Fire and the unnatural

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Starvation Ridge, Wallowa National Forest, Wallowa County, Oregon

context: We spent a few days this week learning about fire and forest management practices in National Forests. Fires play an extremely important ecological role in forest ecosystems—tall trees are resistant to ground fires, and some species have cones which are triggered to release seeds by extreme heat, ensuring the survival of the species after the fire. Periodic fires eliminate much of the understory in forests. The vision we’ve grown up with—forests with a thick, dense understory—is actually artificial, a byproduct of the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression. In an attempt to reserve some of the ecological damage caused by fire suppression policies, the Forest Service now deliberately removes fuel from forests—to prevent catastrophic crown fires—and also selectively burns some areas of forest.

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What is natural? What is unnatural? And is the natural inherently better? These are the things I find myself wondering as we learn about forestry. I wish humans had never interfered with forests on the scale we have, and I wish that, left to their own devices, forests would return to the way they were. I’ve read entire books deriding forest “management” as a euphemism for authorizing clear cuts, but I don’t think it’s really that simple. Is there value in these cuts, designed to restore the ecosystem to a past point in time? The ecologist, the environmentalist in me, wants to see spaces free from human interference. They want to let the fires burn and restore the natural order. If our version of nature involves spending millions to suppress fires and millions more to reduce fuel and deliberately set select areas ablaze, what do we become? I see arrogance in the notion that we can “manage” nature, anthropocentrism in the idea that we should. I’m having trouble letting go of wilderness as other, trouble justifying our meddling by saying it’s nothing new. I can’t decide what to accept as given. Timber harvest on public lands? The timber industry? Capitalism? Civilization? On any given day, all four of those might be fundamentally unsustainable. Tomorrow, we have no limits to growth. The next day, civilization itself it the culprit, choking the life out of nature. If timber is a given, the management we heard about today seems to make sense. But I want spaces for nature too. Is that too impractical, too idealistic? Aside from my human values, does nature have an independent right to exist, and if so, to exist free of human influence? People have always shaped their land; it’s not the concept so much as the scale that keeps me up at night. What would a wolf say? A lodgepole pine? A bird? Am I too emotional for asking these questions?

I read Grassland over the summer it had someone quoted saying, “I can’t imagine a more boring world than one made just of people and what they eat.” If we reduce everything in our world to serve us in some way, to produce for our benefit, what do we lose? If we bend nature to our will, sand down its rough edges to suit our society, what does that make us? We control what grows in the soil. We stop floods and fires. We heat and cool our buildings far beyond the limits of nature. We are not a natural people. And if we lose that connection, what do we become?