Conservation Note for March

Every Trails Club member has had the good fortune to hike or camp or climb or swim/raft/canoe/kayak in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, the Pacific Northwest. Many of the places we enjoy remain vulnerable, or have newly become vulnerable. Each month we will have a note featuring one or two organizations working to protect our natural places, and ways to support them, or a note about conservation actions in one of these special places. We hope every Trails Club member will choose to participate in some conservation effort or activity that matches your time available and your interests. As climate change progresses, it is ever more urgent to “Love it (and fight to protect it) or Lose it!”

This month we feature Crag Law Center, by presenting an article written by Ralph Bloemers of the Crag Law Center. Ralph and the Crag Law Center have spent almost two decades working for conservation of our forests and wild areas in the Pacific Northwest, and working in conservation education. Ralph will be presenting a program in March, “The Best Kept Secrets of Wildfire.” (Date and location below)

March 19, 2019

Patagonia

1106 W. Burnside St.

Portland, OR 97206

Doors at 6:30 pm, show starts at 7pm. Food and drink provided.

Challenging Our Beliefs to Meet the Challenges of Wildfire.

By Ralph Bloemers, Crag Law Center

The forests of Oregon provide a place of renewal, peace and tranquility. I love the verdant green of Pacific Northwest forests and the diversity of habitats found here. I share this love with my family and my friends, and I bet you do too. I have spent countless hours in these forests with scientists, firefighters and wildlife biologists. I have also spent countless hours in the courtroom and in congress advocating for the protection of these public lands.

We recently experienced intense fires in the West, including one in our own backyard. The Eagle Creek fire burned through a large area of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The news reports told us that 50,000 acres were destroyed by fire.

After rains came and put the fire out, I took to the air, to the ground and have spent hundreds of hours in the forests and communities affected by it. I have listened to people’s stories, spent time with people in the community who were evacuated and brought in experts to help the community heal and helped tell their stories through film. I have also taken time off work to join with other volunteers to rebuild popular hiking trails in the gorge. This is really hard work and really rewarding too. I have seen first hand how the landscape is rapidly rebounding and contributing to the recovery.

Last year’s fires in California have resulted in the loss of many lives and homes, and shook us to our cores. These events have forced me to question my own beliefs about forests and fire, why we got here, how our views are shaped and how we might learn to better co-exist with fire.

Fire is powerful. Fire is elemental. Fire can and does destroy homes. Our safety is paramount. I have friends who have been evacuated and lost their homes.

For decades, forest managers, the timber industry and politicians have promised us that they can reduce the extent of fire across the landscape but, of course, they have not and cannot deliver. Yet they continue to promise it just like they promise everyone the American dream.

The good news is that both nature and our elders possess great wisdom and knowledge. We just need to listen and heed the solutions they offer.

Let’s start by exploring the natural, beneficial role of fire. Thick-bark Douglas firs and Ponderosa pine are adapted to fire. These trees survive intense wildfires. White bark pine trees only release seeds when fire moves through, germinating thousands of young seedlings per acre after fire. Old growth forests offer animals wonderful homes, yet for birds like black-backed woodpeckers, Clark’s nutcrackers, and owls – a burned forest is a vast supermarket of tasty treats. Abundant light to the forest floor provides a free-for all generating new life. Of the 50,000 acres that burned in the Gorge, only 17%, about 8,000 acres, burned intensely and even those forests are emerging gorgeous. Fire is to forests, what floods are to rivers – a force of renewal.

For millennia native peoples co-existed with fire, they used fire to create berry fields, grasslands for basket making, maintain open areas for game – they worked with not against fire. And when settlers came west, that wisdom was nearly extinguished. For the past century we have engaged in a never ending and escalating war on fire. We believe we can control fire – just bring in the bulldozers and the super tankers. We continue to think we can manage forests and alter fire behavior over vast landscapes – just bring in the logging equipment. These actions come at significant cost to natural systems, and they are not working.

Learning to co-exist with fire forces us to examine our dominant cultural norms about fire. We have to accept that forests will burn and no amount of effort to alter vegetation across large landscapes is going to change this fact. Because fire is an emotional issue with deeply rooted cultural beliefs, it is going to test our ability to challenge conventional wisdom and chart a rational course. Yet we have no choice but to rethink our approach to wildfire. While fires are good for wild forests we still need to protect human structures from the flames and wind-driven embers.

The good news is that forest scientists and fire experts like Jack Cohen have worked with the insurance industry to test the best methods for fireproofing homes and removing flammable materials immediately around them to create defensible space. Los Angeles is a leader in encouraging fire-safe principles for homes. As a result, the La Tuna fire burned only 5 of the nearly 1,400 homes in its path. The five that burned either escaped annual monitoring for defensible space or had not been updated with ember-proof vents—that is, they could have been saved. Study after study has shown that protected forests are more likely to withstand fire, and that clearcut areas are more likely to increase big, hot fires. Top scientists tell us that older forests are the best buffers against climate change as they continue to add biomass (carbon) as they age. Fire and other natural disturbances do not cause a major loss in carbon from sites, if not followed by post-fire logging. Logging remains the major source of carbon loss in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the West. By requiring longer rotations for those areas designated for harvesting trees and retaining larger areas in older forests we can store more carbon in our forests.

Thinning forests to reduce the chance of big fires in the Westside of the cascades is not likely to be successful because climatic warming is likely to favor increased outbreaks of fire and it is impossible to thin and clear fuels away fast enough and broadly enough to have any major effect because they just grow back.

We can, however, focus our attention and resources on our homes and in the immediate areas around homes. Retrofitting homes is highly likely to be effective at protecting those homes from fire. We can also limit actions that degrade forests, water supplies and increase fire risk across the landscape, namely logging. We also need to re-align the Smokey Bear PR campaign with our latest forest fire science, his message would be: Only YOU can protect your homes and communities from burning. And he would tell us more about how we can use careful thinning in priority areas and prescribed fire for its benefits.

What you can do:

Attend Ralph’s March 19 presentation at Patagonia to learn more about Crag Law Center’s work in conservation and conservation education, and how you can get involved.