Forest fires

[wxsby]

Just because you have never witnessed fire by natural causes doesn't mean it doesn't happen, barry!

Ask the people whose homes burned down because of lightning strike...

But the fires that have burned down all the homes here have been manmade... intentionally or not. I just don't buy the concept that these things that regularly happened over the centuries were strange anomalies instead of a rational plan by the locals to modify the environment for their convenience... or their survival. Do you really think they weren't capable of that? The natural brush here, seven years after the Cedar, is (I'm looking out my window at it) three to four feet high. Game would have a hard time grazing in it and, more importantly, it would be tough to hunt in it. Before the Cedar, it was anywhere from ten to twenty feet high. I think the stuff that grows here tops out at about that. Burn it off and you have wide open grasslands with occasional stands of oak... with cottonwoods in the streambeds. I've never been a real animal hunter but if my survival depended on it, that is what I think I'd prefer. I can see it being hard to swing an atlatl through head high brush.

[wxsby]

That could be true down south, but in NorCal after a big storm you can look across one valley and see multiple lightning caused fires. i've seen electrical storms in other desests, do they really not happen in SoCal?

Nothern California is an entirely different world... climate included, but not the most obvious. There are awesome lightning storms in the desert, but fire just doesn't leap from cactus to cactus. There are occasional thunderstorms in this area, but they are infrequent. They are more likely in an El Niño oscillation such as the one we are currently in, but during those, everything has been soaked for months and a real fire couldn't occur. We have not had any T-storms this year.

T-storms also occur in the July/August monsoon season when the hot wet air comes up off the Sea of Cortez into Arizona and new Mexico, but it rarely crosses the mountain barrier into the San Diego area. We usually have to drive up to the mountains to see that show off to the east. And there is really nothing to burn there.

The real fires occur in the fall when the big highs set up around four corners and the clockwise flow drives the wind down here, heating and drying it by compression as it descends thousands of feet. It comes over our mountains at hurricane force for a few days at a time. There are no clouds, no moisture, no mystical whirlwinds smashing rocks together... just the perfect storm for someone wanting to burn down a county or two. A little flint or rub a couple of sticks together... that's how I'd do it.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Just because you have never witnessed fire by natural causes doesn't mean it doesn't happen, barry!

Ask the people whose homes burned down because of lightning strike...

But the fires that have burned down all the homes here have been manmade... intentionally or not. I just don't buy the concept that these things that regularly happened over the centuries were strange anomalies instead of a rational plan by the locals to modify the environment for their convenience... or their survival. Do you really think they weren't capable of that? The natural brush here, seven years after the Cedar, is (I'm looking out my window at it) three to four feet high. Game would have a hard time grazing in it and, more importantly, it would be tough to hunt in it. Before the Cedar, it was anywhere from ten to twenty feet high. I think the stuff that grows here tops out at about that. Burn it off and you have wide open grasslands with occasional stands of oak... with cottonwoods in the streambeds. I've never been a real animal hunter but if my survival depended on it, that is what I think I'd prefer. I can see it being hard to swing an atlatl through head high brush.

Hunters need cover.
They wouldn't burn the brush.

Herders need open grassland.
They would burn the brush.

Pine cones need the heat of fire to spring open and disseminate their seeds. Without regular pine forest fires no healthy pine forests. Forest fires are indispensable for pine procreation. Fire is an integral part of the eco system. Fire belongs in nature.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine:

[...] the seeds are stored in closed ("serotinous") cones for many years until a forest fire kills the parent tree; the cones are also opened by the heat and the stored seeds are then released in huge numbers to re-populate the burnt ground. [...]

[Minimalist]

Forest fires are indispensable for pine procreation. Fire is an integral part of the eco system. Fire belongs in nature.

On an evolutionary scale, those traits would not develop overnight. It would have taken a long time which means that there had to be fires or natural selection would not have rewarded those traits.

Of course, there would have been no one to put the fires out if they did start from a lightning strike.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Forest fires are indispensable for pine procreation. Fire is an integral part of the eco system. Fire belongs in nature.

On an evolutionary scale, those traits would not develop overnight. It would have taken a long time which means that there had to be fires or natural selection would not have rewarded those traits.

Of course, there would have been no one to put the fires out if they did start from a lightning strike.

If there had been anyone, why would they have bothered to put out the fires? There weren't any posh suburbs, villages, or gated communities to burn down!
Fires were (are) the precursor – even the enabler – of fresh young grass and saplings. Fresh young grass and saplings attract grazers: prey animals. That, in turn, do a lot for seed distribution and fertilization.

