Ten Year Anniversary Of The Station Fire

Hundreds of thousands of images record the transitions of the Angeles National Forest, through the seasons, through two wet winters following the fire, through the epic drought, through the winter of 2019 that made the streams flow and the creeks and rivers flow strong.

The Station Fire of 2009 was considered the largest woodland fire in the region until teh Thomas Fire of 2017 overtook that record. It left a blackened landscape and took the lives of two firefighters, and consumed some eighty homes.

It was an arson fire and one that many can prove could have been contained with different management decisions...but that, to the natural world, means little. Fire is a part of the life-death-life cycle of much of California's natural ecosystems, with the frequency and intensity of the fire determining much of the outcome.

Fire itself is not the enemy. How we relate to fire in the scope of long-term management, and how we have changed the landscape with the introduction of invasive species and the building of communities and infrastructure that cannot be defended...these mistakes are the ones that inadvertently and tragically turn on us.

After The Fire - The Forest Recovery Project is both a visual archive and a live presentation which can be booked in the southern California region. Today the presentation will be given at the Santa Paula airport for the Sant Paula Rotary Club, some of whose members lost homes in the Thomas Fire.

At the Los Angeles Arboretum Library, the art installation After The Fire hangs through September 26, 2019, illustrating the interior of the burn area as it recovers and taking us to the present moment, as the forest Service works to reintroduce fire to the forest in a managed, healthy way. Fire has many benefits for the ecosystem, and allows new growth to occur. The Native American populations in California utilized fire to keep the environment in an optimum, productive condition, and for their own safety; an open landscape offered less opportunities for large predators like the grizzly bear to get close.

The public photographic archive of the Forest Recovery Project is an ongoing work. The photos are stored by year and month on Smugmug. That storage process began in December 2011 with a two year backlog of images, and several months' worth of images still need to be added to complete the collection (they are locked on a computer that will likely need professional intervention to unlock). You can view the images here:

https://forest-recovery-projec...

Groups interested in hosting a presentation of After The Fire can contact the non-profit association Redbird by email at redbirds_vision@hotmail.com