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How the West Was Lost: The American West in Flames
Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now. 
An oasis of green in the desert southwest, the Apache National Forest covers the mountains due east of Phoenix and spills across the border with New Mexico. In late May and early June 2011, the island of forest became fuel for one of the largest fires in Arizona history, the Wallow Fire. This image, taken by the Landsat-7 satellite on June 7, shows the northern edge of the fire. (NASA via flickr)
Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained “zero contained” for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather’s forest fires.
Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing ever more crowded. However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds -- already hard-pressed to cope with the rapidity of climate change -- will be catastrophic.
The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary. Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture. Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants -- if it can.
Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted. The challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.
And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes) isn’t enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously reduced and fragmented habitats. In other words, wildlife already thrown off the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes with a crackle and a blast.
As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear. A forest fire is a monster you can see. It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for days on end. You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away. If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you’re going to get them to safety. If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you check on them.
And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and sneeze fitfully. After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost everyone you meet has a headache. You know that when it is over, even if you’re among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places, of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of the deep woods.
Cue the Inferno
These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.
Global warming, global weirding, climate change -- whatever you prefer to call it -- is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.
The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it’s monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In the East it’s those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.
But in the West, we just burn.
Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated. According to Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist, the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.
Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process. Then, in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the forest canopy. As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to protect the over-stocked timber that generated revenues and profits.
All this set the stage for catastrophe. Next, a decade of drought weakened millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter than normal, are not as cold. Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding dramatically. Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have turned from green to brown.
Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched south-facing slopes. Cue the inferno.
If you live in the West, you can’t help wonder what will burn next. Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and likely candidates. Montana’s Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to ignite. Colorado’s Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up in flames anytime. Wally Covington estimates that a total of about half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires. As ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California’s turn to burn, the fire season is now 365 days long.
The Fire Next Time
That may explain why ”smoke season” began so early this year, overlapping the spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200% to 700% of the normal snowpack (“normal” being an ever more problematic concept out here). Spring weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable. Last year we had record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May. This year it was unusually cold and damp. The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once.
So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah, river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try. In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous. Basement pumps are humming across the state. Reservoirs were emptied ahead of the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over. Utah Governor Gary Herbert went on television to urge parents to keep children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away. Seven children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.
The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, “No more water, the fire next time.” In the West we know that it is not actually a question of either/or, because they go together. First, floods fuel growth, then growth fuels fires, then fires fuel floods. So all that unexpected, unpredicted moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by beetles, and dying. You may visit us this summer and see all that new green vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking tinderbox. If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and dry, as she surely will, fire will follow.
When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated. If the fire is intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate floods. That’s how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable. Today, it is not.
It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion that the planet is getting hotter. But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is overheating. We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.
Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans. For thousands of years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that generally vary modestly from year to year. The agricultural system that has fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings that were familiar and expectable.
Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded field. Signs that life’s operating systems are swinging chaotically from one extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems under stress.
In the process, we’ll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about. For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after the next, was the nation’s Manifest Destiny. We eliminated the Indians and the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.
The Wild West was tamed. In fact, we didn’t hesitate to overload its carrying capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas. We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations. The sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire. The iconic landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the limitations of other peoples -- or even of nature itself.
But whatever we preferred to think, the limits have always been there. Nature has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil. The atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable. When you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay, which means that monster fires are here to stay.
After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and Afghanistan. On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny -- and the West is ours to lose.
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global “weirding,” click here, or download it to your iPod here.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
48 Comments so far
Show AllChip has a good insight to land management. I agree with his assessment of forest health.
Mainly out policy to put out every fire in the 50s, is the reason out forest are choking on themselves. Now that the woods are so dense ANY fire is catastrophic.
Add super low humidity and longer warm periods, and don't forget the bug kill.
but - but I thought you guys hated Arizona and wouldn't mind if god burned it up?????
>^^<
He left out the fact that John Wesley Powell recommended a number of land use practices in what was then (the 1880s and 1890s) called "The Great American Desert," mostly based on what the Mormons had been doing in Utah since the 1850s. Of course, he was ignored, because the fellow who controlled the water became rich - so what sensible person would consider water (or timber) as a common resource?
