Even here in the tropics I feel we’re going to be seeing fires once the El Niño kicks in, the land gets so parched, people are so casual with their rubbish burning and never keep an eye on it smoldering away. And they’ve never had to worry about keeping an eye on it, it’s so green here and moist. But come this potentially long summer I feel this might change.
Thanks for the great essay Rob, I keep sharing your Millan Millan essays whenever I can, I think one of the most important things I’ve read in a long time. ❤️❤️❤️
I’m in the Philippines. I’m in an area which is mostly old rice fields and mixed orchards/coconut plantations and lots of poorly managed grasses that get pretty dry in the summer
Thank you for mentioning the fine work of Peter Wohlleben. The Hidden Life of Trees is a must read.
I too am bothered by the checkerboard of colored square managed forests seen from above flying over the northwest and at ground level driving through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Portions of Maine, Quebec, and New Brunswick suffer the same fate as do southern pine forests in Florida. It doesn’t take much of a trained eye to see the clearcut nakedness of the land a hundred feet beyond the narrow strip of trees along the roadway. Who do they think they’re fooling?
Not any less shocking are the monoculture farmed single species forests, with signs proudly proclaiming the date of the last and future clearcut harvest. Corn fields. Devoid of biodiversity and not even much in the way of any wildlife.
All of this called or should I say so-called a “renewable resource” by the timber industry. What they fail to realize is each successive deforestation, pesticide, replanting and chemical fertilizer, and harvest degrades not only the land and the forest as a whole but also the quality of the trees themselves. Poorer quality wood per volume, less structural strength, more snags and wastage, less disease and drought tolerant. It, like almost everything else humans touch in the name of economic progress and growth, is nothing more than a race to the bottom on a finite planet.
Thanks, Michael. Yes. Well put. When these "forests" burn, they are telling us something, but we're only allowed to hear the monotonous drumming about CO2. I just had this thought. Just as we've replaced complex forests with monocultures, we've replaced a complex climate story with a mono-narrative, CO2, CO2, CO2.
Hey Rob, I started reading your blog after you published this, so thanks for the link in your year end review!
I think most experts would agree that forests have been mismanaged in the past, and that current management is not always perfect. But it goes too far to say we should never manage the forests - native people did.
Also, due to mismanagement (clear cutting and fire exclusion) we now have forests that cannot adapt to current (let alone predicted) levels of climate change. Unfortunately we’ve even seen a lot of never-logged old growth forests burn.
I’m just arguing for a role for humans in fixing the mess we’ve made. But trying to sort out good management from bad takes a lot of nuance…
BTW, if you’re interested in a deep dive into Forest science and the debate about restoration thinning, this blog is a good place to start:
Thanks, Conor, for your thoughtful comments. I'll check out the blog post you provided. I agree about "nuance." Every situation is different and hugely complex, and I am very much a learner here, rather than expert. I was interested in what Suzanne Simard had to say about growing up in an old time logging family, and how in the old days they used horses and selective thinning, with much less damage to the overall forest.
I'm not necessarily arguing against any kind of "management.," and agree there are places, not only forests, that have been so degraded they do need human help. I'm mostly referring to the plantation model of clear cut, spray/replant, cut again...which I think is killing forests.
In terms of forests not being able to adapt to current and future climate change, we have to be careful what we mean by climate change. There is generalized warming due to CO2 emissions, but there is physical degradation of hydrological cycles due to land disturbance. My suspicion is that forests are more challenged by our mutilation of them than what we put in the atmosphere, though that is obviously part of the picture.
Have you read Peter Wohlleben's The Power of Trees. He talks a lot forest intelligence and the need to support natural processes, rather than genetically engineer forms of adaptation that human thinking is too crude to fully understand.
If you know of any studies that shows trends in terms of what burns and what doesn't, please feel free to add links. My main point in Burning for Water is the realization of the Lakota phrase Mni Wicone--water is life/life is water. As we take life out of forests, we also take water. The logic seems hard to get around.
Grand Mesa, Colorado - one of my favorite places to hike way back in the '70s. After reading this I'm almost afraid to revisit this strange oasis in the high plateau country rising above the junction of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers, that it will have changed beyond recognition. It is a flat-topped mesa with steep heavily wooded sides (and Powderhorn ski area on northern flank). Hundreds (it seemed) of lakes spotted the table-like top, with remains of volcanic ridges (mossy and covered by ferns misted by streams) lined the higher trails. In the fall, the eastern flank was ablaze in gold with Aspens. A very magical place. Now I need to go dig up photos of the olden days.
The mesa seemed one of the lesser effected places, still very wet with lots of lakes, and mosquitos!. Although I remember taking a hike and seeing places where large trees had been cut into sections and just put in piles, for no reason I could discern. The national forests seems better off than the state ones. Still aspen groves on the east flank.
Rob - thank you so much for your beautiful, compelling writing. I have learned so much from your historical summaries of Millan Milllan and Ted Munn, and the way you weave the historical, the scientific, and the poetic.
Could you kindly share the link to the USDA report? The link is broken, and I am keen to share this with some people in the water sector to broader the term around 'water security'. Many, many thanks.
Beautiful essay and really powerful, unnerving ending.
Thanks, Sharon!
Even here in the tropics I feel we’re going to be seeing fires once the El Niño kicks in, the land gets so parched, people are so casual with their rubbish burning and never keep an eye on it smoldering away. And they’ve never had to worry about keeping an eye on it, it’s so green here and moist. But come this potentially long summer I feel this might change.
