgepole pine vary in their degree of closed cones they possess. Some will open without a fire. I learned this summer that you can even find both cones on a single tree. Though most trees are either closed cone or open cones. The percentage of closed or open cones varies from place to place. For instance in the Sierra Nevada of California where lodgepole pine tends to grow scattered in very rocky basins where fires just can't move through easily, most trees are open cone trees. In other places where stand replacement blazes are more common like Yellowstone or up by Glacier Park, there are more closed cones.
Another good observation you make concerns the places lodgepole grow. As you have observed in Oregon, lodgepole tends to be found in the colder basins where there is cold air drainage. The pines tend (and this is tend not absolute) are often located on ridges, slopes, and/or micro sites that are slighly higher because ponderosa and sugar pine seedlings are more vulnerable to frost than the lodgepole pine.
With regards to the carbon release after fire, that is a concern and good point to bring up. I am not an expert on this topic--my eyes tend to gaze over when I read chemical cycling stuff-- so I hate to comment except to say that I vaguely recall reading other studies that suggest that while fires release carbon, there is also a great storage of carbon that subsequently results. For instance, the charcoal that is buried thus sequenced, and the subsequent carbon sequestration that comes with new rapid regrowth, etc. Again I can't explain all the ways this works, but I know people have looked at this and concluded that the net contribution of wildfires is counter acted by other factors that I can't explain.
If you believe increases in human produced co2 is causing global warming, you've been brainwashed.
Comment By Dewey, 11-21-08I am of the opinion that Pine Beetle epidemics come, and PIne Beetle epidemics go , but they come a lot faster and further in the absence of very cold winter chills. Two things impede beetle spread: fire or severe cold. We obviously have more of the former, but it comes too late and scours forests of beetle killed trees , too late to be effective . And climate change has robbed us of the latter moderator of beetle spread, Bone Chilling Cold. Where are the two weeks of 30 Below that I experienced in my youth in northwest Wyoming ? The last epic of freezing cold we had hereabouts was 1979 if I recall correctly. And the North Fork Shoshone River drainage in the Shoshone Forest west of my home in Cody is 50-90 percent beetle kill. The Gunbarrel Fire this past summer was allowed to burn ( over 100,000 acres!) to allow it to scour the beetle kill. But we need six more fires that size to do the full job. Who wants to see a blackened forest for the next 75 years and put up with rampant erosion and silting in the meantime ? It is the diminishing of frequency and intensity of severe winter cold spells in the Absaroka Range that allowed the Pine Beetles to march and multiply. And that is Global Warming on six legs and wings , folks. I am convinced of it, with much other anecdotal evidence outside the topc of this article. We had beetle kill near my family's mountain homestead when I was a kid, but it moved very slowly , I presume becasue of the hard winters thereabouts in the 1950's and 60's
Earlier this autumn , I spent a couple weeks driving thru British Columbia, country I had last seen 16 years ago . The amount of beetle kill there utterly astounded me. Then I visited the Columbia Icefields glaciers and noted that the mighty Athabasca Glacier had receded about a mile and a half since I first saw it in the early 1970's.
If you do not believe that anthropogenic warming is more likely real than not, you simply are not paying attention. ( Brainwashed?--no way ! )
George,
Thanks for posting your commentary. I do have to question some of your assertions though.
"Significant fires in lodgepole pine only occur when there is severe drought—conditions as we are experiencing now. So the idea that past fire suppression reduced fires in these kinds of forests is unlikely or at best probably has had little influence on total fires and acreage burned today."
Over 100 years of good fire suppression has surely changed the patterns and mosaics of our LP forests. Are you seriously telling me that is we let all of the natural fire starts in the past 100 years that coincide in or near LP stands burn free that we would essentially be looking at the same forest stands here in the west?
"We are seeing unprecedented drought and much warmer temperatures as Robbins noted in the article. But what he did not do is connect the dots. Such droughts mean that our forests are overstocked for current conditions, and the beetles as well as wildfires are doing us all a great favor by thinning them at no cost. Instead of portraying this natural thinning process as a problem, a more ecologically informed perspective might suggest that the beetles are creating forests that are more in balance with available moisture, and other nutrients."
I agree with you that many of our forests are currently overstocked. But to characterize the beetle attacks as thinning defies logic. It just adds to the fuel load creating more intense fires in the future. If I don't mow my lawn for three years straight I don't go tell my neighbor that it's natural thinning.
"Third, the idea that dead lodgepole increases fire risk is also more nuanced than presented. In most of lodgepole pine forests it is too wet to burn most of the time—regardless of the fuels that are present. That is why lodgepole forests tend to burn on long intervals—because conditions that make them dry enough to burn readily do not occur frequently. Just because you have a lot of dead trees, doesn’t mean you will have a large fire or the fire risk is higher in those particular forest types."
I guess I don't see this, at least not as strongly as you present it. Perhaps in Yellowstone stands where you have long winters, high snowpack and fairly frequent summer showers. Most stands of lodgepole I see don't meet that criteria especially in recent decades. What I see are LP stands that are dying which will lead to crashed dry 9" logs crisscrosed on the ground along with the existing other structure of DF or other species. Soon (in a few decades) we will have a real nice 7 layer bean dip of fuels for fire to rip across.
