<\/p>\n
On a hot summer afternoon in 2011, a gust of wind blew an aspen into a power line in northern New Mexico\u2019s Jemez Mountains. Electrical sparks ignited the Las Conchas Fire, which burned more than an acre a second in its first 14 hours, eventually covering 245 square miles.<\/p>\n
The fire burned reservation land of four Pueblo tribes and much of Bandelier National Monument. It destroyed more than 60 homes in total and came frighteningly close to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Some 90 miles south in Albuquerque, the Rio Grande flowed black.<\/p>\n
Las Conchas is the type of conflagration lawmakers point to when they talk of reforming wildfire management. Many agree that getting a handle on the West\u2019s wildfires means more logging on public lands, but they disagree on how to do it. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, wrote in an op-ed that the West\u2019s wildfires could be \u201ccontained and even prevented\u201d if environmental groups stopped litigating and logging continued unencumbered. But many Democrats blame factors such as climate change and growing fire fuel loads for the increasing length and severity of Western wildfires. Instead of overturning environmental protections, Rep. Ra\u00fal Grijalva, D-Ariz., said at a recent hearing, \u201cCongress should fix the wildfire budget. That\u2019s the issue.\u201d Meanwhile, the West burns.<\/p>\n
The best way forward from this impasse may be found, intriguingly, in New Mexico\u2019s past. For millennia, people thrived in northern New Mexico\u2019s fire-prone ecosystems. Their lessons could help resolve today\u2019s urgent debate over smart logging. As land managers try to resurrect logging practices very similar to the methods used for centuries by Ancestral Pueblo people, the state could serve as a model for creating fire-safe communities throughout the West.<\/p>\n
For more than 12,000 years, humans have inhabited the Jemez Plateau, a landscape of forested mountains, rolling grasslands and deep canyons. Beginning in the 13th century, ancestral Jemez people built villages of 50 to more than 1,000 rooms in the region\u2019s ponderosa pine forests. By 1600, between 5,000 and 8,000 people lived on the mesas, in approximately 10 large villages. They were the original inhabitants of what planners today would call a wildland-urban interface, or WUI. Yet even at the height of the Jemez Plateau\u2019s pre-European settlement, no communities burned down \u2013 a startling contrast to today\u2019s big Western burns. Over the past few years, archaeologists, fire ecologists and tribal members have traced the region\u2019s intertwined history of communities and conflagrations, seeking to understand why.<\/p>\n
What they have found is that the villages\u2019 ancestral Jemez residents essentially practiced selective logging. Life on the Jemez Plateau required all the fine fuels that villagers could get their hands on. In roof construction alone, villagers cut hundreds of thousands of small-diameter timbers for supportive vigas, while understory growth went for fuelwood. Outside of villages, trails and agricultural fields acted as firebreaks.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople really manipulated fuels just by living on the mesas,\u201d says fire ecologist Thomas Swetnam. More fires burned on the Jemez Plateau than today, but they were very small and rarely became destructive crown fires. A fire usually burned a single tree or agricultural field before burning out. In fact, studies of the fire scars on centuries-old living trees, as well as carbon remains from long-gone forests, suggest that megafires could not have burned: The combination of frequent small fires and selective logging used up too much fuel.<\/p>\n
But the fire regime of the plateau depended on the people of the plateau, and the arrival of the Spanish devastated local communities. In just six decades \u2013 between 1620 and 1680 \u2013 Jemez Pueblo declined catastrophically, from about 6,500 people, to fewer than 850 survivors of famine, disease and warfare. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Southwestern Pueblo tribes united to fight off the Spanish, after which surviving Jemez tribal members either relocated or were forcibly taken to Spanish missions. New tree growth crept into emptied villages as walls crumbled.<\/p>\n
Fire suppression on the mesas began in earnest in the 1870s, when thousands of sheep and cattle were shipped in by rail. In the early 20th century, most of northern New Mexico\u2019s forests were logged, leaving only rare old-growth stands in wilderness areas and national parks. The U.S. Forest Service suppressed wildfires to support logging, increasing fuel loads even more. Even today, fires make Westerners in the WUI uneasy and tend to be suppressed quickly. And so fuels accumulate, and as the West becomes hotter and drier, megafires become more frequent. Nothing burns \u2013 until a hot, dry year, when everything does. Jemez Plateau fire-scar data tracks the shift in burn patterns from small, frequent blazes, to today\u2019s climate-linked scorchers.<\/p>\n