Yep, "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" by Stegner ought to be required reading, even by Easterners.
Not to worry. Bin Laden is dead and Weiner is stepping down.
scribe,
You stated "The Earth may already be in a death spiral, and the eddies along the way can pull you down very quickly." Maybe in relation to what it means for homo supposedly sapiens but ol Ma Earth doesn't give one hoot about homo supposedly sapiens existence on this planet. The earth and its various ecological systems will recover and whatever happens happens. Homo supposedly sapiens are a chigger bite on ol Ma Nature's arse.
OYE
And so it goes
My aged parents live in Arizona (Cottonwood, in the Verde Valley). I rarely visit them because we're not close and because I hate everything about Arizona but the scenery and the place names (Dead Horse Canyon Road).
When I was there the pine forests all looked dried out and terrible. Some sort of beetle, spurred on by many years of drought, had gotten to the pine trees and killed many of them. The forests looked different than they used to. They looked tinderbox dry and ready to flame out.
Scribe is right. We don't know and have no way of knowing whether climate change means a slow steady deterioration in earthly livability, or whether a tipping point will be reached causing a quick change to unmanageable catastrophe. Both sound bad. A slow decline would be easier to cope with until it reached bad-enough status, but who wants to spend the last years of life watching the home planet in a state of irrevocable deterioration.
What doesn't appear to be possible is things changing for the better, the earth "getting over it."
I've seen similar deteriorated signs, somewhat different in nature (no pun intended), in the forests of the Ozarks, whenever I go home for a visit.
What doesn't appear to be possible is things changing for the better, the earth "getting over it."
Thanks for the wee bit of cosmic humor!
hue_sir_name,
I'm not sure where you go in the Ozarks but I'm out in the Southern Missouri Ozarks almost once a month, mainly floating and fishing, 11 Point, Current, Jacks Fork, North Fork rivers and I do not see the "deterioration" that you mention. Now a couple of years back a severe wind sheer hit a number of counties-Shannon, Texas, Ripley, Carter etc. . . that really wiped out a lot of standing timber. The MO Department of Conservation along with the DNR has been doing a great job of managing our forests and wildlife. Any specific examples of what you are talking about???
OYE
Speaking of Southern MO, I hope the folks in Joplin can recover from tornado hell. I don't know about your state government but DC is way out of touch and treating it the same way they treated the victims of Hurricane Katrina and BP oil spill.
Who wants to watch? Me! and i'm gonna have a damn front row seat. Of course, we all have a front row seat. Smile out there, big grins, there's not much else left to do.
Up here in Northern BC is a far cry from Arizona but our pine trees have been all but decimated by pine beetles, which have now adapted to spruce as well. The city where I live has had it's parks and greenbelts reduced to empty expanses of stumps and small shrubs. Last summer was scorching, by our standards, and forest fires rained ash down on every part of the city.
As the author mentioned, our winters no longer get cold enough to freeze the beetles out and thus they nest all winter and destroy trees all summer, it only takes a few degrees to make this difference. The loss of forests is immense and before and after photos are heartbreaking. This has been happening for years now and is quickly spreading across all the northern Boreal forests.
But, what the hell it seems. Enbridge is looking to build an extensive pipeline from the tar sands to the west coast to keep the carbon pumping and the Northern waters are clearing of ice far faster than expected so you can bet it's not just going to be your Alaskan idiots chanting "Drill, Baby, Drill."
I think the tipping points have been reached and surpassed. It's just that the human mind has been trained to look at each travesty as a separate, unrelated entity. If one takes in the growing, vast expanse of the "Dead Zone" inside the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the nation's fish come from, add to it these massive fires, add to that the pollution from fracking, the lost mountains blasted away in West Virginia, the flood zones along the MIssissippi, the trace particles of radiation spewing from Japan... EVERYTHING points to a decimation of species, along with radically reduced foodstuffs.
Maybe Soylent Green is not such a far-fetched fantasy after all?
