#fire-ecology

#fire-ecology

I was retracing my steps of 20 years earlier to a scene of mass death I had never been able to erase from my mind. At a small plateau alongside Ninemile Creek in the Golden Trout Wilderness Area, I had stood in a forest of black sticks standing on both sides of a steep canyon like whiskers on a beast too large to comprehend.

During the twentieth century, the United States declared war on wildfires. In 1935, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service announced "an experiment on a continental scale": every blaze was to be put out by 10 A.M. on the morning after it began. Given that fires had been burning regularly for hundreds of millions of years, this was an enormous departure from the natural order. Fire clears vegetation and delivers nutrients to soil, creating fresh cycles of growth that help ecosystems.