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2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

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Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#171

Post by brudgers »

gdubs wrote: post #99

I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!” Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — a…

Part of this is because the yearly burns the Native American Indians did to maintain the habitat

On the evolutionary scale of the coastal redwood ecosystem, those burns are insignificant. Intellectually, the argument is romantic. Some nobler previous state of human existence. It's rooted in an anthropocentric view, not a scientific one. The physics of fire today are no different than the physics of a million years ago and the Santa Cruz mountains have been around for millions of years longer than humans.

The redwoods survived because they weren't logged. Simple but unsatisfying.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#172

Post by rconti »

greentimer wrote: post #107

Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagna…

[citation needed]

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#174

Post by hinkley »

Stupulous wrote: post #154
hinkley wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge that the forests of California are more than 12000 years old, yes. We have very little information on what those looked like [and some of that was systematically suppressed by the people who wrote the history books]. What we have is documentation of forests that were already under active but low-intensity cultivation for almost 10,000 years before someone with pen and paper saw them [and decided that a…

Because races aren't genetically distinct in any substantial way, and Eurasian and African climates match North and South American ones, indigenous societies in the Americas would presumably follow the same trajectory as the indigenous societies elsewhere. This is not to absolve colonialists of guilt for the horrific consequences of their actions. 'If I didn't, someone else would' is not a moral justification. But if…

I'm not an anthropologist but the ideology mismatch was more than just race. Colonialism is, to me, a gumbo of nationalism, classism, religion, seasoned with a generous helping of some other ideologies, like our flavor of mastery over nature.

I will challenge your conclusion though, at least in a qualified manner. We do preserve things that we understand better before the option to exploit them arises. But. We do tend to understand things by taking them apart like children. And like children, we often lack the sophistication to put them back together again for a long time. But the clocks, radios and wind-up cars we disassembled as children were inanimate objects. Vivisecting living things/systems has a little bit different moral gravity.

But we are where we are. The best we can do is say "we fucked up, how do we fix it?" and start trying to listen, even if much of that listening now has to be through historical anthropologists.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#175

Post by ummonk »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #121
gdubs wrote: post #99

I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of “see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!” Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — a…

trees used to be used as wind breaks for farms, would it be possible to do some geo-engineering to prevent fires from spreading through passive design like gaps or roadways or something?

I mean Santa Rosa got hit by fire after flames jumped the multi-lane I-5 freeway a few years ago, so I don’t think small gaps / roadways accomplish anything in some of these fires.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#176

Post by hinkley »

hinkley wrote: post #145
matt-attack wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious. You’re telling me that the nomadic tribes of the Native Americans, who never built a single city nor developed any appreciable technology somehow tended to the vast millions of acres of California’s forests?

Tending the Wilds answers this. The nomadic tribes mostly had an exclusive zone from the mountains to the sea, and moved back and forth seasonally, doing maintenance work to guarantee a good harvest of food and crafting materials the following year. Quite a bit of selection of fire resistant food species (eg, Cammas bulbs, which require meadows)

Specifically in the case of cammas bulbs, the harvesting method was quite precise in its imprecision. The tool for gathering bulbs was basically a polished stick, which means that digging up a cluster of bulbs misses all of the offsets and a few of the larger bulbs. But the act of levering them out pushes the remaining bulbs outward from the center of mass, giving them more room to divide.

They also apparently gathered at flowering time, something you don't usually see in conventional agriculture. TtW suggests that this is because of Death Cammas - a hepatotoxic doppelganger with a completely different flower, that would be in the public interests to irradicate from your fields.

Cammas experts claim only an idiot would confuse the two, but harvest is a group activity. Some of those 'idiots' would be your kids or elders with failing eyesight.

I knew a guy who is trying to re-establish cammas from remnant native meadows who thinks the real reason is metabolic. That the fraction of inulin (one of the starches that make you fart) during flowering is lower, and hence they require less intensive food prep. Lewis and Clark apparently sampled underprepared cammas during their journey and spent a very unpleasant night because of it.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#177

Post by ummonk »

matt-attack wrote: post #137
hinkley wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Naturally“ is a mental trap we have walked ourselves into, with John Muir leading the charge. There is not and never has been in recorded history, a “natural” forest in California. They were anthropomorphic, but in a manner the Western eye refused to see. The indigenous peoples were not a bunch of ignorant riffraff living in a forest paradise wrought by God or Nature. They were the forest paradise, and when they wer…

I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious. You’re telling me that the nomadic tribes of the Native Americans, who never built a single city nor developed any appreciable technology somehow tended to the vast millions of acres of California’s forests?

I assume you mean specifically native Californians right? Because native Americans built spectacular cities in Mexico and Central America.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#178

Post by ummonk »

gdubs wrote: post #97
DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

Redwoods not only survive the fires, they tend to proliferate afterwards. After lesser trees have been cleared out by the fires, redwood seedlings take root. Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not. I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?" https://www.s…

Not all fires are created equal. While fires are a natural part of many ecosystems, many of today’s fires are more powerful and become “ladder fires” where a build-up of fuel on the ground causes the fire to reach the crowns and cause severe damage to even fire-resistant species.

Old redwoods have high canopies and prevent smaller trees / shrubbery from growing so they’re naturally unlikely to succumb to ladder fires. Also, they can regrow the canopy if it does burn.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#179

Post by ummonk »

01100011 wrote: post #34
URSpider94 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concerning issue with this fire is that humans have spent most of the last 100 years suppressing wildfires in these forests. This leads to an unprecedented amount of fuel built up on the forest floor, which leads to abnormally large and hot wildfires. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be too much for the redwoods, though time will tell.

I've heard this argument a lot and it makes sense, but on the other hand isn't there a maximum limit to the amount of fuel(carbon?) that can accumulate? Fungus and detritivores must certainly play some role, no? Doesn't the shade provided by the big trees place some limit on what can grow beneath?

Yes very much so. And you notice it the minute you enter an old growth redwood forest - suddenly the forest floor becomes largely barren of shrubbery and small trees, because the redwoods are soaking up the sunlight and nutrients.

Re: 2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park

#180

Post by ummonk »

hanniabu wrote: post #9
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #4

“Withstand” is a funny word. Forests need fire. Fire is destructive to the organs (flora and fauna) but beneficial to the organism (a forest). I’m thinking of all of the sequoia seeds, now germinated from the fire[1], that will sprout next year into full sunlight that hasn’t touched the forest floor in hundreds of years. It is sad though that it’s also destructive to the lives of so many people. May everyone find saf…

> It is sad though that it’s also destructive to the lives of so many people. Eh, maybe it's just me but I've always felt worse for the animals than the people.

Probably just you.
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