Fire Ecology

Rachel Becker wrote a front-page piece for the LA Times today entitled “Reforesting, too slowly.” She says, “Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they are wiping out the very forests that need fire to survive–leaving celebrated landscapes at risk of turning to brush and scrub, permanently.” Wow…I can’t believe that four falsehoods can be housed in a single sentence, but there it is in black and white! 1. Fire suppression has little to no influence in the changes we are witnessing today–climate conditions explain virtually all the changes. 2. Although fires now burn more frequently and cover larger areas than ever before, they are not generally more SEVERE–the extent of the most severe portions is still around a third of any burned area. 3. Severe fires don’t “wipe out the very forests that need fire–they RESTORE early successional conditions! 4. Landscapes are “…turning to brush and scrub, permanently”? Show me a single place where this has been shown to be true (assuming that it takes 100-200 years for succession to yield a mature forest again). These kinds of falsehoods exist to further commodity-driven planting goals—we need, instead, to address and reverse climate change and population trends.