Sterile Forests and Charred Subdivisions

Taylor Schenk

 

            As summers become hotter and drier, we hear more and more about the catastrophic wildfires that ravage across our nation every year.  We hear about how many homes and subdivisions are destroyed, how many hundreds of thousands of acres and burned to the ground, and how many firefighters are battling the blaze.  In recent summers this nation has had larger and more intense fires than it’s ever seen before.  Many people want somebody to blame for these fires occurring, one could say it’s because of global climate change warming everything up and although this is not to be ignored it is not main cause.  If you ever have visited some our beautiful national forests across the nation you may notice many of them are extremely densely wooded.  While this may be great scenery this is not what a natural forest should look like everywhere. 

            Some areas would most certainly look like this if left untouched, but most would be thinned out with less available fuel.  Since humans started suppressing fires in the 1920s and 30s the forests have been allowed to accumulate excessive amounts of fuel.  An even bigger damper on fuel control occurred/ is occurring because government agencies are being taken to court and sued when they want to log.  Logging would reduce the amount of readily available fuel to a fire, replace the disturbances that were once natural and vital to a forest, and increase profits for the agency.  Many courts would rule in favor of these logging operations, the problem is that our government agencies can no longer afford to go to court to fight the battle so in turn the agencies just scrap the whole issue. 

            Logging is not a bad thing; the days of clear cutting thousands of continuous acres are gone.  In the long term health of the forest, logging is a necessity, the forest needs disturbance to encourage species diversity, create wildlife habitat, and to continue providing long term environmental benefits.  If a fire starts in a stand that is overgrown the fire becomes so intense that it cannot be directly stopped, it will sterilize the soil for many years to come, and burn everything in its path.  However if a fire starts in a well managed stand it will most like burn with moderate intensity creating a more fertile ground, expose the seed bed instead of destroy it, be more easily managed by fire crews, cost less to manage, and make it easier to save people’s houses and assets.  This is not to say catastrophic fires won’t ever happen, but the chances of one can be greatly reduced and impact lessened.

Physical management of public lands must become a priority, we don’t need to log everything but we can’t let everything be ‘natural’.  Nothing is natural anymore we messed with the cycle so we need to intervene to continue the cycle because this country can’t live on a 100% fire suppression idea in an un-managed forests. We can still have our wilderness areas and natural areas but the public lands near people need to be managed, or our fires will continue to grow in intensity and size.  They will destroy homes and sterilize forests, costing billions to the public, because when lightning strikes you can’t send the bill to the cloud.  The frivolous lawsuits need to stop and agencies need to be allowed to be proactive about our situation in order to sustain what we have left.