Doesn’t a big arson fire suggest that the forest had a lot of deadwood that needed to be burned out anyway?
And if you hear there is overcrowding in a city, murder is the obvious logical next step to take.
No.It just means it’s it’s a dry period and the vegetation burns easily. I doesn’t mean there is to much vegetation.
What I’m saying is that if a forest is in such a condition that it only takes a spark to set it ablaze, is there something necessarily bad about it being set aflame on purpose? Are the consequences worse if some jackass sets the fire than if a random lightning strike starts it?
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Natural fires tend to occur as a result of lightning strikes, and hence at a specific time of year. Anthropogenic fires occur out of season which the ecosystem isn’t adapted to and cause ecological damage as a result.
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Related to 1. Lightning tends to be caused by storms, so natural fires tend to be cooler and of shorter duration than anthropogenic fires, which some idiot usually lights in the hottest and driest part of the year. So you get hot fires covering large areas. This isn’t good.
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Natural fires occur randomly, which means that they have a long cycle, usually 5-50 years between blazes, and they produce a mosaic across the landscape. Animals and plants can use the unburned areas as refugia from which to recolonise the burned plots. Anthropogenic fires occur whenever some dickhead is bored and the weather is warm. That means that they occur frequently and they will recurrently affect those areas most frequented by people. Those areas never get a chance to recover.
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Natural fires are rare and they tend to come with a warning. Fires need an ignition source, which usually means lightning. That means that fire services an monitor areas under a storm path for spot fires. It also means that they are unlikely to be faced with a fire that starts on a 3 mile front that then links up to other fires to produce a a 50 mile front. In contrast anthropogenic fires are completely unpredictable and they are inevitably started across a large front, often by multiple morons. That makes the job of controlling them much, much more difficult.
That’s fairly simplified rundown, but it covers the main points.
Essentially it’s like arguing that since deer are killed by predators naturally, whats the harm in having a year round open season on deer.
Huh? Burning wood is murder now?
He may be referring to the fact that in this last LA fire, two Firefighters died in the arson caused fire.
Good post, btw.
It puts an additional burden on fire-fighting resources. They have to fight the arson’s fire, including great expense and possible loss of life . . . ***in addition to ***the naturally-occurring ones.
If we could hold mother nature accountable for fires we would. As we can hold people accountable for man made fires we do.
Every time smoke jumpers stop a fire they are in reality postponing the inevitable IMO.
That is unless the area is managed properly after the meddling.
There was a big fire here in MN a couple years ago and a Washington DC resident caused it. The federal prosecutors had their way with him until he could no longer handle it and took his life.
His camp fire got away from him.
And he lied to a forest service officer!
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/12/17/family_says_man_charged_in_gunflint_wildfire_loved_minnesota/
Good riddance to him!
I had friends who lost much of their farm, and some of their animals, in this fire that he caused.
And your summary soft-peddles his actions.
- It wasn’t a campfire that got out of hand, but a trash fire. (Burning trash is not allowed in Minnesota, unless you have a burning permit.)
- A burning ban was in effect at that time, due to the dry conditions.
- He obstructed justice by repeatedly lying to the officer, first denying that there had been any fire, than that the fire had been his, then that he had ever left it burning unattended, etc.
Perhaps where he is now there is enough fire for him.
Oh, good grief. My point was exactly the same as the one you made. A deliberate act of meaningless untargeted violence is not the same thing as either natural fire-starting forces at work or a controlled burn done by experts. There are better solutions to overcrowding than random murders; there are better solutions to uncut brush than arson. Neither murder nor arson are justified just by conditions being less than ideal.
I really wasn’t trying to make it sound like he was faultless. He made a very big mistake caused by either poor judgment or criminal intent.
That was never determined, but the point I was attempting to make was the federal prosecutor’s had their way with him. They didn’t care what the circumstances of the fire were, they threw the book’s at him.
And that every time a fire is suppressed and not managed to reduce the chance of it happening again like is done in the BWCA and many other places ,we all share in the results.
My position is let’er burn or harvest**.**
Obviously you place worldly possessions before human life.
As for eternal damnation, Who are we to judge?
Arson is natural (since there was discussion that it is somehow not).
