Oregon State University (OSU) published a series of essays, “Not All Flames Are the Same,” on wildfire in Oregon. While the essays are written about Oregon forests, most of the main ideas about wildfire represented in the publications are similar to the propaganda found across the West.
Like many forestry schools, the authors promote the dichotomy of “good fire” and “bad fire.” The “good fires” burn frequently, producing low-severity blazes that seldom kill mature trees, while the “bad fires” kill trees.
According to the forestry industry paradigm promoted by OSU, these fires were created by “Indigenous land stewards” who kept fuels low and forests open and park-like.
The authors suggest these low-severity blazes “crept through surface fuels and caused little damage to large trees.” There are plenty of studies that promote this paradigm.
The idea that a fire might kill mature trees is considered “damage.” However, that represents a pejorative anthropogenic perspective. Mortality from blazes is “natural” and has existed for millennia in our forests, even in the dry forests featured in OSU’s essay.
The promotion of “indigenous burning” is also an anthropogenic perspective. Do our forests really “need” humans to promote “healthy” conditions? And how did these forests survive for millions of years of evolution without human intervention? After all, common tree species like ponderosa pine existed in North America for at least 60 million years, while humans only colonized the continent perhaps 15,000 or so years ago. How did these forests survive all those millions of years without “land stewards?”
The underlying philosophy is that any mortality from wildfire, insects, drought, or other natural processes creates “unhealthy” forests. In keeping with the Industrial paradigm, only human intervention in the form of prescribed or cultural burning and chainsaw medicine can save them.
These industrial forestry attitudes are widespread, even among some so-called “conservation organizations,” such as the Nature Conservancy.
However, numerous scientific studies challenge this industrial forestry paradigm. For instance, extensive research suggests that native burning was primarily localized and did not significantly influence the landscape. Even in the densely populated Willamette Valley, which likely had some of the highest tribal populations in the West, the influence of human fires was found to be local.
Historical references to large wildfires despite Indian burning raise questions about the idea that such human intervention is effective at precluding high-severity blazes.
For instance, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, most large trees were established after large, high-severity fires that occurred long before Euro-American influences on native populations. The 1865 Silverton Fire burned more than a million acres of the western Cascades, and the 1853 Yaquina Fire burned nearly half a million acres.
Recent records from Washington estimate that a series of large fires in 1701 may have burned between 3 and 10 million acres in a single summer. According to the article, “1701” is given as the best estimate for the last devastating fire that occurred throughout Western Washington, a fire that burned an estimated 3 million to 10 million acres. At the upper end of that range, the area is roughly equal to 10 Olympic National Parks.”
Another study in Yosemite National Park, where historically significant Indigenous communities resided, found a direct correlation between climate and the amount of burning on the landscape.
“We analyzed charcoal preserved in lake sediments from Yosemite National Park and spanning the last 1400 years to reconstruct local and regional areas burned. “Warm and dry climates promoted burning at both local and regional scales… Regional areas burned peaked during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and declined during the last millennium, as the climate became cooler and wetter and Native American burning declined.”
“Our record indicates that (1) climate changes influenced burning at all spatial scales; (2) Native American influences appear to have been limited to local scales, but (3) high Miwok populations resulted in fire even during periods of climate conditions unfavorable to fires. However, at the regional scale (< 150 km from the lake), fire was generally controlled by the top-down influence of climate.
Colombaroil and Gavin documented that large fires always occurred in the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California and southern Oregon, primarily due to climate/weather, even during the pre-European period. “Fire is a primary mode of natural disturbance in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Increased fuel loads following fire suppression and the occurrence of several large and severe fires have led to the perception that, in many areas, there is a greatly increased risk of high-severity fire compared with presettlement forests. To reconstruct the variability of the fire regime in the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon, we analyzed a 10-m, 2,000-year sediment core for charcoal, pollen, and sedimentological data. The record reveals a highly episodic pattern of fire in which 77% of the 68 charcoal peaks were before Euro-American settlement…”
A similar result was found in the Rocky Mountains. A study of Jackson Hole concluded: “Although it is impossible to determine the exact cause of past fires, there is no direct evidence of ecological changes as a result of Native American burning during the last 2100 years. ” climate has influenced fire activity significantly over the past 2100 years.”
A second problem with the “low-severity/high frequency” model for forests is that it is greatly exaggerated and extrapolated across the landscape. Just like native burning, which did occur, some low-elevation dry forests were open and park-like. However, this condition was far less common than the Industrial Forestry paradigm would suggest.
For instance, in the paper: Countering Omitted Evidence of Variable Historical Forests and Fire Regime in Western USA Dry Forests: The Low-Severity-Fire Model Rejected, the authors conclude that high-severity blazes were far more common than commonly presented.
A third assumption is that thinning, burning, and other “fuel treatments” reduce large, high-severity fires. A study examining 1500 wildfires in dry forest ecosystems found that “active management” resulted in higher-severity burns than landscapes protected from logging, like wilderness areas and national parks. Considering that such protected lands have more “fuel” than managed areas, if “fuels” were the driving force in high-severity blazes, we would expect protected lands to have greater tree mortality.
The fourth assumption is that the snag forests resulting from high-severity blazes represent ecological “damage”. In reality, these snag forests are critical habitat for many species. Indeed, there are plenty of species from bees to mammals that flourish in the aftermath of high-severity blazes, and can be said to live in “mortal fear” of “green forests.”
When all these factual elements are considered, it is clear that OSU is nothing more than a handmaiden to the timber industry, promoting misinformation or failing to provide context to its statements to promote further exploitation of our forests.
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