Fired Up For Summer

Summer is full of fun in the sun, cookouts, trips to the beach, bugs, and in the West, fire. Every year thousands of acres, mostly in the West, burn. Some are caused by lightning strikes and others are caused by human carelessness or even intentionally set. Lives are lost and property is destroyed. But fire is nature’s way of renewing itself. Within days of a fire (assuming it wasn’t a wildfire that sterilized the soil) new plants colonize the area, followed by the animals.

Fireweed, one of the first plants to colonize an area after a disturbance

Certain evergreen trees need fire to reproduce, the seed cones unable to open without the extreme heat. In other areas, such as meadows and prairies, fire destroys competing plants that would otherwise change the characteristics of the ecosystem. Many birds are dependent on shrubs and trees that require a more open area than dense forest, and without fire keeping those areas open the plants and birds would become homeless. 

Aftermath of a fire at Crater Lake National Park

Why are today’s fires so devastating? To answer that question, we need to use the Wayback Machine and visit the birth of forest management in the 1800s. Forests were being managed for timber production, and fire was seen as the enemy. Since fire was a threat to destroy the product, it had to be suppressed. Fire suppression was so good, that by the time we figured out that a burn every now and then was a good thing, there was such a tremendous buildup of fuel that any small fire could potentially become a highly destructive canopy fire. 

Okanogan wildfire (Washington Department of Natural Resources)

Many trees, like the ponderosa pine, have a thick fire-resistant bark that enables them to survive the healthy kind of slow-moving ground fire that clears out the underbrush and opens up seed cones. With excessive fuel laying around, the fire can reach the canopy of the trees and rapidly destroy anything in its path. 

Ponderosa pine, which has fire-resistant bark and fire-dependent seeds

Prairie fires were human-caused maintenance fires before white settlers arrived and replaced prairies with farms and towns. In the Great Plains, natives set fires to burn the grass to allow for fresh growth that would attract the bison that were so vital to their existence. In the Northwest, prairie fires kept the forest from invading the open areas were camas flowers grow. Camas bulbs were an important part of some tribes’ diets. 

2015 Alder Lake fire near Eatonville, WA

2015 Alder Lake fire near Eatonville, WA

While most of the big fires making headlines are in the West, Florida and Georgia have had a few in recent years. A potentially explosive situation in the making is the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where an uncontrolled wildfire could put thousands of lives at risk.

Some information on fires is from US Fish and Wildlife Service. A map of current fires is available from the National Interagency Fire Center.