When I read about these scorched forests, two visions come simultaneously to mind:
1. It's a metaphor of the bombing campaigns, the military's scorched earth policies preying upon large portions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Here's the karmic blowback in action!
2. I get a mental replay of that scene from Excalibur where all the land dries up like a sterile prune.
Maybe it's time to search for the Grail? Shaped like a chalice, in my view, it represents the absented Divine Feminine, the realization that all life is sacred, and that it was never MAN'S right to seek dominion over her (Mother Nature/Gaia), but rather to work in PARTNERSHIP with the land. Many Indigenous tribes understood this sacred covenant, for it is the pact that life's sustainability rests upon.
In contrast, it is sheer ego-based hubris for man, via science, militarism, and technology, to think he can own, direct, or rule the Great Goddess.
I wish humanity didn't have to learn the hard way, but even after decades of warning about these very types of things, leaders showed a complete dereliction of duty in offering no ethos of conservation. Meanwhile the auto makers turned out the most ridiculously over-sized gas behemoths known to man, while the oil and gas companies worked to disable greener technologies. These recipes for mass suicide were financed by the narrow-thinking monied interests who somehow felt they had the right to sign nature's death warrant.
I've previously shared the thinking of spiritual teachers like Yogananda in exposing the link between human campaigns of carnage, and nature coming apart. Now that Humpty Dumpty has fallen from the wall, the pieces will NOT come back together. Most people who make it through a calamity presume it's now over with... to the contrary, these types of events will contine and interrupt the stable commerce of what we previously took for ordinary life.
As some in this forum have advised, buy seeds, know your neighbor, live simply, and plan to network soon.
A much worse tipping point than we are now experiencing is within easy reach and could happen at any moment, or not all of a sudden at all.
Networking and acquiring seeds won't help the huge people population who live in cities who couldn't possibly grow enough food in vacant lots, window boxes, and community gardens to feed the population in time to prevent widespread starvation, which -- given some of the other situations building up -- could end up being a merciful way to go.
The people who one networks with would, in my non-humble pessimistic view, be likely to panic when their own survival feels threatened, try to grab others' shares to keep themselves going. We who did not grow up in isolated self-sufficient villages do not have the social skills to network for survival. Bye.
I have just a short note about buying or saving seeds--it sounds good in theory and the sentiment is certainly valid. However, the reality for this year is far from romantic, cosmic or a solution. With the present weather pattern I am stuck in up here in the inland, Pacfic Northwest growing any crops at all this year is a challenge akin to impossible. I personally have made my third planting of squash and beans with only a few pitiful little plants now growing. It has been so wet and so cold that seeds have been rotting in the ground. Local farmers have been unable to plant due to wet fields and this area which is usually a veritable growing paradise has this year been reduced to a sodden, cold wasteland running 15-20 degrees below normal for over six months.
I only relate this story to point out that saving/buying seeds will do no good if they won't grow. I'm afraid this will become more prevelant in years to come which does not bode well for survival no matter how self-sufficent one aspires to be.
Again:
Climate change means its hotter and colder in different places.
Global warming is the net result
You are 100% wrong.
The science is settled.
At this point, scientists are just trying to figure out everything that will be going to pot, at what rate, and how bad it will be.
For a comprehensive look at the settled science, look up Joe Romm's blog.
Some minds, however, will adhere to whimsical beliefs.
If Joe doesn't make you 100% sure the science is settled, you don't belong in a discussion of science because you have zero to add.
His is a fickle mind on this issue but unfortunately, he's not alone. Short of letting the global climate change disaster happen, we need to roll out solutions and ideas to tackle the problem so that they'll be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that it's all for real.
likeitornot,
You know, you are a lot like enriched Uranium.
You empoor humanity.
I agree with the science, but sometimes even I gotta say, "Fuck the science." I don't need a scientist to tell me that living conditions on the planet are getting worse; they can call it what they will. "Global warming, global weirding, climate change," I can look around and see the obvious evidence.
