Postcards from the Forest - fire in the Angeles

In 2002 a documentary called Fire Wars chronicled the changes being witnessed in fire behavior based on Arizona's increasingly volatile fire seasons. It foretold much of what we are seeing today.

In 2009 we had a lot of adjectives to describe the Station fire. Extreme. Explosive. Erratic. Unprecedented. Angry.

Eleven years on and most fires that aren't contained in the first ten acres bear these descriptions. Except for unprecedented. Because now, extreme fire behavior is more or less the norm.

First, let's address the euro-centric idea that our forests burn because they are not properly cared for. Actually, we live in a Mediterranean climate and ecological zone. Our forests are nothing like, say, Germany's forests. Our local native plant communities are relatively unique to our latitude. We are in that sweet spot of equatorial influence. It's why millions of people flock to California. Our alpine regions may have similarities to Germany. Lower altitudes are more like the ecosystems of Spain. Those lower elevations are a fire climax ecology. A proper fire interval is about 60-100 years...not just on the west coast of America, but in many forest/rangeland/wilderness areas across the globe. Fire is a natural and vital part of the life/death/life cycle, an inescapable reality that no sentient being on this planet gets to escape.

As for being properly cared for, the US Forest Service has been systematically defunded beginning in the late 1970s. In 2020 alone, $815 million dollars was cut from the USFS budget. The privatization of public lands then seems the only way for our forests to be cared for properly. No one really discusses what we have done to the Forest Service. Only that the USFS is not doing their job. And so we should take their job from them and put the care of public lands in the hands of private entities. Unless there's a fire. Then, of course, we'll want to call in the USFS, and let them risk their lives to protect us.

We have put ourselves in this predicament by allowing the USFS, and by direct association, our public lands, to not be a priority. We have not placed sufficient importance on the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil that sustains us. We have allowed our leaders to set policies that undermine our national natural resources for forty years and counting. This is not someone else's problem. We let our leaders lead us astray.

But back to the woods. What's happening there, biologically. Should we mourn our lost forest? Rush out into the burn scar and plant trees? Will everything be okay?

Mourning is healthy and natural. I would not for a moment stop you from feeling your feelings. But please, do not rush out and plant trees. For much of the burn area, everything is going to be okay.

Tree planting is the natural, cathartic response. It's also not appropriate immediately after a fire. There's a process that takes place called succession where regrowth begins in a logical way. It begins at the microbial level. Then very small plants emerge, followed by larger plants, and meanwhile the chaparral plants start regenerating. Specific fire follower plants start to emerge. And eventually, when all of this infrastructure is in place, tree seedlings start to appear. Trees, the largest plants in our local ecosystem, are the last plants to begin regenerating from seed because they need all their supporting cast to be established and in place. Going out right after a fire and planting trees in our ecosystem is not appropriate and will yield little, if any, results.

Invasive species eradication - and not introducing invasive species to burn areas - those should be the over-arching priorities in burn footprints. Two factors are devastating to recovery. Invasive species is one. The other is climate change. Fire itself creates local climate change. Temperatures are elevated on barren slopes. Chaparral plant communities sequester c02, hold moisture in the ground, produce oxygen and provide evaporative cooling. In their absence, the local temperature rises. There is a local microcosm of climate change that eventually self-corrects with new growth.

But clearly, we've crossed the line on a global level. I do recall numerous reports that predicted the impacts of climate change by 2020. Well...here we are. A few degrees rise in average temperatures in some places, radical changes or erratic behavior in others...our new normal is unsettling. Devastating. Even deadly.

When I moved to Chilao in the summer of 2011, I was told to expect snow on the ground until May and temperatures that rarely exceeded the mid-eighties. In the summer of 2019 we experienced 99 degrees days for over three straight weeks. The sustained elevated temperature is more than the trees at our elevation are able to deal with. Over the last one hundred years, not just in our forest but across the west, plants have shifted their elevation preference upward by roughly one thousand feet. Ponderosa pines no longer thrive in Chilao. Sugar pines now grow primarily above six thousand feet. As the trees move out, chaparral plants fill the niche they leave behind.

Even environmental scientists feel like this is some sort of encroachment issue. It's not. It's the reality of nature. Chaparral plant communities can endure triple digit heat. Many conifer species can't. The trees are moving out, and the chaparral is filling the ecological void.

And that is much, much better than the alternative...invasive species that are highly flammable and increase the likelihood of frequent fire moving in and taking over.

Reforestation efforts in southern California have come to this climate reality the hard way. Many people have sought to help the forest regenerate, targeting specific high value native tree species and doing everything right, only to watch their seedlings dry up and die. It's just too hot in these burn scars for tree seedlings. But when conditions favor their return, they will return. The soil in all but the most severely burned locations contains a rich genetic soup, and in that soup are the seeds of trees, and when the conditions favor their survival, those seeds will make a go at it.

We'll talk abut fire frequency in our next segment. #

(Corina Roberts is the founder of Redbird, a Native American and environmental non profit foundation with a land base in the Angeles National Forest that is currently threatened by the Bobcat fire. You can learn more about Redbird at www.RedbirdsVisions.org)