My truck got recalled because of something to do with the wheels. Since I was off because of President’s Day, I could take it to the dealer. They looked at it for a couple hours and then told me that they needed to order the parts. They will call when the parts come in. Until then, there is evidently no imminent danger. Besides this excitement, it was an uneventful day.
Below is a ponderosa pine plantation in Oregon. The ponderosa pines that grow on the western slopes of the Cascades are different than those that grow in Rockies. Please read the original entry re at this link.
I found a good report on the Internet re ponderosa pine forest restorations by the Wilderness Society. You can read it at this link. Ponderosa pine forests are among the most pleasant ecosystems in the world. They are widely spaced if fire is not excluded. But fire has been excluded too long, as you will see in the report. The ponderosa pine forests are usually found half way up the mountains, at higher elevations farther south and lower up north. Individual trees can survive significant drought once established. A lone pine you see on the prairie is probably a ponderosa pine.
Below are thinned loblolly on my land taken last fall. Pines ecosystems look similar wherever you find them, but there are clearly differences. Read the original post at this link.
All pines have a generalized pine smell but there are lots of variations. Ponderosa pines have a distinctive smell, like vanilla. What most of us call pine smell – the one that the fresheners or pine cleaners try to imitate – smells to me like white pine. I have been trying to figure out how to describe the smell of loblolly. I really can’t, but I am pretty sure that I could identify loblolly by smell alone.
One of the better lessons of the report linked above is not only about trees. They recommend adaptive management, where each action is an experiment that informs future activities. This iterative, continuous learning approach is good no matter where you use it. They also stress that we must acknowledge that we cannot predict future conditions, which is another reason for the experimental management.
Please read this linked article first. All the pictures are taken today in places where I have been running for more than ten years. I have been observing what changed and what stayed the same during that time. The picture texts could be read independent of the general text.
I was still thinking re the ivy problem and the general problem of native and invasive species. Let me stipulate that there are real problems with invasive species. In fact, I would rate it as one of the most important problems we face, bar none. The Washington Post has an article today on potential release of Asian oysters into the Chesapeake, which is one of the high risk plays that scare everyone involved. On the personal side, I spend many days fighting the Chinese paradise trees that infest parts of my forest land and they seem to be in league with another invasive – the multiflora rose – which makes approaching them painful. So I know the problem with invasive theoretical and practical.
Below is an ivy covered culvert. It has been holding the soil since before 1997, when I first saw it. The ivy slows the storm water and allows it to soak in. Ivy is low/no maintenance and nothing else would grow as well in this shady and stressful environment. This human environment will NEVER be like the natural world. The rain quickly runs off the impervious surfaces and washes away soil and most vegetation…but not ivy. It would be foolish to forgo this option.
But the whole concept of invasive lies on a continuum. Horses are not native to North America, at least since their ancestors disappeared here during Pleistocene. Nature did not place the horse on our continent; the Spaniards and English did the job. Few people today consider horses an invasive species, but they are. In fact, wild horses get special legal protection. Also among the immigrants are honey bees, white clover, cows, sheep, wheat and even earthworms. It is clear that these species have altered the environment in profound ways; they made the land more productive and it would be insane to try to eradicate them. On the other hand, we have chestnut blight, snakeheads, kudzu, wild hogs, Chinese longhorn beetles, emerald ash borers … the list goes on.
Below is an alternative to ivy – concrete. Storm water rushes down and floods stream beds. This culvert, BTW, is above the ivy in the picture, so it rushes into the ivy, where it is slowed down and tamed.
Reasonable people disagree about where to draw the line. Norway maples are the most common street trees in the upper Midwest. Are they invasive? Some people think so. They replaced the American elm, almost eradicated by the invasive Dutch elm disease. The salmon introduced into the Great Lakes are generally well received. They replaced the lake trout, wiped out by the invasive lamprey eel. We cannot dial the history back to the past, and what year would we choose anyway? Species composition is always changing.
Below – somebody dumped gravel into this low spot to slow erosion. They still mow the grass all around. Maybe ivy would be better than this alternative.
The problem of invasiveness is really a type of cost/benefit calculation. My own bias is to prefer native species – actually local species – because they have been around together a long time and have a demonstrated adaption to the nearby environment. But I do not limit my choices to only local species because I recognize that human activities have changed the environment sometimes rendering the previous adaption less adaptive. The human changed environment is the new environment. The old one is only historical.
