You’re Fired, Burned & Singed

You’re Fired, Burned & Singed

Forest Fires: What’s Really Happening

Globally, we’ve never faced the magnitude of dried forest floors, and even the trees themselves, a combination of levels of heat and lack of humidity plus rampant human mismanagement, a callous reality that is actually getting worse. Even simple, seemingly responsible reforestation – replanting the next generation of trees after timber companies have harvested acres and acres of trees – has risks. They tend to replant trees in neat rows, easier to harvest when the trees return but effectively creating wind tunnels that act like a bellows to a fireplace. Our machinery of harvesting trees – giant pieces of equipment able to move trees through forests to massive trucks ready to transport the harvested wood to processing sites and mills – have made agricultural forestry a massive and efficient process. Except for the fires…

Forest and plains fires have existed long before man, burning themselves out, sooner or later, and nature just recovered. Even technologically limited indigenous people knew how to clear land for any number of reasons by selective and controlled burning. The notion of actively fighting forest fires is historically fairly recent. We’re still learning. But using controlled burns is still and effective containment and prevention tool that really requires real time projections of wind and weather patterns, accurate and complete, at a point in time where political pressures to reduce federal staffing at every level have taken their toll in the National Weather Services at NOAA and even limiting the climatic measurement systems in NASA satellites as a part of a government effort to deny that climate change exists.

Jack Dolan, writing for the August 24th Los Angeles Times, was inspired by the massive July wildfire at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon – triggered by lightening – that was expected to be small and burn itself out quickly: “Instead of racing to put the fire out immediately, as was the practice for decades, they deferred to the doctrines of modern fire science. The prevailing wisdom says the American West was forged by flames that nourish the soil and naturally reduce the supply of dry fuels.

“So officials built containment lines to keep the fire away from people and the park’s historic buildings and then stepped back to let the flames perform their ancient magic… That strategy worked well — until it didn’t. A week later, the wind suddenly increased and the modest, 120-acre controlled burn exploded into a ‘megafire,’ the largest in the United States so far this year. As of Saturday [8/24], the blaze had burned more than 145,000 acres and was 63% contained...

“Both of the [Arizona’s] Democratic senators called for investigations, and Gov. Katie Hobbs, also a Democrat, took to X to demand ‘intense oversight and scrutiny’ of the federal government’s decision ‘to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.’… The people of Arizona ‘deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,’ Hobbs added.

“Those tough questions are predictable and fair, said Len Nielson, staff chief in charge of prescribed burns and environmental protection for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He hopes investigators will be able to identify a specific failure, such as a bad weather forecast, and take concrete steps to prevent the next disaster… ‘But I hope we don’t overreact,’ he said, and turn away from the notion of good fire. ‘Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.’

“The logic behind intentionally igniting fires on wildland, or simply containing natural fires without attempting to extinguish them, is based on the fact that fires have long been part of the West’s landscape, and are deemed essential for its ecological health.

“Before European settlers arrived in the American West and started suppressing fire at every turn, forests and grasslands burned on a regular basis. Sometimes lightning ignited the flames; sometimes it was Indigenous people using fire as an obvious, and remarkably effective, tool to clear unwanted vegetation from their fields and create better sight lines for hunting. Whatever the cause, it was common for much of the land, including vast tracts in California, to burn about once a decade… That kept the fuel load in check and, in turn, kept fires relatively calm.

“But persuading private landowners and public officials that it’s a good thing to deliberately start fires in their backyards is a constant battle, Nielson said. Even when things go right — which is 99% of the time, he said — smoke can drift into an elementary school or an assisted living facility, testing the patience of local residents.”

Mother Nature remains unaffected by the pendulum swings of political sentiments. She does not care if we accept or reject the notion of climate change. She shrugs at human stupidity; she started with nothing and has no stake in allowing mankind to dominate the earth. She controls the dramatically uncaring laws of physics. That religions may or may not accept the notion of human responsibility, that conspiracy theories tout countervailing directives, are simply biased human notions blowing in a hot smokey wind. Nature does not care. In fact, as overpopulation and continued fossil fuel burning represent a natural environmental threat, allowing human stupidity to cull the herd just might be what Mother Nature ordered.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you do not like science or spending money trying to understand the underlying reality, Mother Nature does not care if burning in hell in on the future table, when you can get started right here on Earth.