It is natural but preventable (to some degree on how we deal with arsonists or those inclined to do such things).
In much of the Western US, this is not true. Native people used to routinely burn forests for a variety of reasons, and this is the fire cycle that the forest ecosystems are adapted to. Areas that traditionally got more human use are indeed adapted to much shorter fire intervals and presumably the native people didn’t check the long-term forecast before they burnt.
The trouble is that in the meantime we’ve built houses and other things in the forest which we’d prefer weren’t periodically burnt, so it is in our best interests that they don’t burn or are burnt in a controlled manner. So for preventing fires that cause property damage or loss of human life, your post would be right. But as far as the forest health and diversity is concerned, arsonists are great.
Here’s a good link about SoCal and chaparral fire:
http://www.californiachaparral.com/chaparralmyths.html
We need some information on this. What Indians burned what areas, and what percentage of those areas, at what times? California has not been controlled by Indians for hundreds of years. Are any forests still adapted to those cycles after that amount of time?
You can’t make a blanket statement about an area that large. I’m not denying that some forests were burned at some times. What I want are some cites about the specifics of these burns and their relevance to the current fires.
Here’s an article that deals with the central and southern CA coastal range areas (PDF): http://www.werc.usgs.gov/seki/pdfs/jbiogeography2002.pdf
I’m not as familiar with California, but in the Northern Rockies, tree ring analysis shows burn intervals of around 5-10 years in areas known to be heavily used by native peoples, with intervals more in the 30-50 range for more out of the way areas. Various models have shown that the shorter figure is basically impossible with only “natural” starts. A lot of these places that were used to burning every 5-10 years haven’t burned since European settlement (and especially since the policy of aggressive fire suppression started in the 1910’s) and so they have a lot of old dead trees and poor diversity and are basically tinderboxes.
I’m not saying that the lone pyromaniac should be a part of modern forest management (for reasons of preservation of property and human life), but it should be recognized that there’s really nothing special about “natural” versus “anthropogenic” fires as far as the ecosystem is concerned.
EDIT: Looking at the site HawksPath posted and looking up the post, I’ll add that my comments would more apply to conifer forests and not necessarily the sorts of environments that the current catastrophic fires in the LA area are burning in.
If lightning is as rare in southern California as it is here in coastal northern California, I would guess that almost all southern California fires are set by man - accidentally or otherwise.
You’re trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, and doing a poor job of it.
Firstly if you even take a cursory look at the OP you will see that we are discussing natural versus anthropogenic fires. Yes Indians lit fires but, believe it or not, Indians are humans too. Indian fires are every bit as anthropogenic as fires lit by Frenchmen or Zulus.
Secondly while the systems may have adapted (read “everything that can be exterminated has been”) to Indian burning regimes, the point is that they are adapted to Indian burning regimes. Changes in that regime are every bit as catastrophic as changes to a natural regime to which they are adapted. There’s enough evidence for that fact to bury a horse under.
Finally the Indians indisputably did indeed check the weather conditions before burning. They stood to loose a hell of a lot more than modern Americans if they stuffed up the burning regime. They would starve to death. That’s not to suggest that every Indian fire was carefully planned, but in a great many places, particularly area of high population density, they were very carefully and deliberately set according to a prescribed regime. The idea that any people would simply set fires willy-nilly next to their own towns is beyond comprehension.
Absolute nonsense.
Did you read the article you cited? I looked at it. It makes a case that, perhaps, maybe, given some conclusions based on the lack of alternative evidence, Indians once set fires in coastal California.
That was a given. The article makes no case for a “fire cycle that the forest ecosystems are adapted to” or “shorter fire intervals” or anything else you claimed in your initial post. The author also looked mainly at pre-Columbian patterns, which would make them irrelevant for any pattern of fire activity today, as I also stated earlier.
Finding a hit on Google is not the same as a cite.
This isn’t as egregious as “arsonists are great” but it’s not true either. The two show entirely dissimilar patterns of activity, frequency, severity, timing, location, range, and scope. You might as well compare irrigation to floods or beaver dams to the Boulder Dam. Yes, more of those dratted metaphors, but metaphors are designed to get your mind off a narrow path and see the, um, forest instead of the trees.