Below – imagine the force the stormwater will achieve as it rushes down this hill in a concrete culvert with no plants to slow it down and no possibility of soaking into the ground.
This last part is important. Every species is adapted to a niche. But the niche is not the species and the species is not the occupant of the niche. A species that occupies a very narrow niche is probably on its way to extinction in our rapidly changing world. One of the definitions of an invasive species is that it can invade several niches and do it well. This is also an advantage.
Below is a local stream where most of the water running through the culverts ends up. The impervious surfaces and the fast water runoff ensures that it floods and erodes. The rip-rap holds it somewhat, but it requires consistent attention.
Our environmental tool kit should include a variety of solutions, native and not. While native is often the best choice, a slavish devotion to the environment we happen to have had in 1607 is senseless.
Below – the neighborhood is in many ways an oak savannah. The oaks were planted years ago when the houses were built and/or some were left from the original cover. It would be better if the lawn was replaced with some more resilient, non-mowing, vegetation.
BTW – some of our native species are invasive in other places. Our native southern pines are planted all over Australia and South America, where they often grow better than they do back here at home. Some people in Scotland complain that our Sitka spruces and Douglas fir are now the main components of their forests. The world’s largest redwoods may soon be in New Zealand, where they were introduced 150 years ago. They grow even better there than they do in California. I saw some very big redwoods in Portugal and some really majestic sequoias in Geneva.
Below is a bad introduced species – bamboo. Bamboo is extremely aggressive and hard to eliminate. People plant it because it provides quick cover, but it takes over real quick.
Below is a yard with a ground cover of pakisandra. I don’t know if they are native, but they are not as hardy as ivy and they can be killed by too much foot traffic or even weed wacking. The advantage is low maintenance and no mowing. BTW – most lawnmowers make more pollution than a full sized car.
Below is a “good” non-native, a Lebanon cedar. They get big and live a long time. I really cannot reliably tell cedars apart unless they have some special color, like some sorts of Atlas cedars. I planted a deodar cedar near gallows. The only way I could identify it was from the tag at Home Depot.
Below is a bad non-native, multiflora rose. You cannot see them very well in the picture, but they cover the forest floor. They have pretty flowers, but I hate them for their thorns; those thorns, however, are why they are so common. The government recommended them as erosion control and as a “living fence.” I can attest to their value as fence barriers.
Below – the urban forestry meeting was held at the Fairfax County government center. Fairfax is the biggest and most populous county in Virginia. I was told that there are still some farms in the county, but I have not seen them. There are a lot of forested acres, however, both in private and public hands. I heard that the Fairfax School System plans to plant trees on some of their mowed places. This is good for the environment and saves on maintenance costs.
BTW – if you want to attend these sort of events and learn re forestry in Virginia, the best information aggregator is the Virginia Forest Landowner Update.
Urban forestry meetings attract a consistent demographic divided into two parts. The first segment is at or near retirement with time to pursue their interests unpaid. I guess this is where I fit in. Then there are the professional “tree people,” those involved with forestry, landscaping or local government make up the second group. There is essentially no ethnic diversity. Everybody looks like they walked out of a 1950 LL Bean catalogue. This may become a problem. A good part of Northern Virginia’s tree cover depends on the volunteer efforts of local citizens. Trees are too important to be the concern only of the dwindling LL Bean demographic. I have noticed, however, that the age ratios have remained consistent over time. Maybe people just don’t get interested in these sorts of things until they reach a certain stage of life and maybe this problem is not a problem.
I am interested in forests but many of my fellow attendees seem more interested in trees. These are not the same concerns. Some of my colleagues personify individual trees. I agree that some extraordinary trees need special protection, but the forest trumps individual trees and forest health depends on cutting some trees. Somebody even used the term “tree-rescue” in referring to moving trees from a place being cleared for a highway interchange. This implies another “rights mindset,” and a fundamentally anti-ecology theology.
Below is the natural range of the loblolly pine range. The range extends as far as New Jersey and the tree can survive if planted farther north, it is essentially a south-eastern species.
The Rappahannock River is roughly the boundary between Northern & Southern Virginia both culturally and ecologically. I have a foot in both regions, since I live in Northern Virginia, but my forest is in the South. In suburban Northern Virginia, a few acres or a couple of trees are a big deal. Down in Brunswick County foresters don’t pay much attention to anything less than forty acres. In the Virginia suburbs, trees are usually seen as part of a garden landscape. In the in Southern Virginia they are timber in a forest. In the North, tree lovers look toward the Middle Atlantic States. South of the Rappahannock, where the southern pine forest ecosystem starts and then stretches to the Gulf of Mexico, it is natural to look toward the Carolinas. There was a little grumbling at the meeting that southern forest interests kept Virginia in the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern District, but I think that is where we belong from the forestry point of view.