Released from fire, dense ponderosa stands have grown on the plateau\u2019s logged mesas. In some places, 5,000 to 10,000 ponderosa pines grow in just one acre; century-old trees are only a few inches thick. \u201cThey\u2019re very abnormal trees,\u201d Swetnam says. Nothing grows underneath them because the light can\u2019t get through. These doghair stands produce the hottest crown fires. From the ashes, clonal shrublands of Gambel\u2019s oak and thorny New Mexico locust sprout, outcompeting ponderosas to dominate the landscape. More flammable shrublands appear with each big fire. Botanists don\u2019t yet know when \u2013 or if \u2013 anything else will replace them.<\/p>\n
Some northern New Mexicans are trying to make their communities fire-safe once more, in part through forest management strategies similar to those of ancestral Jemez people. The Forest Stewards Guild, a Santa Fe-based forestry nonprofit, calls its method \u201cecological forestry.\u201d Working with land managers, crews selectively log a forest \u2013 for lumber that can be sold, if that is the landowner\u2019s preference \u2013 then follow with controlled burns. The goal is not to erase fires from fire-evolved landscapes. Instead, if all goes well, future fires will burn in ways that humans can abide, such as by moving slowly and burning low to the ground. Guild director Zander Evans says that such pre-burn treatments usually mean \u201cthe difference between saving a house or community or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thin the forest in a historically relevant way that is trying to restore (forest) structure and function, and we follow up with fire,\u201d Evans says. \u201cThose treatments can change wildfire behavior.\u201d The aim is to re-create communities of large trees scattered within fuel-free understories, similar to what historically grew on the landscape. Because this would mean fewer trees competing for water, the forests will, ideally, be healthier overall, and better able to adapt to the drying conditions of a warming climate.<\/p>\n
Tying fire management to lumber profits is difficult at best in places like the Jemez Plateau. New Mexico\u2019s forests aren\u2019t lush enough to grow small-size timber as a renewable resource \u2013 and even in places where trees regrow quickly, the market for understory growth may not exist. \u201cThere are some people who have done some amazing things taking that small-diameter wood and figuring out ways to make it at least pay its way out of the woods,\u201d Evans says. \u201cAround here (in Santa Fe) we make fences out of it, and you can use it for firewood, but it\u2019s tough.\u201d Because the guild\u2019s mission includes trying to help local economies, it will also log larger trees. But at the end of the day, to avoid the kind of big fires that lay waste to lumber of all sizes, the guild focuses on removing the small fuels. Fire-wary locals who pay for logging even when the wood is of no marketable value may simply burn the woodpiles on-site.<\/p>\n
Swetnam supports \u201clogging from below,\u201d or removing small-diameter understory trees, followed by controlled burning. \u201cWe should keep the big trees as much as possible,\u201d he says. There are so few left after a century of logging, and they are seed sources for the forests of the future. When it\u2019s necessary to take large trees, Swetnam encourages using the wood to support the local economy, as the guild and Jemez Pueblo are doing: They are collaborating to restore fire resilience to the Jemez Plateau, in part by milling lumber on the tribe\u2019s land.<\/p>\n
But Swetnam is less concerned about making money than he is about solving what he calls the region\u2019s \u201cfire-drought.\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s because he thinks about the Jemez Plateau WUI on the scale of millennia, not months. \u201cMy own feeling is that we\u2019re long overdue for this investment,\u201d he says. \u201cWhether or not we make a useable product is a secondary concern.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article was first published on hcn.org.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Researchers look to the past to better fight fire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[21,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-102466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102466"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=102466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}