Even the first land colonizers, the
bacteria, fungus, algae, lichens, and mosses still have a place in modern
ecosystems, adapting to their ever-changing environment. Once these early land species colonized and
broke down the rocks on the early earth to create the soil for trees. Now we see these almost identical ancestors
living in and on the soil and on the trunks and branches of the trees that
displaced them where they are still exposed to fire.
We now know that when man
evolved in the grasslands and savannas of Africa, he too became fire adapted,
just as had other species of plants and animals living in these
environments. Plants
in a rudimentary way can manipulate fire, but Man went much further. He consciously learned to use fire as a tool,
a paintbrush, to paint on the living canvas in which he lived in order to
improve his livelihood.
This giant step made him an artist,
painting on cave walls or on canvas; it was simply a natural extension of his altering
the landscape in which he lived. The
landscapes we think of today as natural are only so in the context that man is
part of the environment. Many of the plants and animals and even whole light-fire ecosystems, owe their continued existence to man's fire activities.
Misguided global fire exclusion and
suppression policies for the past 120+ years threaten the very light-fire
ecosystems that nature created over hundreds of millions of years and the ones
that primitive man has been busy creating for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. The problem we have today all around the
world is that as man moved into artificial environments and out of the natural
world he has lost the knowledge that he
and fire are part of the natural order of things.
Our global catastrophic wildfire problems
really started when the European colonists almost wiped out the native fire
managers through disease and war. It's
no accident that heavy fuel loads began to build around the world starting especially
in the 1800s and are continuing to this day. As the knowledgeable native frequent fire
users were wiped out or displaced into reservations in the 1800s and 1900s they
have been replaced by less competent, citified, inexperienced government agents,
scientists, and bureaucrats who decided to unwisely and irrationally suppress
fire.
Many of these early European bureaucrats
were brought up in less fire-prone areas of Europe or in cities ignorant of the
role of fire in the environment. They
were well meaning, but only knowledgeable of the devastating city fires and
unnatural catastrophic of the time and thought if wildfire is bad for the city,
it must be bad for nature. In the early
1900s the rising unnatural heavy fuel loads, caused by displacement of the
native frequent fire managers, clear cutting and wanton economic development,
created major catastrophic fires in forests and grasslands that spread to
cities.
With ignorance building upon ignorance,
the early European land managers with public support used advanced technology
to seriously suppress fire throughout the 1900s. This disastrous cultural legacy has been
communicated down through generations of bureaucrats to where today's public
and private land managers. Now these
land managers are discovering that no amount of technology or resources can stop the catastrophic wildfires created by such huge buildups of fuel.
Further adding insult to injury in trying
to reduce these catastrophic fires, still inexperienced and underfunded fire
managers have resorted to prescribed controlled fire with limited success,
allowing controlled fires get away and burn parks like Yellowstone to the
ground. This only helps reinforce and
supports the views of those who support fire suppression interests that compete
for public money and resources with the fledgling government fire management
units.
The recent and continuing catastrophic wildfires in the Western United States, in Australia, and in Europe that erupt with the power and devastation of multiple atomic bombs, should provoke global public outrage. This should be especially true for those land managers who understand the nature, scope, and causes for accumulating fuel loads the past 120+ years in nature's global ecosystems. Many or most catastrophic wildfires can be directly traced to the fire-suppression activities of man himself. Fire suppression goes against the natural order of things where light cool fires sweep the forest clean. Light-intensity fires are the norm in most ecosystems with natural catastrophic fires limited mostly to cold climates like Alaska and Siberia.
I think it is about time to summon the
ghost of Ed Komarek Sr., my father and ecological mentor as a young boy, and his
fire-ecologist friends and colleagues.
Ed Komarek Sr. has been considered by many to be the most prominent
global fire ecologist of the 20th century. He, backed up by his brother Roy Komarek,
organized other fire ecologists from around the world through fire conferences
north of Tallahassee Florida. They were
instrumental in the creation and operation of Tall Timbers Research Inc. in the
late 1950's 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s.
Tall Timbers was organized to be as a scientific, educational, and
activist pro-fire bulwark against the powerful, misguided propaganda and fire-suppression operations of the US Forest Service and other government agencies
in the United States and elsewhere around the world.
Ed had been raised in Chicago where he had
been taught that fire was bad for the environment. His father had gone bankrupt in the Great
Depression and he had to quit college to go to work collecting mammals in the
Great Smokey Mountains. When he traveled south and met and worked for Herb
Stoddard, his ecological mentor, he realized that fire was an intrinsic part of
the natural order and to suppress fire was a crime against nature!
Herb was one of the founders of the
emerging field of ecology at the time and was a good friend of another founder
Aldo Leopold. Like many of the early
ecologists Ed, Roy, and Herb were museum collectors who because of their
collecting experience realized that plants and animals were in dynamic
relationship with each other.
Ed soon realized along with Herb and a few
others, whom Dad fondly called mavericks (cattle who would not run with the
thundering herd), that suppressing light natural fires over decades created
huge fuel loads in both private and public forests and grasslands. This resulted in turning small harmless and
nourishing cycles of regeneration into large catastrophic cycles of
catastrophic regeneration in light fire forests, savannas, and grasslands.
I think that my father would have been
appalled today to see the problems, while changing for the better in the Eastern
United States, have been still building in the Western United States and other
parts of the world like Australia. This has happened despite a lifetime of
effort at the grass roots to educate and train a new generation of pro-fire
land managers on public and private land.
He would surely have been disappointed that entrenched bureaucracy,
special interests, and politics at the highest levels were still responsible for
continuing and amplifying these crimes against nature and man!
I would say it has certainly been the case
for me as a bystander in this drama, because I can see that these catastrophic
wildfires are so unnecessary. Many
catastrophic and devastating fires in the United States and around the world
are the result of continuing incompetence and lack of funding at the highest
levels of governments. This lack of competence, excellence, and funding by
national and global leadership is in part due to inadequate oversight and
accountability by the public and is caused by a general public ignorance of
fire's role in nature.
In turn, this failure to hold leaders
accountable has been brought about in part by the dark legacy of 120+ years of
misguided fire suppression, fear, and propaganda by governments, an assault on
public consciousness. Surely the public
deserves better that this from their public servants and managers of the public
lands in America and around the world.
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