Some people at the meeting really hate English ivy and often voice their feelings. They want it declared a noxious week and banned, and evidently tried w/o success to get the State of Virginia to do that. I understand that English ivy could be characterized as an invasive, but it is not that hard to control and it serves useful purposes. For example, nothing that I see around here holds soil better in ditches, since the plant can root in the firm soil and form a network of vines in the erodible dirt on the sides and in the bottom. This is especially true near paved roads and driveways. When people advocate ripping out ivy, they do not provide real solutions. Sure, native plants might be better (although I am unenthusiastic about poison ivy), but they won’t grow in the disturbed conditions and soil structures that human activity creates. It is just dreamy to think we can – or will – create and sustain the conditions that will allow the beautiful native diversity we would all want in theory. We need solutions we can actually live with. You can use Virginia creeper or wild grape, but those tend to climb into the canopies worse than English ivy does. Those vine covered trees we see along the Metro line and along I-66 are being harmed and killed by native vines. English ivy in many cases may be the best obtainable solution.
Besides, it is pretty and well-suited to the area around Washington. I don’t feel bad about the English ivy. It also seems to displace poison ivy, which is a native plant but it provokes rashes in about 80% of the population. Native is not always better.
I used to love the days in late winter when the warming sun would melt the ice and snow in the alley behind our house and send little rivers of water down the hill. My friends and I would make ice dams. They didn’t last long, but it was fun. When I got a little older, I would go down to Lake Michigan. My favorite places were the little beaches in Grant and Warnimont Parks. I like the Lake in all its moods and majesty, but I was always attracted to the little rivulets the poured down the hills. I can still sit for hours by a stream just watching and listening to the water flow.
Below is Genito Creek, which runs through our land in Brunswick County. Notice the river birch and the natural levies. The river water naturally deposits soil along the river edge. Heavy rain will take it over the banks to flood the forests and the levies trap it on the inside making temporary ponds. This enriches soils, replenishes ground water and provides habitat for wildlife, especially amphibians. Flooding is good. It is only a problem when we develop and build on places best left to the natural riparian environment. Flooding is predictable. If you need expensive flood insurance, you probably should not have built your house where you did.
We camp near flowing streams and build our cities next to rivers. Where we don’t have these things near enough, we construct fountains in urban squares. Even people who don’t like to swim like to sit near a pool. Love of flowing water is something primeval and instinctive in humans.
Peter Glieck of the Pacific Institute gave me some interesting insights. Here is the link to his talk at the Wilson Center. He focused on the ecological disaster unfolding in China. I will let you read about that at the link if you want. It is scary. They have destroyed 80% of their wetland in N. China, sucked dry many streams and rivers and exhausted or polluted most of the easy accessible groundwater. But I want to concentrate on some of the general ideas.
We can never run out of water, but we can run out of water that you can afford to get or water we can get w/o destroying local ecosystems. Dr. Glieck explained it that water uniquely exhibits characteristics of both a non-renewable stock resource and a renewable flow resource. It is renewable, but can be used up locally.
Regions can and do exhaust or destroy their accessible water supply and some stocks are essentially non-renewable. We call them “fossil water.” Examples include the Ogallala aquifer under the American Great Plains. Water is not a global resource. It is too difficult and expensive to move worldwide in large enough quantities. You can move bottles of drinking water over the oceans, but you cannot base your general water needs on sources that are too far away. (BTW – tap water in most of the U.S. is excellent, often better than what you get in bottles.) In fact, the story exhausted water often goes with the fall of civilizations.
Water and energy are connected. Energy production uses and often pollutes water. It takes water to grow biofuels, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Moving water consumes a great deal of energy. The single biggest consumption of energy in California comes from pumping water from Northern to Southern parts of the state. Water is reused an infinite number of times. Cleaning it and pumping it around is what takes the resources.
Below shallow temporary ponds are created at new construction sites to catch the runnoff and protect surface waters from silting. If left alone, this would become a vernal pond and provide a home to amphibians, as well as all sorts of bugs – good and not.
Rain Gardens
There are lots of rain gardens popping up around Washington. I found some up near the Capitol and there is a whole complex of them at the EPA. I didn’t take a picture since there was little to see in the winter. But I did read all about it on the placards nearby. Please follow this link to the information about them.
