We must rethink our ties to Earth
WITH THE RELEASE of the Forest Service’s final report on this ecological disaster (“Dog Head Fire got out of control immediately,” Oct. 15), what kind of closure can New Mexicans expect? Should we confine the incident to history, move on and forget about it?
Something is conspicuously absent from public discussion and bears on the future of our state’s quality of life and our environment: climate change. Wildland fire has been accelerating the last few decades and forests are not growing back; we are losing our forests. Efforts to reduce catastrophic fire risk are themselves proving to be risky as they increasingly result in more fire.
This was a restoration project. Climatological forecasts are dire, forest hydrology is degrading and natural vegetation is becoming viewed as “fuel load.”
No doubt we have “mismanaged” ecosystems, but forest fire severity is conventionally believed to stem from practices falling under that rubric when the primary
factors are increasingly climatic: soil moisture, tree growth rates and canopy cover, winds, dew point and humidity, not fuel loading — in other words, climate change. There is no evidence that brush removal or tree thinning reduces fire severity; yet evidence abounds that southwestern forests are dying from global warming, and to question this is an exercise in climate change denial.
How sad that property owners had cleared “the area around their homes of trees ... ” to no avail, trees that once provided shade, coolness, and maybe a place for birds and butterflies. The Dog Head Fire has involved heartache, finger-pointing, financial burden and the contentions of disaster relief funding, but one thing it is not is an isolated event.
This is the face of climate change, here in a state that has embraced the fossil fuel industry as its economic backbone and is likely to be a poster child of future climate crises. Fire suppression equipment requirements, fire restriction standards and adaptation plans in the wildland-urban interface are all but tinkering at the edges of a predicament that spans the globe and its lifesupport systems. Fundamentally rethinking the way we relate to the earth is mandatory and must become part of the dialogue.
SCOTT M. SMITH Albuquerque