Street Roots • July 17-23, 2015
News
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P H O TO IN THE PUBLIC D O M A IN
Scientist D om inick DellaSala says, when it comes to forest fires, we've got it all wrong
BY EM ILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
n the tail of back-to-back, historically
severe fire seasons, drought-stricken
Oregon has lit up once again as fires
began raging across the state a month
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, the Resilient
Federal Forests Act was introduced. If it
moves forward after passing the U.S. House
earlier this month, it will allow for
accelerated timber harvest in federal forests.
Proponents say logging and clearing out
underbrush in the nation’s forests will help
prevent fires.
But logging will make forests more prone
to severe fires, not less, says Dominick
DellaSala, president and chief scientist at the
Geos Institute in Ashland.
Additionally, he says fighting to suppress
large fires in remote areas is a waste of
taxpayers’ money, and the common practice
of salvage logging after a blaze dies out only
paves the way for more severe and damaging
fires in the future.
In essence, when it comes to forest fifes,
DellaSala says we’ve got it all wrong.
His new book, which he co-edited with
Chad Hanson, director and staff ecologist at
the John Muir Project of Earth Island
Institute, is a compilation of essays written
by biologists, ecologists, firefighters and the
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former deputy chief of national forests. They
all agree we need to change the way we
perceive and combat wildfires.
“The Ecological Importance of Mixed-
Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix” carries a
price tag that may limit its readership to
early.
academics and industry experts, but every
taxpayer should heed its message.
Scientific research during the past decade
indicates fires are not disasters, but rather
an important part of a forest’s natural cycle.
But despite mounting evidence that shows
the need to approach fire habitat differently,
public pressure to extinguish fires has
thwarted any significant changes to the fire
suppression system.
Emily Green: C a n you describe how forest
fires are “Nature's Phoenix,” as the title o f y o u r
book suggests? (A phoenix is a mythological
bird that lives hundreds o f years, is consum ed
by fire, a n d then rises, reborn from the ashes o f
its predecessor.)
Dominick DellaSala: For a long time,
folks thought fires were ecological disasters.
And when you go in and see forests right
after a fire, they look like that, right? But
soon after the flames go out, there’s a whole
web of life that comes in. Forests need those
fires to be vibrant, fire-adapted systems. The
science in the last decade or so has caught
up with that perception, and so in this book,
we have put a lot of the prevailing thoughts
on their head, in showing that these mixed
severity fires are not ecological disasters,
they are very beneficial.
The majority of fires we see in western
North America are what we call “mixed
severity.” If you fly over them in an airplane,
it looks like a kaleidoscope of different burn
patches, with some areas that burned really
hot, areas that didn’t bum at all, and some in
between.
Even in the intensely burned patches,
immediately after the flames have gone out,
you’ve got seeds that are prospering - little
conifer seedlings come back, right out of the
ashes. If you had a fire in the summer that
went into the fall when the rains put it out,
that next spring you would see this
incredible rebirthing or rejuvenation of the
forest, beginning with seedlings, wildflowers,
shrubs, and then all of the wildlife that come
in with that vegetation.
E.G.: D o some species rely on recently
burned landscapes?
D.D.: The best places to pick morel
mushrooms are areas that have just been
burned. Lots of different wildflowers depend
on these bum areas, a lot of different shrubs
species only reseed when a hot burn comes
through. Lodgepole pine and knobcone pine
need intense fire for their cones to burst
open and reseed. But I would say probably
the bellwether species of fire-dependent
systems is the black-backed woodpecker.
Everything about that species was designed
by nature to come in after a forest fire. It has
a jet-black appearance, so it blends right into
the charred remains of the trees that have
gone through an intense burn. Shortly after
a burn, beetle larvae start to come in and
start boring into the bark of those dead
trees, and the woodpecker in turn goes after
the beetle larvae.
E.G.: C a n you explain why society has come
to regard fir e as destructive, rather than seeing
it as p a rt o f a forest's n atu ral cycle?
D.D.: It’s perfectly understandable that
people feel fear when they see fire, because
it can definitely affect homes, lives and
safety. But there’s another side of the story
that almost never gets told, and that’s the
ecological side.
A lot people think a forest is restored
when it’s gone from blackened to green, but
they are starting to get that there’s an
ecological basis to fire. But when you talk
about the big, severe burns, the perceptions
haven’t caught up to the science - the land
managers certainly haven’t caught up to the
science, and many members of Congress are
See BURN, page 5