Below is a vernal pond on our CP land. You can see why people might call them unattractive. It greens up by April and this part is mostly dry by August.
Below is what the same place looks like in October. You can hear the water, but cannot see it unless you push through the plants.
A rain garden is sort of a fancy name for a vernal pond, which is itself a fancy name for a temporary pond, a fancy name for a big mud puddle. You have to change some names. Swamps become wetlands; jungles become rainforests. The old names have developed negative connotations that stand in the way of understanding. Vernal ponds are really important but under appreciated. They used to be common, mostly because of neglect. Water just pooled up and nobody did anything about it. They form with the spring rains and/or melt water and disappear with the heat and dryness of summer and/or when growing vegetation sucks up the surface water. But as our landscaping “improved,” people filled in or drained many of the ponds. Who cares? We should.
Below is one of our streams. It flows and floods depending on recent weather conditions. It always flows across the surface where I took the picture, but it goes underground and reemerges at other points.
Vernal ponds are important to water quality. They allow water to soak into the ground and they slow the flow to allow nutrients and silt to settle out. As importantly, vernal ponds provide places for amphibians to breed. Key characteristics of vernal ponds are their impermanence and stagnancy, precisely the things that make them unpopular with grounds maintenance crews and home owners. If the pond is permanent enough to support fish, they tend to eat the amphibian eggs and if the water flows it washes them down.
People make the right choices when they have the right incentives and they can do what they say they cannot. According to articles I read, Americans drove 112 billion FEWER miles over the past thirteen months. This is way higher than the previous biggest drop of 49.9 billion miles in the 1970s. The drops in driving are across the U.S., with Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont the top three. Wide open Utah has little in common with compact Rhode Island. The drop is rural and urban.
Below is a picture I took in Germany. English is not their native language, but I don’t think this is coincidence.
Gas consumption drops when the price rises. All the rules, CAFÉ standards and exhortations are mostly just feel good palliatives, analogous to all those fad diets beloved by fat people and largely ineffective. Solutions are simple, just not easy. Higher gas prices lead to less driving. Traffic and parking problems help in the long run. People make logical decisions. When driving in cheap and easy, they drive more. When conditions change, they do too. Bad economic conditions are evidently extending the demand drop for gasoline. Simple, but not easy – there is no painless way to achieve change.
And we do need to change. The environmental effects of carbon consumption are bad enough, but we also have the geopolitical considerations. Most of the easily exported oil is under or near countries that are unstable or run by despots and tyrants.
Anyway, the continuing drop in driving and related drop in oil consumption is a bit of good news, but we have been in this place before. This time we should do the right thing and get the incentives right. The time to raise taxes on oil is when prices are low. I have written about these things many times before. When gas prices were high, I wrote that they would drop again and that we should raise taxes on oil when they did. The time is now.
Different sorts of fires are prescribed for different purposes. The variations usually depend on the wind direction and topography. A backing fire goes against the wind and spreads slowly by conduction. It is the safest fire and consumes most of the fuel, but it is slow. A head fire goes in the direction of the wind and/or uphill. Flames are carried by the wind, so things burn faster, but it tends to be a less complete burn. The fire jumps over some fuel. That jumping also makes this fire more likely to get out of hand. Other variations are flanking fires, as the name implies along the sides and strip fires. The strip fire is a series of head and back fires. They run into each other. The strip fire is faster than other fires because you light several places at a time. Similar to a strip fire is a spot fire, where you light a series of spots that come together. The spot fires work well in theory, but they very often turn into strip fires anyway, just because it is hard to keep the spots apart. The challenge with all multiple fires is when they come together. They rise up and can scorch the trees or even provoke a crown fire.
The time of the year when you set your fires depends on your management goals. A dormant/winter season fire will consume the surface vegetation but won’t usually kill it. In fact it will create a lot more sprouts and shoots, especially with understory hardwoods and blueberries. This kind of fire produces a lot of good browse for deer, but it will not yield the herbaceous growth for other species. A growing season burn will often kill much of the woody vegetation and over time it will produce the savannah-like open forests with a herbaceous forest floor. It produces more flowering, legumes and releases nutrients to the soil. If a forest has not been burned for a long time, a winter backing fire is probably smarter. It cleans up the debris at a cooler temperature that is less likely to damage your trees. After that you can do the growing season fire as appropriate. May/June is a good time.
