Eco-Nalogies: On Fire

Pinus radiata, or the Monterey pine, is the most widely planted tree in the world. It grows fast, adapts well to temperate climates, and is often used as a prototypical Christmas tree. Its natural ranges, however, have dwindled to just a handful of dispersed stands. One day, these too will be gone, and we will be left only with the copy.

I visited one of these remaining stands as a Forestry student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The stand was in Cambria, near San Simeon along California's Central Coast, and our program had been granted special permission to enter and collect data for reporting back to the state. As I followed my classmates, curiously inspecting the diseased trees (they had been infected with pine pitch canker), I heard our teacher speak about how well these pines were adapted to fire, even severe ones that killed the rest of the accompanying flora. Sure enough, the pines were endowed with serrotinous cones, ones that wouldn’t even open up to release its seeds without the presence of the extreme heat associated with forest fires. I noticed that the landscape bore no signs of recent fire, and that even in this relative stronghold of native Monterey pine, none of the trees bore seedlings or were even especially young and vital. 

I asked my teacher if there would be a prescribed burn here soon, and she bittersweetly shook her head. “A prescribed burn, or even just a let-burn policy would be just the thing,” she explained, “but the people in Cambria and San Simeon aren’t for it. Their communities are too close to the forest and might burn down. Even if we handled things perfectly, implemented the burn in just the right climate, we could never honestly guarantee the safety of their homes.” She spoke as someone pushed to defend a position they did not actually hold. But I understood too that her points were all essentially true. There was a reason why they stopped using the term ‘controlled burn,’ and switched to ‘prescribed burn.’ Once a forest fire was started, there could be no definitively containing its spread. The fire that had recently gotten out of control in Montaña de Oro State Park could attest to that in full. 

“But there must be something to be done,” I protested to no one in particular. It was true that a prescribed burn could maybe affect the nearby town. But it was also undeniable that to do nothing would eventually bring about the extinction of the Monterey pine’s most significant remaining natural foothold. My teacher herself even acknowledged that a prescribed burn was surely the ‘right’ thing to do, in the narrowest sense of the word. But she understood better than I did all the countless political and bureaucratic hang-ups that would continue to prevent its implementation. So it goes. 

I have not been to that stand since 2015, and I do not know if the trees are even still alive. Maybe they are, but the seeds inside their cones have gone stale, and would not bear new seedlings even should a fire now sweep through. I suspect there would be articles about it had a new generation successfully taken root. 

Even now, having gained a fuller, more pragmatic understanding of the ways that various social circumstances can impede our ‘best remaining practices,’ I cannot help but feel personally slighted whenever I think about that stand. Whenever I see any fire-dependant stands, unable to replenish naturally because Smokey the Bear is just too efficient. Nowadays, it feels like all of California is aflame, only never in the right spots or severity. 

Fire is the ultimate leveler. Sure, some plant species have adapted to thrive from it, whether through serrotiny, stump-sprouting, fire-resistant bark, or any number of other strategies. Some environments, like coastal chaparral for instance, have a fire return interval of 10-20 years, whereas others in the Pacific Northwest might only burn every 200-plus years. Even so, all forests anticipate fire as a natural part of its ecosystem, no different than rain in the rainy season. We can’t stop the rain, but if we could I doubt that we would try. 

Fire is just different. Volatile, all-consuming, wild. As much as we are hypnotized by it when confined to a small, well-regulated pit, so too does it terrify us when it is not we who are in charge. It is never the ‘right time’ for a fire, socially-speaking. Nobody wants to sacrifice their home for the sake of a Monterey pine. But when we try to restrain nature, it has a way of taking its power back eventually. 

And after nearly a century of a national fire response that (understandably, if not correctly) prioritizes short-term human safety over the long-term health of our environment, nature has done just that. Our fires now are bigger than ever before, and can sometimes overwhelm even the most fire-adapted species. They burn too long and hot over the soil, leeching its nutrients; the fire-resistant bark gives way to powers beyond its range of mastery. Sure, a heating climate with prolonged drought surely has some degree of influence over this troublesome change. But at the core of our proneness to huge, destructive wildfires, sits our deep-seated aversion to little ones. 

This aversion extends far beyond the domain of fire. In general, we humans tend to avoid chaos, especially chaos of which we do not understand. More than profit, we seek that which is predictable; nothing throws a wrench into the machinery of Homo economicus like some good old fashioned chaos. But trying to halt change is like playing Whack-A-Mole with a dozen hammers. You can plug most of the holes at once, but eventually the mole is going to pop its head out somewhere. Like Oedipus leaving his home so as to avoid the fulfillment of a terrible prophecy, yet inevitably diverting himself right into its path, so too does our thirsting for stability only temporarily forestall, and ultimately worsen, the inevitable catastrophe. 

My point is not that our aversion to chaos is wholly bad, or that a readjustment toward the unpredictable would be wholly good, but only to suggest that our balancing between these opposing viewpoints has fallen out of whack. That its becoming out of whack is a natural and inevitable by-product of our growing civilization, not a bug in its system. No different from incurring interest on credit card debt, or paying double on a parking ticket after the due date. At least with personal procrastination and avoidance, we recognize that these are fundamentally destructive behaviors. It’s past time we applied that view to our natural world, as well. 

When the ‘mole’ of chaos rears its ugly head from underground, I do my best not to hammer it back down. To view each disruption not as the haphazard workings of some spiteful God, but as a benevolent warning to change my behavior before it leads to something worse. Like the mild fever that warns you to hydrate and eat well so that you don’t get sick, or the feeling of stress that nudges you to think over what is making you so anxious. When we heed the little fires of our lives, we increase our chances of surviving the big ones.