Nature's Restoration by Friederici Peter;

Author:Friederici, Peter; [Friederici, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6531061
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

These infernos are not the kind of fires Steve Packard’s friends set in the Chicago forest preserves. They are fires that roar across the land, unstoppable, consuming all the needles of hundred-foot trees in seconds, practically immune, even, to all the technologically sophisticated blandishments of the modern firefighter: quick-response systems, air tankers, fire retardants. They are souvenirs of more than a century of ecological meddling and especially of the exclusion of the ground fires that once maintained ponderosa pine forests. Lacking small fires, the forests grow thick with small trees and become ripe for conflagration. They present a grave danger to the human communities set within the forest and, to Jordan’s mind, a signal opportunity for restoration. Here, he thought, the scale of the ecological problems instigated by modern humans had grown so great that restoration had the opportunity to become the dominant paradigm defining how people manage the land; in fact, it would have to.

After Jordan went back home he added his thinking about the northern Arizona landscape to his book’s final manuscript. “The situation here is dramatically different from that on the prairies,” he wrote, “which die if deprived of fire, but die quietly, leaving the system intact as the prairie is gradually replaced by another kind of community, often oak forest. The ponderosa pine forests, in contrast, die violently, striking back viciously and self-destructively, demonstrating in a way the prairies do not the worst consequences of human neglect. If it was on the prairies that conservation learned the value of restoration, it may be in the ponderosa pine forests that the rest of us will at last learn its importance.”

Maybe so. If that is to happen, though, it is likely that some reconciliation will have to take place between those two primary ways of viewing this extensive forest: as a monumental wilderness and as a monumental problem. If that is going to happen, it will require that the region’s people find, through the practice of restoration, a tricky middle way between two deep-rutted and comfortable paths.

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