Look to the tar sands, or the gulf, or fukushima, or Chernobyl, or the Chevron dump site in ecuduar, look to the great lakes, look to the Niger Delta or a hundred other places, maybe in your city. I could give a shit if the world is or isn't 2 or three degrees different 100 years from now, if the entire planet is a toxic dump in the next decade or two! I'm still a young man with my best years ahead of me.
This talk of science and numbers and validation is relevant but it detracts from action. Are humans impacting the climate or aren't we, are the models too fast or too slow, can we calculate feedback loops or are they even proven? We are impacting the environment, that is clear, that is easily observable. Our impacts are often shitty and getting shittier, in that nobody likes the results of blown oil rig or a nuclear meltdown. Again I don't need a scientist to label what I see, to tell me that our lifestyles have to change or the situation will get worse. It becomes more obvious every day with all the garbage that blows in my yard from the nearby fast carcass dispensary or the smog that hazes my view on windless afternoons. Just like I don't need a doctor to tell me when my throat's sore or my muscles ache, I don't need a scientist to tell me that this lifestyle is making everything around me sick. My environment, my community, my family.
I live in the foothills west of Denver, and have most of the time for the last 40 years. We have had extreme fire danger and large fires here for about a dozen years, and the conditions are there for it to happen at any time. The change is unmistakable -- less rain, less snow, almost no afternoon showers in the summer, warmer all year round, evergreen and aspen trees dying without any specific disease, besides the huge number that die from beetles. This past winter we had grass fires in FEBRUARY. I have little hope that this magical mountain environment will be here for my grandchildren. And it absolutely infuriates me when people act as if this is not happening. I know why they do it, because it releases them from the reponsibility to take action. It's nothing but denial of reality and resistance to change.
Here's an article from Science that's related to the subject of your comment: "Drying Rockies Could Bring More Water Woes to Western U.S.": http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/drying-rockies-could-bring-more-.html?etoc&elq=9a846860a3a147fe93065006f9b4dbd4
It will be very lucky if your grandchildren make it that long.
Paranoid Pessimist....
I too live along the front range but in southern Colorado. We are still in the spring but summer is just around the corner. The last bit of rain I remember seeing out here was in very early March and it was an hour's worth of drizzle, just enough to make the top 1/16th inch of soil moist. Nothing since then. In late May the wildfires started and have been burning since. We have been surrounded by them for at least the past three weeks. Each day I watch the smoke haze the vistas. I too have a grandson I am raising. And it requires a lot of effort to see that he will survive his time on this planet. Survival is a full time job and it is my calling to teach those job skills to my grandson.
Also, many of us are involved in the fight against energy companies that want to extract the natural gas this county seems to be floating on in an effort to preserve what is left of the environment, to protect the water and air. For me this isn't some kind of esoteric struggle. It is a very real fight involving many of us who live out here just as many are involved in the fight against mountain top removal in the east.
rhb
A FEELING
Been bothered for a while now about the state of the world, the people, my country and the people in it and what has transpired since the colonials dumped tea in Boston harbor and told King George to stuff it. Admirable stuff and then write a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution for the ages and right from the start started dragging the words through the dirt and mud since paving was not in yet. What they did to the native populations belied what was in those words, the alien and sedition act, slavery. So, let me see, it is ok to push a people different than themselves (color, mostly) out of their way and if they did not go peaceably they would go by force; even folks of the same color but different culture were “discouraged” from coming over but it was fine by everybody to import slaves to do all the work nobody else wanted and then get paid slave wages. This was all fine, right? After all slavery is mentioned in the Bible is it not? From the first to today and into the future it looks as if the American malaise was in, still is and will have top billing; greed and meism. When you get the hammer you can have yours.
We grew up to be the big bully on the world stage and treated and are treating our own people like shit which is not much better than what England was doing when the colonists left; some advancement eh? People talk and make everything complicated by “political realities” which is bullshit for I got mine , when you get as political as me you may get yours. What a way to live. Don’t even know why it is called life when all it is existence. We can sit here forever and blame whoever but the dems and repubs have screwed this peoples here with no end in sight.
Fear; for most of my adult life that has been hammered into the American conscience and it has worked most excellently just look at some of the assholes we’ve let run our government; legally or not.
