Fire, Forestry, and Wilderness

From a desk in my home, I look out a window, over the roof of an outbuilding, into monsoon-soaked low hills of chaparral, scrub oak and Pinyon Pine. Between two knolls, I can see part of the formidable red and gray-hued rock formations of the southwest face of Granite Mountain. Making up the heart of the wilderness area carrying its name, Granite Mountain rises more than 2,200 feet above the valley in which I make home, creating a distinguishing backdrop for the nearby city of Prescott, Arizona. Along the steep slopes, I can see thousands of acres of blackened, bare stalks of Ponderosa Pine and ancient Alligator Juniper burned out in last year’s Doce Fire.

Fire has come to dominate our news and our fears in the West. Fire, though, is a natural force and, despite over a century of trying to control it, a critical element of many of the ecosystems we strive to protect through preservation and restoration. Fire has been vital to the process of restoring and cycling nutrients. Fire clears overly dense conifer forests for meadows, aspen, and new-growth conifer, creating the habitat diversity needed to sustain native species. Fire has also played a crucial role in controlling fire itself, keeping understory density and fuel loads low to prevent the mega-fires we see today. Combined with patterns of drought and climate change, decades of relatively successful wildland fire suppression have, perhaps ironically, come to be realized as one of the factors behind the growing extent and intensity of fires in the West.

The escalating call to manage Western forests by thinning and reducing fuel loads, mimicking, according to some, the historic effects of fire on the landscape, presents something of a dilemma for wilderness advocates. Under Arizona’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative, the Forest Service has partnered with community planners, the timber cutting industry, and some conservation organizations to actively ”treat,” through selective harvesting, a targeted 50,000 acres of Arizona forests a year in hopes of preventing the recent mega-fires that have turned forested areas to virtual moonscapes. Their efforts have been reported, albeit anecdotally, to have had some success. In the July 2014 San Juan fire in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, recent forest thinning treatments are credited by some to have kept the fire manageable and ”saved” the landscape from the kind of destruction seen in the nearby 2011 Wallow Fire.

A May 2003 High Country News feature notes, however, that there is consensus in the scientific community that “forest thinning and other mechanical treatments will never replace the role of fire” in restoring and sustaining forest health. Field studies conducted by Northern Arizona University and other researchers advocate a more balanced approach to true restoration, including the use of prescribed fire, to create more natural processes of forest renewal. Researchers also conclude that in the end, there are simply too many unknowns to support a headlong, fixed approach to managing forests for wildland fire reduction. The restoration of natural forest health and conditions will be a process of trial and error requiring adaptive management strategies. It will require management agencies to acknowledge that, despite the ghost of forest management pioneer Gifford Pinchot still shouting otherwise, some things may simply be beyond our ability to manage and control.

To set aside an area as wilderness is an act of respect for those limits, an act of humility and restraint. As even environmental historian William Cronon asserts in a pivotal 1996 essay challenging, to some, the emphasis on preserving pristine wild areas, “wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to dominate.” In wildland fire, we may find a parallel, yet severe, reminder to never take these wild places for granted. In fire, we are called to concurrently work to protect wild places and acknowledge, even embrace, that, despite our best intentions, there are some natural forces we cannot fully come to terms with, that there are some elements of nature, and of wildness, we cannot control.

This past spring, I hiked up Granite Mountain with several people who have had a much longer relationship with the place than I’ve had. I respect the sadness and anger they expressed as they came upon the burned out trunks of iconic juniper left from a fire caused by what has been reported as the most blatant of human negligence and ignorance. I could offer little solace in noting the emergent green growth amidst the ash and the tapping of Hairy Woodpeckers digging for insect larva in the burned trunks. This evening, I watch out the window over my desk as Granite Mountain is wrapped in rain and lightning. I am looking forward to getting up there in the coming days to see what new signs of life the recent rain has brought.

Additional Reading

For a range of viewpoints on Arizona’s forest restoration and wildfire issues, see also the following links. While AWC may agree with some of these perspectives and disagree with others, it’s important for this dialogue to move forward.

• "Lost in the Woods: How the Forest Service is botching its biggest restoration project." by Claudine LoMonaco, High Country News (September 2014)
• "Senators say slow thinning is damaging forest industry" by Brenna Goth, Arizona Republic (October 17, 2014)