Review of Year One

Before we venture any deeper into the woods, we should look back and retrace the path we took to get here.

We began SOS Forests Year One by defining forests as vast tracts of native vegetation with an abundance of trees. Forests, we suggested, are something quite different from tree farms. Then we examined some of the features of forests, most notably their age structures.

Most remnant western forests are multicohort. That is, they have two distinct age groupings of trees. The older trees are few in number and have all the characteristics of open-grown trees. The younger trees are many in number and are obviously stand-grown.

We presented a question: how did these old trees come to be scattered amongst the young ones? Fuel loadings in multicohort forests are such that modern wildfires kill all the trees, old and young. Multicohort forests do not arise from the ashes of catastrophic forest fires. Our multicohort forests are somehow different than they used to be.  Modern forest development pathways have been altered and are unlike those of the past.

Continuing: There is only one common sense conclusion that can be deuced from the clues: according to pioneer journals, oral histories of Native Americans, and backdated tree age distributions, most western forests must have been and clearly were open and park-like 150 years ago. Then we hypothesized an ecological mechanism for this widespread, historic forest condition: anthropogenic fire.

At that point in Year One we turned back the clock and reviewed the history of vegetation from the Devonian to the Holocene, (covering 400 million years in a couple of weeks). Then we examined the Holocene in finer detail, with special emphasis on the Anthropogenic Fire Theory. We cited numerous authorities and added many references to the bibliography.

Unfortunately, our instructional rubric and train of thought were rudely interrupted again and again by current events. But we tried to use those events as teaching moments, and demonstrated how our forest institutions are failing to protect, maintain, and/or perpetuate our forests, and how politically-inspired junk science kills forests.

We offered the notion that grief verifies affection; that those who do not grieve for the former forest did not have affection for it prior to its demise.

Then we began a series called The Landscapes of Lewis and Clark. Our intention was to describe the forests the Corps of Discovery encountered and the effects of Native Americans tending our landscapes with anthropogenic fire for millennia.

We were again rudely interrupted, this time by an early and fierce fire season. And again we resolved to use it as a teaching tool, a demonstration of the effects of junk science and forest “unmanagement.” We tracked some specific fires, and got caught up in the awful tragedy of what turned out to be the worst fire season in 50+ years.

The lessons were harsh, online and on the fire line. We shared our grief, old and new. It wasn’t always pretty, but we hope this message got through: our forests are in crisis.

It is a fairly big crisis, too, in that our priceless heritage forests are going extinct.

The vegetation that grows back after catastrophic forests fires is not multicohort, is not open and park-like, is not maintained by anthropogenic fire, and is nothing like what was destroyed. What grows back will never get old. Our heritage forests are condemned to extinction by junk science-led junk policies that guarantee catastrophic fires on most forest acres every few decades.

We ended the year with an appeal to intelligent people to use their own powers of observation to confirm or deny the assertions we made during the year past, and to mount their own investigations along their own intellectual pathways, and to report their findings in the Blogosphere, and to thereby advance the intellectual evolution of Humankind. And maybe save a forest here and there, too.

Then we quoted a passage from a Steve Pyne book that summed up everything we said over the entire year in a sentence or two. Such is genius: brilliant but a little bit annoying at the same time. We are kidding; we are not annoyed by genius. In fact, all of Year One we leaned on the teachings of some of the best minds in forests and wildlife ecology in America today. Thank you, Dr. Pyne, and all the rest of you brainiacs.

And without the help and encouragement of some very special people, we could never have done it. Thank you. You know who you are. (We do not wish to implicate you by mentioning your names in this context, as a favor which you should appreciate if you don’t already).

And we thank you, dear readers, many of whom also helped a very great deal. Without you, we’d just be talking to ourselves.

In Year Two we will travel much the same path. We are going to look at the same subtopics, but in greater detail and with additional scientific rigor. SOS Forest readers will have to screw their thinking caps on a little tighter.

But we are going to have fun, more fun than last year, we hope. Fun should not be too hard to find, because forests are fascinating things. We think so, anyway, and we hope you do, too. So join in the merriment, shake and bake your fandango, and let’s explore our forests together.

And maybe, if we persevere, we can save a forest here and there while we’re at it.