This has just been a rambling because there are things happening all over the world and many of the people out there and here know and feel that we are going down and picking up speed; one of the reasons and a big kicker is Scientists say that in North America and Brazil and where else? The trees are dying and burning and it is past the point of reversal. The feedback mechanism is at full throttle
Fear to promote greed, with a touch of ignorance, is a potent combination and that is not even talking about other countries governments!. Tunisia and Egypt proved that change can be pushed to the forefront but it took 30 years and we don’t have 30 years. Tony
Tony,
You are right.
I believe the central problem that has turned humanity into such a destructive force against his fellow humans, other creatures and the ecosphere is the inability of the most ruthless and aggressive among us to see the oneness of life. This accursed perceived separateness is the fatal flaw of humanity. It is THE excuse to plunder, enslave and kill anyone.
Well, the joke is on us. We are the ones being rejected by the "system" because the ecosphere really does have an immune system that deals with creatures that don't want to fit in.
They say that love is defined as the absence of perceived boundaries between you and a person or an animal. It makes you willing to die for he/she/it and always defend and care for he/she/it unselfishly.
If we can't love, not just each other, but all life so as to zealously care for and defend the ecosphere, we will all soon be food for bacteria.
Agelbert; Thanks for the reply but being right is wrong for Gaia. Peace, Tony
I have no problem with Chip Ward's article in general, but aside from the climate change aspect, he misrepresents the cause of catastrophic wild fires. Specifically, he over blows the role of fire suppression and ignores the roles of ranching and logging.
E. Wallace Covington, whom Ward mentions, is one the world's foremost experts on ponderosa forests. He sums things up very succinctly:
"We've overgrazed the ponderosa pine forest, cut down all the old growth, let the population of young trees erupt, then let it burn like hell"
Note that Convington doesn't even mention fire suppression.
Logging is the main culprit. If not for the unsustainable logging practices allowed by the corrupt US Forest Service, thinning the forests would be unnecessary and catastrophic fires like the inferno that's burning up the highway from me right now in AZ would not happen.
When the ponderosa forests are left in their natural state, the ponderosas grow really big and their long branches stretch to form a canopy. They cast enough shade on the forest floor that the small trees don't have much of a chance to grow. The big old trees die one at a time, new trees spring up in their place, and the overall character of the forest is sustained. And when lightning strikes, causing fires, the grasses burn and the trunks of the ponderosas get singed, but the fires are too small and low, and the ponderosas too big and far apart for the fires to spread and burn the forests to the ground.
But when you clear cut, you leave an unnatural state where there are no more big trees to stop the little ones from growing. The result is that lots of little trees all pretty much the same age and height grow right next to each other, and when they get bigger, their branches are crowded right into each other. It's that unnatural density of brush and small to medium sized trees that produces the fire risk.
Furthermore, environmentalists are NOT against thinning the forests! (Ward doesn't say he believes they are, but he does mention it without correcting the false claim.) They are against clear cutting. One sign of hope here in AZ, though it's obviously too little too late, is the Four Forests Restoration Initiative that would allow harvesting of smaller trees in a sustainable way, thinning the forests at the same time. It's one of those rare examples where environmentalists and capitalists have been able to agree and work together.
Finally, a climate change point that Ward doesn't mention: Trees soak up carbon dioxide. Catastrophic forest fires not only spew carbon into the atmosphere, preventing the trees from sequestering it and eventually returning it to the ground, they destroy an important carbon sink, which in turn helps to exacerbate global warming.
You've explained the dynamics of the western forest well. I believe grazing, especially on public land, is an equally destructive practice. At least with logging they have to wait 20 years or so to harvest again and clear-cutting is seldom practiced. Grazing goes on 24/7 and sometimes the rangeland looks so bad I wonder what the hell cows are even eating. The bottom line is that the SW is drying out. We used to have occasional dry spells and drought but we've had a long-term drought since the middle 90's here in NM. We've had historical fires burning at 8000ft and above, that's bad news. I know of old cabins and homesteads that were at least 80 years old that have burned in recent years in the wildernesses. Sure we get some record snowpacks and big monsoons but long-term things are unstable -shorter winters, warmer night time temps; never any periodic/seasonal moisture, it either dumps or just dries.. I have a fairly well calibrated meteorological station on my property -registered 10% humidity the other day. Hasn't been much out of 20% for weeks.
logitech,
Anything below 21% is considered desert. Namibia in Western Southern Africa has lots of desert and is frequently above that. Those levels kill everything not adapted to a desert.
