Monday, November 21, 2011

How humans added fuel to the wildfires of New Mexico | Philip Connors

9:44 AM | Posted by Free Game Zone | | Edit Post

fires were part of nature thousands of Gila National Forest of years. But then we tried to delete

This year marked my tenth round was the fire itself, providing a portion of the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico, where every year hundreds of fires caused by lightning strikes broke out in the landscape. When people ask me what I'm doing here, the simplest answer I can offer is that I paid to see the mountains all day. If a column of smoke rises, I use my two-way radio to call a dealer and the alarm. Sometimes fires are fought, sometimes allowed to burn, according to a calculation of the Dark "risk values" against the "benefits to forest resources." From early May to mid-August this year, I saw six fire , less than one in ten days I spent in my watchtower. For most of the summer, when my time was mine and so were the moods of the mountain. No TV. No connection to the Internet. No phone. Five miles from the nearest road.

pure happiness, in other words. For a while.

For much of the summer atmosphere of the mountain was serious. A vicious winter drought had dried the U.S. Southwest, and in May and June, the wind was blowing hard, sometimes gusts over 60 mph. Not to my West One hundred miles or more, on the other side of the line of the State, the giant forest fires are raging, smoke to fill my horizon. On some days it seemed that the entire state of Arizona was on fire. The Wallow Fire, now in the record as the largest wildfire in Arizona history, burned over 800 square kilometers and crossed into the front of New Mexico. The sunsets were apocalyptic.
  • And as they do almost every year in July, the rains came and stop the combustion. Instead of flames and smoke, the dangers referred to runoff and flooding, storms dropped heavy rains on the country where the grass and the trees were burned, exposing the bare soil. Another danger arose as opportunists and ideologues. Politicians have held public meetings to punish the U. S. Forest Service mismanagement of forests. They joined with the interests of logging and grazing to propose that the saws and the cows could prevent large fires in the future, if only the loggers and ranchers have left their hands free to do what they want on public lands belonging to all Americans.
  • The irony was delicious, because if you talk to scientists, they will tell you, in fact, logging and grazing - and a century of fire suppression in anger - who brought us the spectacle of huge unstoppable fires in the forests of the southern United States the. As recently as the 19th century, the fire regime in these lands is common (we speak of two or more times per decade) of low-intensity surface fires before moving through the grass, the preservation of trees removed from forests old. Ponderosa pine in particular is well suited to withstand such fires. Its thick, fire-resistant bark, with his habit of leaving the evolution of the lower limbs as they grow, they were survivors Hardy in a fire-prone ecosystem. Then, cutting and grazing began. Second growth forests, increased again in the most dense, partly because the voracious animals had skin away from the grass, removal of fine fuels in a fire had already supplied. Fire suppression has only increased the density of the fuel, such as trees and shrubs that had been extinguished by the fire or prevented outbreaks in densely rooted sod all, took over and spread. This left us with loads of fuel orders of magnitude beyond historical norms. Burned by drought, forest ill and against nature was perfectly prepared to go to a giant plume of smoke.
There is a saying among some of my colleagues in the fire, that during the 20th century, despite our phenomenal success in extinguishing fires on public lands, not so much extinguishing fire as their answer. No more. Especially among the effects of climate change on the day the fires to have ended. But if I learned anything in my decade of silence, watching the mountains, is that fire is as creative as a destructive force, and from among the blackened stumps of the forest is renewed once. What types of forests is uncertain. Will we follow the prescription of ranchers and loggers and their cohorts in Congress, and turn the cattle loose and cutting, the mistakes that got us here in the first place? Or will we learn a little humility, recognizing that we live in a fire-adapted ecosystem, and allow the ground to go its own way, sometimes the fire to the recovery?


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