In a loblolly rotation, it makes sense to wait a year after thinning and then do a winter season fire to clean up the slash. After that, go with a spring time burn every 2-3 years.
Loblolly pines usually survive scorching. The biggest danger to them is in October, after they have finished growing for the year, but before they have gone dormant. A scorching will probably kill them at this time, so you should never burn in October. The State of Virginia bans outdoor burning until after 4pm from February to April. This is the time when conditions are dry and the leaves are off the trees. There is significant danger of fire escaping.
A major concern in fire management is its effect on the soils. An intense fire burns hot. A severe fire burns down more of the soil. Sometimes you want to expose mineral soil since some plant communities require that to regenerate; most of the time you don’t. Usually it is best when you see black. The vegetation has been carbonized but much is still intact. White is ash. Too much white means you burned a little too severe. It is bad when orange is exposed. If the soil gets burned bad enough, it can become impervious to water. The fast run off caused by the impervious soils can create mud slides.
Burning off too much soil litter can lead to erosion in general. Summer rains in Virginia can be torrential. The water hits hard and washes the soil downhill. All land erodes. An intact forest in Virginia loses from .05-.1 ton of soil per year on average. By contrast, field crops can lose 3-15 tons a year. After a burn, a forest floor loses more than the intact forest, but less than plowed field, depending on how severe the burning was. But repeated small burns create a stabile herbaceous layer that helps build a healthy soil that mitigates erosion in the longer run. Good forest stewardship means thinking in the long term. Be aware of how what you are doing now will be in years or decades.
Of course, erosion is an eternal process that never stops. The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies and in the future the Rockies will be as low as the Appalachians. Erosion & time will flatten Mt Everest. Everything washes down and everything has to go somewhere. If a ton of soil flows from one acre to the one down hill and that one loses a ton of soil to the one below that, it is really not much of a problem. Each acre “loses” a ton of soil, but not really. It becomes a problem when too much soil is lost and when it flows into watercourses. The water from my farms flows eventually into Albermarle Sound via the Meherrin and Chowan rivers. An important duty is to protect the waterways from too much silt. That is why we don’t cut near the streams (stream management zones) and generally tred lightly near them. Beyond that, you just don’t want to lose your dirt, on which all prosperity depends.
Alternatives to fire, such as mechanical, mowing, grazing or chemical do not have the same ecological effects. For example, none of these things can properly kill diseases and pests on the ground, nor do they consume all the combustible materials.
There is a general rule that big fires decrease biological diversity, since only a few species can stand being totally annihilated. Big fires will also tend to impact areas where fire is less useful. A beech forest, for example, will be destroyed by a big fire, but the moist conditions of such a stand will usually resist or limit small fires. Small regular fires lead to greater diversity, since they prevent to domination of a few species while not destroying too much and opening the landscape to some sunlight. In any case, you really cannot avoid fires; you can only postpone them. When combustible materials build up in wild lands, you eventually get a much bigger and more disastrous fire. These are the kind of thing we saw in Yellowstone back in the 1980s. Years of fire exclusion made the place a tinderbox.
An unplanned fire is significantly more dangerous than a prescribed fire, but fire is dangerous no matter what. A prescribed fire can get out of hand and even if it goes 100% according to plan, it will create side effects, principally smoke, that will annoy the neighbors. They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the case of prescribed fire, an ounce of prevention is sometimes worth a ton of blame, as people weight the tangible effects they see from the prescribed fire with the much greater, but unspecified effects from a true wild fire.
Fire has several simple characteristics. We all know about them, but it is useful to think about what that means. Fire usually rises. You should always avoid getting above a fire. Fire will move up hill more readily than it goes downhill. It will also climb if there is a burnable ladder of brush or branches. Flames will also rise when two fires come together. This may scorch tree branches or even set them on fire. Fire more easily spreads to loose and dry material, but it burns longer in denser materials. You can see that with a campfire. I have seen people trying to light big logs with matches. It doesn’t work. You need to go from the small to the large. Of course, if you light a pile of pine needles with nothing else, you will just have a short flash and then ash.
The behavior of a fire on the ground depends on lots of factors, none of which can be predicted with absolute certainty. The most capricious is the wind. Wind directions can change and local conditions can change the direction locally. The fire itself changes wind conditions. A fire draws in air. If the fire is going up a canyon, it might create an effect much like a chimney.