I wish the solution was just getting more water piped in. It's not. The effect on the soil is cumulative, Increases in the dust particles in the air can even lead to frequent outbreaks of airborne dust particle diseases like Anthrax that they have in Namibia.
Sometimes engineers think of mega projects like flooding death valley to increase relative humidity and rain. That doesn't work because of the increased evaporation rate from global warming.
Outside of living underground, It will be very difficult to live there.
Nice, informative post. A book I read recently--wish I could remember its name--featured side-by-side photographs of North Dakota during an expedition of George Custer in 1874 and modern photographers last year. They found the same places the old photos were taken from and took new ones for comparison. The surprising thing is how many more trees there are now compared to the nineteenth century. Why? Logging practices that enabled forests of trees all of the same age? Effects of bison on the land? Who knows? but it tends to support your theory that forests are more dense than they used to be. That seems to be the basis for these catastrophic fires we have been experiencing.
I've seen historical photos of NM that depict the same thing. Some of the timber was cut for railroad ties, mine shaft support and fuel wood but there was more open space as Ward states. I've seen photos of lumberjacks at the turn of the century posing with their bucksaw straddling fir trees that looked like redwoods along the rivers of SW NM. In fact, the tree'd Rio Grande (or bosque) didn't really exist. Cottonwoods were sparse and the grass grew high right to the rivers edge. Constant flooding was the dynamic. Then came grazing. Perhaps the most destructive activity known to man besides war, IMO. Look what's going on in Africa with cattle. Drive along I-25. What you see is mostly toxic opportunistic shrubbery -sage, broomweed, snakeweed and creosote. Looks pretty but it ain't natural. The cattle drives out of Texas destroyed that nearly a hundred years ago. Before then it was grasses; remember the buffalo herds migrated all the way into Mexico.
Even though I never get tired of the beauty of the high desert I can only imagine how breathtaking it was then.
Great analysis. Reckon we know some of the same folks. Only one criticism. Generally in climax pondy forests 20-40 stems per acre there is not much canopy intermingling. This is what enables the savanah like grass floor. And why light and frequent fires are critical so as to take out "ladder fuels".
Otherwise you're right on!
I'm an old saruchero myself. You know that one bit that didn't burn on Quaking Aspen up there by Bear Wallow? That was me & my crew.
If I weren't an atheist...I'd say it was God's punishment for the NATO/US's 2000 bombs dropped on Libya. The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as ‘military’ targets. The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages. Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘restrained’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, has led directly to bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, and is pushing to overthrow the legitimate government. The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission: they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving – or as an earlier generation of American generals would claim in Vietnam, they are ‘destroying the villages in order to save them’.
The proper label for the phenomena in question is "terminal climate change," which -- influenced as I am by James Lovelock -- I first began using in my own writing c. 2007.
Though I have no idea who conceived the deliberately misleading euphemism "global warming," I cannot doubt it was carefully analyzed by capitalist psycholinguists and was thus selected both for its implicitly soothing tone and its function as a provocateur of (unresolvable) controversy, e.g,, the apparent conflict between "warming" and record blizzards.
Thus -- again demonstrating its truly diabolical capacity for deceptive manipulation -- does capitalism perpetuate itself.
The fact the capitalists rule with such malevolent cunning -- a cunning that literally has no counterpart in human experience -- is why I agree with Dr. Lovelock's scientific projection our species is doomed,
But I nevertheless retain the (ever-fainter) hope there will yet be a great awakening, that we will at last recognize capitalism for what it is: the ultimate enemy of eco-human survival.
What a beautifully comprehensive essay.