[Minimalist]

Seeing the relative ineffectiveness of even modern fire-fighting in major brush fires it hardly matters if small HG groups would have tried or not.

Even today, fire-fighters are at the whim of the winds when they try to stop these things. Once they get going they seem to burn in the direction the wind pushes them until they run into an obstacle or run out of fuel. Which brings me back to my comment to Barry about there always being enough money to "fight" them but never enough to thin the brush ahead of time.

[kbs2244]

Actually RS hunters do need the brush cleared.
The “undergrowth” (misnamed because it is mostly dead branches) can get so thick that you cannot walk through it.
It can collect to the point that a 6 foot man cannot see over or through it.
And even at mid day it is dark due to the heavy overhead cover.
You cannot get a very good shot with a gun, bow, spear, or anything in those conditions.

My experience with this was in the US / Canadian Boundary Waters canoe area.
On the US side they clear and maintain the camp sites so you need to walk about 200 feet into the woods to find fire wood.
On the Canada side you are lucky to have a 8 foot wide stone beach between the water and the woods.
And you cannot walk into the woods deep enough to take a pee.
The tree line is like a British hedge.
A cow couldn’t get through it.

The accounts I have read about the Indian practice was that they didn’t try to stop them.
They set them on purpose and let them burn out on there own.
They seemed to know the wind patterns well enough to set them on the lee side of valleys so the wind would stop the fire when it reached the ridge.
Or on the up wind side of good sized water so the fire couldn’t jump the barrier.

But if it got out of control, so be it.
They were a mobile society.
They would just move on for a while and let it come back on it’s own.

[Minimalist]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 093300.htm


This seems like a timely find from the News page.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 093300.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world's oldest trees shows that California's western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to new research.

[wxsby]

Hunters need cover.
They wouldn't burn the brush.

Herders need open grassland.
They would burn the brush.

Pine cones need the heat of fire to spring open and disseminate their seeds. Without regular pine forest fires no healthy pine forests. Forest fires are indispensable for pine procreation. Fire is an integral part of the eco system. Fire belongs in nature.

Hunters couldn't hunt in impenetrable brush anymore than game animals could graze in it. The only game in it is rabbits, squirrels and birds. Not products of a productive hunt.

Pines? What pines?

[wxsby]

Of course, there would have been no one to put the fires out if they did start from a lightning strike.

It would have been absurd to try... but why would they if they started them to modify the landscape?

[wxsby]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 093300.htm


Sequoiadendron giganteum... my favorite flora. And I love backpacking the area where they grow. But what does that have to do with where I live and am talking about?

[wxsby]

Even today, fire-fighters are at the whim of the winds when they try to stop these things. Once they get going they seem to burn in the direction the wind pushes them until they run into an obstacle or run out of fuel.

They have traditionally started on the west side of the mountains in the fall, when the Santa Anas blow, and burn to the obstacle... the Pacific Ocean. Not much fuel there. The first Spanish explorers said they saw the big fires... and the stories say the Indians set them... in the earliest expiditions.

my comment to Barry about there always being enough money to "fight" them but never enough to thin the brush ahead of time.

Again, my answer... we ask that every year. A long time friend, a chief of Cal Fire (the station is behind my house... sort of... says if they got one tenth of the money for proscribed burns (an interesting term. They used to call them controlled burns, but after the one at Almagordo, they changed the name) as is spent on firefighting, we wouldn't have much of a problem. But proscribed burns don't make headlines and draw federal disaster money. Go figure.

[Minimalist]

Go figure.

That makes perfect sense in a screwed-up kind of way.

[wxsby]

That makes perfect sense in a screwed-up kind of way.

Not to those of us who live here.

[Digit]

Interesting debate this for two reasons, one it demonstrates to a degree how far people ae removed from a 'natural' way of life, and second it reminds me of an event some yers ago here in the UK.
My local Council were planning on clearing the underbrush from some derelict woodland, and the do gooders were up in arms!
I attended the public meeting and ended up virtually giving a lecture to the floor.
I had to explain that the woods they were familiar with were a managed ecology, that derelict woodland tended to be devoid of larger life forms and wild flowers accept where a tree had fallen. That the tree tops and the woodland edges were where you found the grazers, the wild flowers, the insects that used the flowers and the insectivores that fed on them.
It came as a revelation to the 'townie' conservationists.
The underbrush was cleared!
From that experience I have always harboured serious doubts about HSN ambushing large prey in European mixed woodland, I know nothing about west coast American woodlands so make no comment about that.

Roy.