"a bi-monthly journal of environmental news and commentary..."

South Puget Sound Prairies, Endangered Species and Veterans

The Fires of Abundance

By Deston Denniston

Five thousand years ago, it was the commonest of sense. The food was in the prairie edges, and maintaining that edge was the key to prosperity. This wasn't something peculiar to one watershed; the whole coast, indeed both American continents, were actively managed for this effect.

From the southeastern hardwood savannas to the oak-edged prairies of the Pacific Northwest, the density and composition of forest edges was maintained by fires that were often completely intentional. The continent was on fire, and Indigenous Americans liked it that way.

After the Ice Age glaciers receded from the Puget lowlands, leaving vast grasslands in their wake, indigenous people saw the forest encroaching into grasslands abundant with game and wild foods. They observed that frequent, low intensity fires burned enough of the dead wood and prairie invaders to prevent bigger fires which burned everything. Low creeping fires leave charcoal and seeds. Hot lingering fires leave sterile ash, making regeneration difficult. Low to the ground, slow moving, low intensity fires covered the continent, stopping forests from closing in on prairie and grasslands. These burns enriched, rather than sterilized, the soils. Within the margins of this intensively managed forest prairie edges grew unprecedented abundance.

Gifford Pinchot and John Muir debated natural resource management before Congress a hundred years ago. Pinchot championed conservation management and sustainable extraction and stewardship, while Muir championed preservation and abstinence. Muir believed that 'wilderness' should be left to its own devices and that by these devices it will inspire us. Many preservationists saw "nature as teacher" in "the unmanaged wild." Pinchot believed that maintenance is close to Godliness, that stewarding resources is paramount to culture, and that studied, diligent observation and adaptive management are key not only to the prosperity of the western States, but for the preservation of nature. The debate has gone back and forth like a tennis game ever since.

A century later, 200' walls of fire that do not leave functional edges, but broken gashes, ash white and sterile, are jaunting across North America. Colorado's Waldo Canyon wildfire of 2012 was a tiny 18k acres. The California Wildfires of 2007 and '08 burned 2 million acres, while Nevada & Idaho's Murphy Complex fire of 2007 burned 653k acres. The further back one looks the smaller the number and average acres of burns tends to be. Two hundred years ago, through much of the inhabited west, fuel loads were burned off before they became a catastrophic problem. Low intensity high frequency fires prevented the conflagrations common to our modern forests.

The fire managers of western Washington were dozens of dissimilar tribes with several languages, socio-cultural structures and belief systems. Two things many of them had in common were salmon and burning prairies softly. This maintained productive forests-prairies edges, and provided cultural boundaries. It also fed them pretty well. The first people rarely burn now, after so many blankets and wars. The forests have closed in, the fuel loads are built up: one spark, and fires burn out of control.

Joint Base Lewis McChord (JBLM) burns. Between Tacoma and Olympia in Southwest Washington, JBLM hosts the lion's share of Washington's heritage prairies - roughly 14,000 acres of 20,000 acres which remains of the original 150,000 acres of south sound prairies. Somehow, almost accidentally, these vestigial fingers of the historic Tenalquot prairie remain not merely intact, but actively fire-managed. They boast some of the most intact ecosystems of the historic prairie region. They are not managed for food. Nor are the surrounding forests managed for timber. They are managed for training soldiers in tactical deployment. Combat preparedness... War.

Small arms tracer rounds light the woods afire with clockwork regularity. Tank and artillery practice often result in flare-ups. In addition to this the Department of Defense forestry crew enacts prescribed burns to maintain the forests prairie edges so that soldiers will have a variety of environments to train in. The fires burn with low intensity, sweeping the ground, clearing fuel loads, and enriching the soil with char. Char improves soil structure and provides niches for bacteria and nematodes, insects and arthropods.

The prairies sky-flora edge is home to butterflies such as the Taylor's Checkerspot and the Mardon Skipper, and birds such as the Streaked Horned Lark. The 'Golden Paintbrush', a wonderful wildflower, and the Mazama Pocket Gopher, live much of their lives in contact with the rocky soils, while the Western Grey Squirrel lives above among the oak and fir. In the waters of JBLM, the Oregon Spotted Frog sings its mating songs and lays its eggs. All of these species are threatened, endangered or provide habitat to those that are. They thrive because of the way the fort burns.

The Tenalquot has burned for thousands of years. This is no 'natural' or 'pristine' or 'wild' habitat. It is uniquely man made, a cultural modification practice that has, quite accidentally, been maintained by military training. Mere miles away in Tillicum, Spanaway and Yelm, the species listed above are extirpated. In most regional national forests and even many heritage reserves, these species are rare, or conspicuously absent. Despite this, the JBLM bomb range is not the wild Muir described.

As regional prairies diminished over the last four decades, the Department of Defense's land management and cultural teams at JBLM, along with state Fish and Wildlife and Ecology teams, observed the same positive effects from burning that the indigenous people did. They began to coordinate around managing the landscape for Endangered Species Act protection and research at JBLM. They knew immediately that they were obliged to enjoin Tribes as partners. It is important to understand what management patterns work, both for landscape and partnerships.

So far, the partnerships managing JBLM have produced some of the best outcomes for endangered species nationally. A layered and rich engagement between these agencies and the Tribes, with all of the difficult politic and nuance one can imagine, has been created. The policy and practice of burning maintains the pattern of active management which has kept the Tenalquot from vanishing under the forests advance for perhaps 12,000 years while much of the rest of the rich ecologies of our once fire-managed continent have been erased by a century of development, industrial forests, suburbs, or farmlands.

A century after Muir and Pinchot's debate was brought, we see the result of Muir's preservationist ideals playing out in vast portions of the American west. As smoky as it is with all these catastrophic fires, one thing is clear: Pinchot has the winning word in this century long debate.

Across the western states, farmers, environmentalists, forestry professionals, rangeland managers, fisheries, tribes, conservation professionals, soil scientists and agronomists are looking for ways to abandon fossil fuel intensive landscape management patterns adapted in the last century, and employ ancient wisdom in land management so as to better prepare for and manage fire. There are few people in our modern society better prepared to do this kind of work than our military veterans.

Veterans stand in a prime spot to re-vision the practice of broad-scale landscape management in the US. As the last few summers of fire storms have shown, the landscapes of the west demand skilled technical practitioners capable of split-second thinking and fearless fellowship in face of emergent and catastrophic events. Fifteen fire trucks had to defend 1700 homes in the Waldo Canyon fire. Hundreds of homes were lost. Meanwhile, veterans, proven in performance of hands-on technical skills requiring highest accuracy under stressful conditions, sat unemployed, unasked, while at the ready and willing.

Deston Denniston is an honorably discharged 50% disabled veteran who served in the US Army from 1988 - 1990. Before and after his service, Denniston lived and worked on small family farms in Western Washington. He earned his Masters Degree in Agriculture from Washington State University in 2007, and a BA/BS in Ecological Science and Design from The Evergreen State College in 1996. He is currently partnering to develop the VETS CAFE educational program for Veterans interested in conservation, agriculture, forestry and ecology. To find out more, contact him at abundancepc@gmail.com. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Vets.Cafe Website:http://abundancepermaculture.com/vetscafe.html


Back to Home page.


Copyright © 2024 - All Rights Reserved
Updated 2015/01/07 21:14:22