Thank you for dwelling on biodiversity -- as species disappear, the whole ecosystem collapses because species are interdependent on one another to create the conditions and balance in which all life forms thrive.
Now that public lands have been cleared by fire - install acres of solar arrays.
Arid land that is not good for much else is perfect for solar arrays that don't need water to operate. Even with transmission losses of 50% they still represent an intelligent use of otherwise dry unused land. Under those vast array will be attractive cooler habitats for the critters who spend most of the day looking for shade. Help the environment and get energy too. Looks to me like nature is leaving us a natural opportunity. Other nations envy our solar collection potential.
Tombot. Mebe a bit but we need to replant. We need viable soils and carbon sequestraition. Even pinon juniper sequesters a terragran per thousand acres in one year.
T
Mother Nature will always seek her level. We can pretend we can control that or we can learn to live in balance with her.
So much for leadership in this country, doing anything about anything...just another day, same ole stuff. I believe the USA is directly responsible for past & present mismanagement of land, subsurface land, water, subsurface water, oceans, atmospheric, stratospheric & even outer space...with diverse excuses, 'the system wide failures' continue face first in INTENTIONAL & global destruction, neglect, & pollution.
Leadership could had actually played an important role in cleaning up after Katrina, or even the floods of this year, working in forests could have, with a substantial labor effort impacted present wildfires and future ones... the typical response is to airlift some water & retardant, or build another Airport, or another nuclear waste dump!!! Typical American mismanaged INTENTIONAL waste, where 'conservation' is just another minimum wage job, easily understaffed by several million job hours/year and 'outsourced responsibility': THE TRADEMARK OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP continues on with one resolve: ignorance.
whocares;)
Responses to two posters:
Tiddas at 5:15 p.m.: "...as species disappear, the whole ecosystem collapses because species are interdependent...to create the conditions and balance in which all life forms thrive."
Good point. But notably missing in Mr. Ward's recounting of ecological interdependence is the subspecies of H. sapiens sapiens the Euro-Christian invaders "disappeared" from the ecosystem: specifically the First Nations peoples who were genocidally murdered to clear the Americas for Euro-Christian settlement.
One small example of First Nations' contribution to North American ecological stability is preserved in the archaic term "squaw wood" -- i.e., dead wood gathered by girls and women from the forest floor for lodge and ceremonial fires. Regular collection of this fuel -- a practice halted by the murder of the collectors -- minimized the potential for wildfires.
Agelbert at 6:09 p.m.: "...the central problem that has turned humanity into such a destructive force against his fellow humans, other creatures and the ecosphere is the inability...to see the oneness of life. This accursed perceived separateness is the fatal flaw of humanity."
True indeed. But too few of us recognize the source of our species' fatal curse is patriarchy, particularly as fulfilled by the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
As proven by their scriptures, these three cults despise Nature as demonic and in response conceptually sever our species from the ecosystem by proclaiming us "made in the image of God," the male deity whose masculinity is so powerful he was able to create the universe without help from Nature or woman. Hence "creation" – as if God somehow masturbated the cosmos into being – the first definitively unnatural act.
(I have capitalized God as a proper noun because that is precisely how the term is used by the Abrahamic cultists.)
What is methodically censored and therefore remains hidden from far too many of us is the fact the political purpose behind the Abrahamic cults was the overthrow of the Great Goddess, our species' original deity, the divine mother who was the central psychodynamic symbol of human community, its place in the ecosystem and the ethos by which it was sustained. Given that women are literally the source of life, matriarchy was thus our natural social order (as it is with nearly all species) and prevailed globally until only about 4000 years ago.
Given that woman is microcosm to Nature's macrocosm – it is biological truth all life is female at conception (hence the perpetual war between science and Abrahamic doctrine) – Abrahamic misogyny quickly morphed into hatred of all Nature.
From the wars of patriarchal conquest also grew the present-day systems of hierarchy and caste – the command structures and associated tyrannies essential to preserve the unnatural condition of male supremacy. Thus the mutual dependence of capitalism and Abrahamic religion: the cult as brain police, as theological slavemaster – which is why the intensifying savagery of capitalism is necessarily accompanied by ever-more-oppressive imposition of theocracy.
