SUPPRESSION
Climate change complicates the picture. It is making wildfires more likely, essentially punching through the human effort to suppress fires. That might, in the short term, help achieve the scientific goal of having more fire on the landscape. But longer term, it could lead to profound changes in forests, potentially driving some creatures to extinction.
The question coming into focus is simple, but answering it in the age of global warming will be a lifetime challenge for a rising generation of forest managers: How much fire is enough?
Scientists are still trying to figure out how regularly forests burned in what is now the United States in the centuries before European settlement, but reams of evidence suggest that the acreage that burned was more than is allowed to burn today — possibly 20 million or 30 million acres in a typical year. Today, closer to 4 million or 5 million acres burn every year.
Scientists say that returning forests to a more natural condition would require allowing at least 10 million or 15 million acres to burn every year.
Efforts to suppress fires began in the 19th century, largely motivated by the view that forests should be seen as standing timber with economic value. By the 1930s, industrial-scale techniques allowed firefighting agencies, Burned trees rise from a high-intensity burn area of California’s 2013 Rim Fire, which covered more than 250,000 acres in Stanislaus National Forest near Yosemite National Park.
including the U.S. Forest Service, to suppress fires across the landscape.
A handful of scientists began arguing decades ago that this was a mistake. Over the past decade or so, the research has crystallized into a new understanding of the role of fire in forests.
Hundreds of species can live in recently burned forest, researchers have learned, and many of them prefer these charred forests above any other habitat. Some beetles even have heat-sensing organs to detect forest fires from miles away, rushing toward them to lay their eggs in the just-burned trees.
Far from being calamities, fires are now seen by many experts as essential to improving the long-term health of the forests, thinning Chad T. Hanson, of the John Muir Project, plays a recorded woodpecker call while searching for black-backed woodpeckers in Yosemite National Park in California.
them and creating greater variability on the landscape.
Yet that awareness has yet to penetrate the public consciousness.
The battle over forest management might come to a
climax in the next few years, though — and the tiny blackbacked woodpecker could be one reason.
Hanson’s environmental group, the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute in Berkeley, California, and another one, the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a petition in 2012 to list the black-backed woodpecker as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. They argued that fewer than 1,000 breeding pairs might be left across Oregon and California.
Under the Obama administration, biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that protection for the bird might be warranted, but it is unclear what the Trump administration will do with the proposal, which faces a Sept. 30 deadline. If the petition is turned down, the environmental groups are likely to sue.
A listing for black-backed woodpeckers would almost certainly require a new approach to forest fires that would include allowing some fires caused by lightning to burn. In addition, the lucrative — and scientifically controversial — practice of logging trees just after a fire might be banned across large areas because those dead trees turn out to be important habitat for many species, including the woodpeckers.
Hanson studied under Malcolm North, a Forest Service scientist who also holds a position at the University of California-Davis. North contends that Hanson goes too far in arguing that even the most severe fires that burn large areas are a good thing.
“I would agree it’s actually a valuable habitat type,” North said of burned forests. “It’s just that he’s arguing for way too much of it, and in really big patches.”