Other factors include humidity, temperature, air stability and time of day. Higher humidity dampens fire. The key factor is not humidity itself as much as relative humidity. Warm air hold more water than cool air. The same amount of water will be a lot less dense in warm air. Roughly speaking, for every 20 degrees in temperature, the relative humidity decreases by half. That is one reason time of day makes such as difference. You might have dew in the morning (relative humidity is 100% and the air cannot hold the water it has, so dew forms), but as the temperature rises, relative humidity falls. That is why fires burn faster and stronger at 3pm than they do at 3am. Temperature makes a difference independent of humidity, since the cooler the temperature, the more heat a fire needs to generate to maintain and spread.
You can sometimes see stable air at a distance because may be clearly demarcated layers of air. Stability makes a bigger difference for smoke. In stable air, smoke rises and then flattens out. It doesn’t blow away. Smoke rises higher and disperses easier in unstable air, but unstable air has its own challenges in that it usually has stronger and more variable winds, making fire control more of a challenge. The tradeoff is between smoke problem and fire control problems.
Fire escape used to be the big concern for burn bosses; now it is smoke. As more people w/o country experience move into the countryside, the complains and problems of smoke increase.
Smoke doesn’t always rise. In stable air or in humid condition, it tends to drain. Like water, it drains into valleys and gullies, where it might sit a long time. Unfortunately, valleys are often places where we have roads and homes. Smoke can be a health and a traffic hazard. The worst is “super fog”. Super fog is a combination of smoke and fog that makes visibility almost zero. The fog helps hold the smoke near the ground and the smoke helps keep the fog from evaporating off. It is bad all around.
We used to have lots of super fog in Krakow. We would often unwisely drive in it, following the taillights of the car in front. Such behavior sometimes led to spectacular accidents involving many vehicles. One vehicle stops and the others blindly drive into it, sometimes for miles.
Anyway, those are some of the concerns about prescribed burns. Tomorrow I will talk a little more re how and why we burn.
The question in any historical renovation is when. What period should be restored? In some cases the answer is fairly obvious. I stopped off at Montpelier, the home of James Madison. They just finished restoring it to what it was like when Madison lived there. Madison’s grandfather started the farm. His father built the house. Madison added a lot. Other people owned after that, including some of the Duponts, who greatly added and updated it. The restoration stripped away everything done after Madison owned it. That makes sense to me, but it is a value judgment.
Madison was the youngest of the founding fathers. He came prepared to the Constitutional Convention and is justifiably called the father of the Constitution. He deserves to have his house restored.
Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is one of the most interesting places I have been. It was the biggest Christian church in the world for more than 900 years until the Turks conquered Constantinople, killed or drove off the natives and turned the building into a mosque, which it was for almost 500 years. Now it is a museum. Should the Turks restore it to its original Christian splendor, when it had those beautiful mosaics or to the Islamic period when they were plastered over? The same sorts of questions go for almost any historical structure. But humans create more than buildings that change over time.
Below is a changing made-made landscape with non native animals (horses) near James Madison’s house in the Virginia hills. Not so bad.
When Henry David Thoreau talked about wilderness, he meant the kind of mixed forest and farm communities around Walden Pond. Today the forest has taken over much more of the landscape than in Thoreau’s time. Should historical sites in the Eastern United States restore the non-forested landscapes of the past? If you look at old photos, you notice that the landscapes have changed a lot.
We talked a bit about landscape restoration in my forestry and prescribed burning seminar. Most people think the eastern U.S. was naturally covered with heavy forests in 1607. This is wrong. The landscape of pre-European was not natural and the forests were not so thick. Native Americans were enthusiastic users of fire for hunting, warfare and to manage landscapes, in addition to fire escape from cooking and campfires. Human induced fire shaped the ecology of North America for tens of thousands of years. The native populations, after all, had no comprehensive way to put fires out and there were no roads to act as firebreaks. As a result, grasslands and prairies extended well into regions of N. America that today support forests and forests were open and park-like. John Smith of Jamestown wrote that he could ride through the Virginia tidewater piney woods on horseback. You couldn’t do that today. Elk and bison flourished almost to the Atlantic coast because there was lots of grass for them to eat. The forests of 1607 were not like those we see today.
Settlers from Northern and Western Europe had less experience with fires as a tool for clearing land because Europe had been cleared long ago and their land was much more densely populated and intensely used. European peasants constantly searched the forests for firewood. They were not allowed to cut living trees, but could get any dead branches that they could reach by hook or by crook. They didn’t leave much fuel on the ground to burn. It was too valuable.