Not surprisingly, patriarchy has struggled from its inception to suppress our knowledge of the Great Goddess and the psychological, political and economic conditions her symbolism facilitated. Hence for example the censorship implicit in the horrors of the Burning Times; hence too the capitalist (ultimately patriarchal) terror of Marxist restrictions on Abrahamic cultism: spared the interference of priests, preachers, rabbis and imams, humanity might rediscover its genuine heritage.
And many clues to the sorts of societies and civilizations that evolved in the name of the Great Goddess do indeed remain. They are concealed in a wealth of pre-Christian British and European folklore: who is Janet of the ballad Tam Lin but a personification of the goddess? Who is Jack Orion but her lover? What is the Rusalka but an ancient archetype of the young Soviet women who became the deadliest snipers and partisans in military history? Is the exceptional ferocity with which these women battled the Nazi invaders of Rodina – the Motherland -- a mere coincidence?
In more tangible form such clues are typified by Minoan Crete, a realm in which there were neither slums nor mansions, a civilization that – though you will only learn this from sources east of the Oder River – was undoubtedly the fulfillment of tribal proto-communisms that evolved during the preceding 100,000 years. The Minoan structures today's capitalist-funded archaeologists are compelled to catalogue as “palaces” were more likely to have been administrative centers, which is precisely how they are described in archaeological studies financed by socialist or Communist sources.
Proof such an administrative apparatus existed is provided by the near-miraculous evacuation of Callisté aka Thera aka Santorini in advance of the volcanic debacle that fatally weakened the thousand-year-old Minoan society (for which Google). The Minoans evacuated at least 25,000 people (and perhaps as many as 250,000) with all their pets, livestock and movable goods from the island before the explosion of the volcano reduced it to a seven-mile-wide crater in the Mediterranean Sea, this about 1650 BCE.
To understand the difference between Minoans and ourselves, we need only contrast the evacuation of Callisté with U.S. abandonment of New Orleans to Katrina. Thus many archaeologists say in private Minoan civilization was undoubtedly the apex of human achievement – that it has been downhill for our species ever since.
Thus too capitalism – its infinite greed the fulfillment of the suicidal Abrahamic commandment to pillage Earth – is our final slide toward extinction: exactly as if patriarchy were a lethal virus seeded here thousands of years ago to clear the planet for takeover by some Borg-like species from beyond our solar system.
Great post. Another difference between the Matriarchy over the patriarchy is that of Life versus death. The old religions with the Goddess represented as a pregnant female was that figure representing the sacredness of LIFE.
The Patriarchs worship death. The belief in an after life and paradise in a realm separate from this one is a death cult. Militarism becomes predominant in such societies because those that worship death EXTINGUISH life.
As these death cults destroy all that can support life and develop weapons and technologies that destroy life, they claim to be pro-life.
They are quite insane.
"New Mexico is next"
New Mexico is NOW. We have 2 major fires burning, Carlsbad and Raton. Another which burned 11 homes in Ruidoso. And the AZ Willow fire licking at our border. Not to mention the many smaller fires we've already had this season.
Today I drove up the front range from my home in the Pecos, parched & desperate, past the fire raging on Raton pass, to visit family in Fort Collins.
My dad's family has beeb westerners for four hundred years.
I got to say that heck yeah it's important to recognize the causes. Well represented above, logging, ranching, mininig and all. With global climate dissruption turning it all to hell roaring.
What I don't see spoken much of is the very real & immediate mitigation available.
Consider that for drop & lop thinning (and darn it thinning is NOT logging) requires about two gallons of fuel (40+- pounds of carbon) per acre. That acre burned represents several orders of magnitude more potent ghg's. Plus thinning has the added advantage of restoring healthy balance to western forests. At costs fantastically less than fighting the fire.
It's time we got rid of our hate for chainsaws when that hate is irrational. Hate them in harmful logging operations. Damn straight. But when it comes tosaving our forests pick them up fire up look up and run them like mad.
Sorry for the plethora of typos I suck with this smart phone