I'm not blaming the beetles, they're just doing what comes natural to them. I do blame our response because the outcome that we're getting is not the one that the public desires. We do have the ability to control to some extent the scope and range of the outbreaks by letting some fires burn and by harvesting mature stands to provide at least some patchiness to the landscape. The public wants green trees, or at least not a sea of dead like we're currently getting.
In the end it's not a question of what is ecologically normal. To the public the beetles or fires are "out of control" because it's not what they desire to see.
I'm sure you disagree, but you have to understand that most people don't share your management views. It's not a matter of better educating the public. It's about trade-offs, and as humans we tend to manage for what we want.
Geo.-
It's Tevye. The milkman in 'Fiddler.'
-rkr
Very good points, Hugger. Especially the last.
Comment By Geo, 11-24-08Treehugger
To answer your question, here's the basic answer.
Most fires go out without burning many acres. The higher you up and the wetter the conditions, the more this is the case. The vast majority of all fires will not burn significant acreage, no matter the fuel loading, whether you "suppress" fires or not. In other words, if we did nothing, the majority of fires would just go out without burning many acres.
Thus the combined acreage of all these fires is relatively small. We have been "suppressing" these kinds of fires. The fires that for the most part would not burn much anyway. So whether fire suppression had a significant effect, except at the lowest forest elevations (like ponderosa pine forests) is questionable.
However, a few fires burn the vast amount of acreage in any year. I don't have the current figures, but in a typical year, 99% of all the acreage is burned by less than 1% fires, and in truth the number is probably closer to .001% of all fires, while the other 50,000 to 100,000 blazes burn the other 1-5% of acres.
I'm generalizing here, but you get the idea.
So when you have the right conditions--drought, wind, etc. you get very large fires, but these fires don't happen very often. But when you do get them, we aren't able to suppress the fires. So we suppress fires that for the most part will go out without burning a lot of acres, and we can't affect the large blazes that burn 50,000 plus acres at a shot.
Dewey: It is now about a month later. Step outside. That bone chilling 30 below is here, and real. Earlier in the week, I emailed a fishing friend that it was warmer on St. Mathews and St. Paul Islands in the Bering Sea than it was in Newport, Oregon. 29 in Newport and 39 on the Bering Sea.
This Arctic Blast we are getting is old shoe stuff on the Montana High Line, and in NoDak and Minn. country. The wind chills there last week were in the 50 below and colder range. The daily highs were in the minus teens. Of course, it is all explained as a global warming anomaly, and an indication of how desperate the times really are. I bet the inside of a lot of lodgepole bark looks like Stalingrad in WWII the winter Hitler thought he would sally forth and kick some Russian butt. I can just see the little litter carrying beetle survivors carrying the dead out to keep them from becoming just a nameless bug in amber. It is probably a somber winter inside the bark of many lodgepole pines. Little black rice grains of bugs with their little bugles blowing taps for their frozen brothers/sisters.
I just looked at the forecast for marine influence land, where teens are bone chilling, and schools close because the helicopter moms can't drive on ice or snow. We are in for more low temps, more snow days, out for seven or more days. Add this weather to the late spring, cool summer, and early fall coolness, and this will be a curve buster for average degree days for farmers. We are getting our needed winter chill on the orchard crops, the berries. And then some. If we get wind during the coldest times, we will have plant damage. But the average daily temperatures for 2008 are being dragged down daily, and I can hear Al Gore moaning....either that, or the wind has come up again.
The usual scenario is to get a lot of low elevation snow, and then the chinook comes, driven by the "pineapple express", a storm out of the Gulf of Alaska that drops way south to near Hawaii and then comes up the Westcoast, warm and full of water, and it hits the cold air of the lingering Arctic high, snows for a while, and then it begins to rain, and we get a great few days of floods and mayhem. And then the global warming folks dance around their fires, sing their songs, and all is well with the crazies who now make up a greater part of the LeftCoast population.
It ain't like it hasn't happened this way umpteen times in my life. The problem is the tv news stations make the molehill into Denali, and the newbies and pilgrims, the young and dumb, all suck it in and soak it up like this is their first live disaster film. I got news: it happens every so often, and in cycles, and you had better count on it, and always be prepared for it, because it will happen. Just like Ice Ages following Interglacials. Al Gore or no Al Gore. And man can't influence it in any way. We have 12 empty reservoirs on the Willamette system, and they will catch a lot of chinook snow melt, and maybe keep a foot or two off the flood crest, but they have to empty out again to prepare for the next onslaught, so the river stays just at flood stage for weeks, instead of getting higher for a shorter time and then dropping dramatically. That is what creates channeling and riparian diversity. Now is mostly keeps farmland under water for months at a time.
I have lived in this house for 36 years, and my pipes haven't frozen and the house is warm, and I shoveled the sidewalk and fed the birds. This isn't the first time it has been cold. My personal, witnessed Willamette Valley low is minus 17 F. 35 years ago. But this is the coldest YEAR of my 66 years here. This is the first year I ever saw snow banks at 2000' in the coast range in June. Summer was a nice day.
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