They quickly learned the native fire techniques. But with the denser populations, fire got out of hand. After a series of disastrous fires, such as Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin and the big blowout in Idaho and Montana, fire was stigmatized and it was government policy and popular preference to exclude fire from the woods. We pursued fire exclusion goal until around pursued until around 1970 and we still have not welcomed it back as a tool we should. Fire exclusion changed the landscapes, to include very thick forests and very different species compositions. These ecosystems were not being restored, since they had never been there. The Native Americans “immigrated” to North America before the most recent ice age. They brought fire with them and the continent has been burning ever since. Remember that nature starts fires in only two ways: lightning and volcanoes. There are no volcanoes in eastern North America and lightning tends to come in the summer, when humidity is high and plants are lush. It also usually comes along with heavy rain. In other words, natural fires are much rarer than the regular burns we find in the natural and archeological record over the last 10,000 years. Humans accounted for most of the burning.
So the question about restoring the American landscape is when – what period? What period should we restore? Should we restore at all, or maybe strive for a richer, more diverse landscape? We have lost some species and gained some others. (Most of us like horses, sheep and cows, all non-native.) We have a better understanding of ecology than any of our ancestors and we have improved tools. There are some natural places with special value. These we should choose the appropriate period and “restore” them as possible. However, overall we cannot restore how it was and probably don’t want to. There is no ideal past. We can do better.
On left is our CP forest in 2004, right after a clearcut on the pines. You can clearly see the stream management zones with intact hardwoods and the boundaries of the property. On the south is Genito Creek. We own both sides of that creek on that little hump. You have to look closely to see that; We also own both sides of the road, but not very deep on the north-east side.
The best parts of government are those you hear the least about. It is because they are less controversial and somewhat apart from politics. They don’t overreach and they do the things government is designed to do, i.e. things people cannot reasonably do for themselves, things that have payoffs beyond the lives of individuals and things that promote the common good. Most of us don’t know how much our well being depends on these under-the-radar activities. You know, the ones that predict the weather, secure public health, keep track of our records etc.
Since I bought my forest land and tried to learn how to manage it well, I have been very much impressed with the activities of the U.S. and Virginia forest services and the several extension services, especially Virginia Tech. You might think I am a little self serving, since this part of government serves my interests, but I think it goes beyond that.
Land use affects all Americans and most of what happens on the land is the responsibility of private landowners. It is in the general public interest that grasslands, forests, wildlife habitat, watersheds etc be well managed. It makes perfect sense for government to help landowners do a better job of stewardship. Beyond that, land stewardship is an excellent instance of something that individual people cannot reasonably do all alone. Even the largest landowners don’t own whole watersheds or wildlife habitats and air, water, bugs and weeds don’t pay attention to property lines. There is a need for common goals and cooperation. But how?
There are many ways to work toward the common good in land use. Of course, the government could own or control all the land. This is a thoroughly discredited system, as anybody with even a passing knowledge of the abysmal ecological conditions in the Soviet Block can attest. Common ownership of land is a good idea only in theory. Whenever anything becomes everybody’s responsibility, it becomes nobody’s. On the other hand, complete freedom for land owners is also a mistake. As I wrote above, there is too much interrelatedness.
We need environmental regulations, but they need to be flexible. We have recognize the different generations of environmental regulations and how success can change the problem set. Forty years ago we needed some tough regulations to clean up big pollution. Command and control worked back in those days because we could easily identify pollution sources, which tended to be particular sources and often very toxic. As we eliminated most of the really bad pollution, it got harder to get each successive step. It doesn’t take a genius or any subtlety to find and shut down one big pipe. Finding a thousand little ones, no so easy. Beyond that, it is generally easier to solve the first 90% of any problem than the last 10% and it gets harder and harder to get at that last 1%. As you have to address more diverse and difficult to assess sources of environmental damage, you need to empower more people and engage their intelligence and imaginations to work toward solutions. Incentives work a lot better than coercion. If you order people around, you take away their responsibility and their dignity … and they take their innovations somewhere else. You cannot coerce someone into being creative. Under coercive conditions, people use their intelligence and imaginations to figure out how to avoid blame and do the minimum. If you want creative solutions, you need incentives. They need not be only monetary. Most intelligent people want meaningful things where they can be committed. The search for meaning.
Involvement v Commitment
You can understand the difference between involvement and commitment by looking at your bacon and eggs breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. A lot of involved people think they are committed because they feel passionately about an issue, but they wander off when passion cools, styles change or sustained hard work is required.
