Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[richard green <greenrw71@hotmail.com>]

I am far too young, LOL..Ok so I do remember it..Ive seen first hand Custer state park in South Dakota after its fire.

Rick

 

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Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 22:35:09 -0800
From: firekeeper38@yahoo.com
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Fire cycles and deforestation

Yes, I have also long suspected that some of those deserts very absent of life were made so by some human agency.  Surely, tho, you understand the differences between unnaturally made deserts that are mostly dead and lack an associated ecosystem and an old desert where the bioregion is filled with ancient, well adapted flora and fauna tucked into every available eco-niche?  I don't think you looked much at the info I sent.    Not surprising, your situation is so extreme in the over-kill direction.   The link I sent that is closest to Ireland's ecology suggests very long intervals between natural fires.  In the Americas, the tribes attached burns to specific weather events to limit their range.  The intent was not to reduce the forestation but to strengthen it and some recent researchers have speculated that the health of the forests was artificially maintained, this way, well past the time in which the retreat of the last Ice Age would normally have caused it to change to another kind of ecology.  I suppose because the forests collapsed so quickly in the face of colonial incursions and diseases.  It seems a speculative line of theory tho they have to have some evidence to have bothered to publish.

 

Oh, and Rick, yes. Much to their distress, the people who have chased natural and unnatural fires for the last 80 years have found that the fires that break out during droughts had gotten worse due to the build up of dead materials. Do you remember the '88 fire in Yellowstone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988  http://www.fws.gov/fire/living_with_fire/

 

Yours, Pego

 

<<I do not think it can easily be disproved that all the great deserts in the world came about by fire. The Sahara and the Gobi at least have remnants that indicate they were forested once and inhabited by people.

Here in Ireland we have Gorse as a fire plant ......I had slopes covered with it 20-25 years ago and I did not burn and my gorse is dying these last five years to be replaced by succulent grass and blackberries with a seedling tree here and there. If I did not have my animals graze these places it would turn eventually in an oak wood which is the natural climax vegetation here.john>>

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