Thanks for the great essay Rob, I keep sharing your Millan Millan essays whenever I can, I think one of the most important things I’ve read in a long time. ❤️❤️❤️
Thanks, Leon. Whereabouts are you? Hope you get through the season without major fires.
I’m in the Philippines. I’m in an area which is mostly old rice fields and mixed orchards/coconut plantations and lots of poorly managed grasses that get pretty dry in the summer
I will now be abandoning the use of “vegetative evapotraspiration” in favor of “trees sweat.” Thank you for that, and this lovely piece.
Thank you for mentioning the fine work of Peter Wohlleben. The Hidden Life of Trees is a must read.
I too am bothered by the checkerboard of colored square managed forests seen from above flying over the northwest and at ground level driving through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Portions of Maine, Quebec, and New Brunswick suffer the same fate as do southern pine forests in Florida. It doesn’t take much of a trained eye to see the clearcut nakedness of the land a hundred feet beyond the narrow strip of trees along the roadway. Who do they think they’re fooling?
Not any less shocking are the monoculture farmed single species forests, with signs proudly proclaiming the date of the last and future clearcut harvest. Corn fields. Devoid of biodiversity and not even much in the way of any wildlife.
All of this called or should I say so-called a “renewable resource” by the timber industry. What they fail to realize is each successive deforestation, pesticide, replanting and chemical fertilizer, and harvest degrades not only the land and the forest as a whole but also the quality of the trees themselves. Poorer quality wood per volume, less structural strength, more snags and wastage, less disease and drought tolerant. It, like almost everything else humans touch in the name of economic progress and growth, is nothing more than a race to the bottom on a finite planet.
Thanks, Michael. Yes. Well put. When these "forests" burn, they are telling us something, but we're only allowed to hear the monotonous drumming about CO2. I just had this thought. Just as we've replaced complex forests with monocultures, we've replaced a complex climate story with a mono-narrative, CO2, CO2, CO2.
Hey Rob, I started reading your blog after you published this, so thanks for the link in your year end review!
I think most experts would agree that forests have been mismanaged in the past, and that current management is not always perfect. But it goes too far to say we should never manage the forests - native people did.
Also, due to mismanagement (clear cutting and fire exclusion) we now have forests that cannot adapt to current (let alone predicted) levels of climate change. Unfortunately we’ve even seen a lot of never-logged old growth forests burn.
I’m just arguing for a role for humans in fixing the mess we’ve made. But trying to sort out good management from bad takes a lot of nuance…
BTW, if you’re interested in a deep dive into Forest science and the debate about restoration thinning, this blog is a good place to start:
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/08/13/ten-common-questions-about-adaptive-forest-management-i-background-and-context/
Thanks, Conor, for your thoughtful comments. I'll check out the blog post you provided. I agree about "nuance." Every situation is different and hugely complex, and I am very much a learner here, rather than expert. I was interested in what Suzanne Simard had to say about growing up in an old time logging family, and how in the old days they used horses and selective thinning, with much less damage to the overall forest.
I'm not necessarily arguing against any kind of "management.," and agree there are places, not only forests, that have been so degraded they do need human help. I'm mostly referring to the plantation model of clear cut, spray/replant, cut again...which I think is killing forests.
In terms of forests not being able to adapt to current and future climate change, we have to be careful what we mean by climate change. There is generalized warming due to CO2 emissions, but there is physical degradation of hydrological cycles due to land disturbance. My suspicion is that forests are more challenged by our mutilation of them than what we put in the atmosphere, though that is obviously part of the picture.
Have you read Peter Wohlleben's The Power of Trees. He talks a lot forest intelligence and the need to support natural processes, rather than genetically engineer forms of adaptation that human thinking is too crude to fully understand.
If you know of any studies that shows trends in terms of what burns and what doesn't, please feel free to add links. My main point in Burning for Water is the realization of the Lakota phrase Mni Wicone--water is life/life is water. As we take life out of forests, we also take water. The logic seems hard to get around.
All best, Rob
Another great blog. This one talking about the creative role of fire: https://open.substack.com/pub/gabepopkin/p/recent-and-not-so-recent-works?r=izd8z&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Grand Mesa, Colorado - one of my favorite places to hike way back in the '70s. After reading this I'm almost afraid to revisit this strange oasis in the high plateau country rising above the junction of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers, that it will have changed beyond recognition. It is a flat-topped mesa with steep heavily wooded sides (and Powderhorn ski area on northern flank). Hundreds (it seemed) of lakes spotted the table-like top, with remains of volcanic ridges (mossy and covered by ferns misted by streams) lined the higher trails. In the fall, the eastern flank was ablaze in gold with Aspens. A very magical place. Now I need to go dig up photos of the olden days.
The mesa seemed one of the lesser effected places, still very wet with lots of lakes, and mosquitos!. Although I remember taking a hike and seeing places where large trees had been cut into sections and just put in piles, for no reason I could discern. The national forests seems better off than the state ones. Still aspen groves on the east flank.
Rob - thank you so much for your beautiful, compelling writing. I have learned so much from your historical summaries of Millan Milllan and Ted Munn, and the way you weave the historical, the scientific, and the poetic.
Could you kindly share the link to the USDA report? The link is broken, and I am keen to share this with some people in the water sector to broader the term around 'water security'. Many, many thanks.