Responsibly should be as close as possible to the ability to makes decision and the likelihood to suffer or benefit from the results. It always annoys me when somebody tries to tell me what to do with my land. But I actively seek out the advice and experience of those who can help me make better decisions. I take my stewardship responsibilities very seriously. The Virginia DoF and Virginia Tech have been very helpful with advice. I have taken part in several courses and field days where I learned about things such as biosolids, water protection, invasive species, wildlife protection and much more. They usually cost me around only $20-50, which doesn’t cover the costs. But in return, I apply my knowledge and skill, improved by the courses, to managing my land well, which benefits all the people of Virginia, or at least those that breathe air, drink water or like wildlife.
I appreciate what the Commonwealth does to empower me to be a good steward of my forests and they seem to appreciate what educated landowners can do with the proper information and incentives. Everybody does their parts. It is a win all around. I bet most people don’t even know about this part of government. I suppose that is why it works well.
I am in Charlottesville for the prescribed burning course sponsored by Virginia Department of Forestry. It has given me a lot to think about. I am entering the various threads as separate posts. (BTW – I used to come to Charlottesville to visit Mariza when she was at UVA. Now that Mariza is graduated it is the same, but different and a bit lonely.)
The Science of Forestry
When you try to change any single thing, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” John Muir.
Below is the view from the forestry building in Charlottesville. It was cold, but no wind, as you can see from the flags.
Forestry is probably the most scientific of all the environmental fields in that it is one of the only ones where people with boots on the ground actually do something like controlled experiments. They usually take a long time to get real results. Time is needed to let all the various small connections and causes to be manifest and many times unobvious factors are the real drivers of the process. But the time lag and complex causality usually revealed mean that forestry is usually behind the curve on the big news scares and hopes. The news media has moved along to the next crisis by the time the forest science comes in.
For example, we only recently got the word on acid rain. You remember acid rain? It was a big deal during the 1990s. It threatened to destroy many of the trees in our Eastern forests. I admit that I got a little hysterical about that prospect and there was indeed a serious problem with sulfur dioxide etc emitted by coal fired power plants. We addressed the coal/acid rain problem with a cap and trade program. It worked well enough that it is one of the great environmental success stories that we mostly have forgotten about. (BTW – the things that worry me more are invasive species. In my lifetime and those of my children, this problem will impact our forests more than global warming or acid rain or almost anything else I can think of, but that subject seems to get only local traction.)
But much of the acid rain hysteria was misdirected. There was a lot written about lakes and streams that were too acid to allow fish to survive. This was true. Acid rain, however, was not the most important cause of this. The root problem was change in land use and the ultimate irony was that acidification of lakes and streams was related to the ostensibly good factor of re-growth of forests and the prevention of forest fires. Until the early part of the 20th Century, burning was very common in Eastern forests. When burning virtually stopped, this changed and so did the chemistry of lakes within the forests.
Fires change the chemistry of the streams and lakes in the forests by changing the chemistry of what runs off the land. Everything is a trade off. The fires burn away the C and N but the remaining ash and silt that pollutes the water also raises the pH. If you stop burning the forests on the shores and/or they grow back thickly, the pH of the nearby lakes drops (i.e. they become more acidic) because the surrounding soils are naturally acidic. Burning has always been part of N American ecology and the more frequent burning has been a factor ever since humans brought fire making skills to the new world. Until recently, that is. The forests in the Eastern United States are thicker than they have been at any time since the Native Americans “immigrated” from Asia and altered the landscape with regular burning. When we talk about restoring the natural environments, BTW, we are usually talking about restoration to the pre-1607 levels, not the pre-human levels. This makes sense. It would be too hard to figure out what the “original landscape” was like, anyway. That was a couple of ice ages ago. Who knows?
Forestry, being a practical science, can analyze the problem practically and propose practical solutions. Change what you have on the land and how you manage it and you change other results. Everything is connected to everything else, often in unexpected ways. If you want to raise the pH of land or lakes, you can do that by changing land use. Controlled burning can help. Or you can apply lime. We did that when we established our wildlife plots because the soil was too (naturally) sour. You can do the same with water, at least smaller bodies.
Land use is a really important factor. In fact, it is often so big that we overlook it. I also think land use issues are a little too diverse and prosaic to attract the sustained attention of the media and the public would prefer to turn a blind eye since almost everybody is complicit in this problem. It is more fun to blame big industrialists or feckless government than to change your own habits and aspirations.
