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What fire can do for the ecosystem.
Dear Reader,
“Giant sequoias are built to live with fire,” writes Warren Cornwall in The Anthropocene. “Their thick, spongy bark shields the underlying wood from flames. The lower trunks are largely devoid of foliage, offering little fuel to help fires reach the canopy. Heat pops open their dense cones, releasing seeds for the next generation.” (Bluedot contributor Jackie Davis recently shared that jack pine cones similarly require fire to regenerate.)
But that was then. Today’s supercharged fires burn through forests of dense underbrush thanks to a century of fire suppression, taking with them even the Giant Sequoias.
But scientists continue to learn from the past and from Indigenous peoples who have long employed prescribed burns, “a critical — if underutilized — strategy for turning down the temperature in today’s era of megafires,” Cornwall writes. “The aim is to return fire-adapted forests to something closer to the conditions in which many of them evolved, when fires often acted more like cleansers than destroyers.”
Asking us to learn to “love fire” is a tall order, but this story might just convince you to acknowledge its role in a healthy ecosystem.
Prescriptively,
Dot
Ward off ticks by keeping your lawn free of leaf litter and pine needles.
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