Chaparral Wisdom

– How Truth Metastasized Into A Lie – The Fire Suppression Fallacy –
(Part IV)

How did the observation that fire suppression may have caused some forests to miss several natural fires due to firefighting metastasize into a pernicious stereotype that has convinced huge numbers of people that Nature is sick, clogged with dead trees and unhealthy vegetation, and is ready to vaporize in the next wildfire?

As is the case with fear-mongering media outlets, catastrophizing even the most insignificant events to obtain attention, images and situations are cherry-picked by proponents of the fire suppression fallacy to communicate the most dire circumstance. The propaganda has been incredibly successful, convincing politicians to allocate billions of dollars to “fix” Nature with grinding machines, chainsaws, and herbicide.

As with most stories designed to panic, the truth becomes embellished and inconvenient facts are ignored or forgotten.

Photo: A selected scene to convey the most dire circumstance; was it cherry-picked or a fair representation? This image was shown at a recent conservation conference in San Diego County to support the notion that the forests in the region’s eastern mountains are sick, “dog-haired” thickets in need of immediate treatment. Looking carefully through the trees in the foreground, green trees can be seen. Also, notice how the tops of the trees in the foreground are not shown in the frame. Some, perhaps even most of these trees are not dead. In denser pockets like this it is common for trees to self-prune their lower and middle branches, especially during droughts, since those branches receive far less sunlight and on a per-needle basis, needles in the lower and middle canopy are significantly less photosynthetically productive. Look closely at the upper right. Green foliage can be seen atop one of the mature trees in the foreground that is ostensibly dead. If the image had been expanded slightly to include the tree tops, would green crowns appear on some or most of the trees? Regardless, drought has killed groups of trees in forests for millions of years. It is a natural event that a multitude of organisms take advantage of, from nest cavity birds, to insects, to fungi. Unfortunately, the actual location shown in the image was not identified, although the presence of what appear to be invasive weeds indicate this may have been a previously disturbed site.

Photos: More typical forest scenes in the mountains of eastern San Diego County. L) An image selected to represent the average forest composition. R) A mixed conifer/oak/chaparral community with an open meadow/ranch land in the background. Location: Laguna Mountains, Cleveland National Forest.

The origins of the fire suppression fallacy can be traced back to the late 1800’s when westward expansion brought more human beings, and hence sources of ignition, into a highly flammable environment. Vast piles of logging slash (limbs and other waste from timber operations), hot cinders from trains traveling deep into the back country, unattended fires utilized to clear land, outright carelessness (Pyne 1982), and most importantly drought and high winds, all played a role in adding more, larger fires to the landscape. Between 1865 and 1910 large wildfires from the Great Lakes region to California led federal and state governments to form cooperative firefighting agreements and pass regulations attempting to reduce the likelihood of human caused ignitions and fight fires when they started.

Many of these fires, such as the 1871 Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin, which killed an estimated 1,500 people, were linked to piles of logging slash. Such slash-related forest fires continued into the early 1900’s, due to the deadly combination of loggers resisting change in their practices (McMahon and Karamanski 2002) and severe fire weather. As a reminder, these huge, high-intensity wildfires burned prior to the era of fire suppression (Table 1).