Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] How The West Was Lost

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] How The West Was Lost
  • Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:43:05 -0600


How The West Was Lost
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175405/tomgram%3A_chip_ward%2C_fire%27s_manifest_destiny/
By Chip Ward 16 June, 2011

Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim
reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it
is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than
4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider
those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke
signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some
future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.

Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the
Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across
the West, but the fire remained “zero contained” for most of last week and
only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools
like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high
rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is
so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that
cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not
your grandfather’s forest fires.

Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to
property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in
California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing
ever more crowded. However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from
microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more
popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds -- already hard-pressed
to cope with the rapidity of climate change -- will be catastrophic.

The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything
in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary. Nonetheless, we have been
experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of
the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants
either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture.
Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows
the plants -- if it can.

Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in
their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather
patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed
germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted. The
challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.

And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes)
isn’t enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously
reduced and fragmented habitats. In other words, wildlife already thrown off
the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former
habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes
with a crackle and a blast.

As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that
thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear. A forest
fire is a monster you can see. It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for
days on end. You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary
documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away.
If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large
animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you’re going to get
them to safety. If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you
check on them.

And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and
sneeze fitfully. After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost
everyone you meet has a headache. You know that when it is over, even if
you’re among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and
share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places,
of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of
the deep woods.

Cue the Inferno

These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine.
Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these
phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are
more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today,
wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.

Global warming, global weirding, climate change -- whatever you prefer to
call it -- is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of
a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.

The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean
currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers
of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result
vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage
in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are
becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it’s monster hurricanes and in
the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In
the East it’s those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.

But in the West, we just burn.

Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging
environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting
the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated. According to
Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist,
the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.

Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light
shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move
through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting
the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process. Then, in
the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the
forest canopy. As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees
were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like
highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in
cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to protect the over-stocked
timber that generated revenues and profits.

All this set the stage for catastrophe. Next, a decade of drought weakened
millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw
them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter
than normal, are not as cold. Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild
enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often
able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding
dramatically. Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have
turned from green to brown.

Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes
comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are
dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched
south-facing slopes. Cue the inferno.

If you live in the West, you can’t help wonder what will burn next. Eastern
Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and
likely candidates. Montana’s Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to
ignite. Colorado’s Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up
in flames anytime. Wally Covington estimates that a total of about
half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size
of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires. As ex-governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California’s turn to burn, the
fire season is now 365 days long.

The Fire Next Time

That may explain why ”smoke season” began so early this year, overlapping the
spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and
readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was
an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200% to 700% of the normal
snowpack (“normal” being an ever more problematic concept out here). Spring
weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable. Last year we had
record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May. This year it was unusually
cold and damp. The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is
now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once.

So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah,
river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater
excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because
they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try.
In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous.
Basement pumps are humming across the state. Reservoirs were emptied ahead of
the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is
enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over.
Utah Governor Gary Herbert went on television to urge parents to keep
children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away. Seven
children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.

The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, “No more water, the
fire next time.” In the West we know that it is not actually a question of
either/or, because they go together. First, floods fuel growth, then growth
fuels fires, then fires fuel floods. So all that unexpected, unpredicted
moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush
undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by
beetles, and dying. You may visit us this summer and see all that new green
vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking
tinderbox. If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and
dry, as she surely will, fire will follow.

When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and
slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated. If the fire is
intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods
will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will
clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate
floods. That’s how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days
when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic
relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable. Today, it
is not.

It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global
warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while
the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion
that the planet is getting hotter. But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we
are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is
overheating. We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.

Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water
filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the
operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans. For thousands of
years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that
generally vary modestly from year to year. The agricultural system that has
fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings
that were familiar and expectable.

Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded
field. Signs that life’s operating systems are swinging chaotically from one
extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our
carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems
under stress.

In the process, we’ll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about.
For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after
the next, was the nation’s Manifest Destiny. We eliminated the Indians and
the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging
rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually
filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.

The Wild West was tamed. In fact, we didn’t hesitate to overload its carrying
capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as
growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in
Las Vegas. We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for
toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations. The
sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles
helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire. The iconic
landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and
brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the
limitations of other peoples -- or even of nature itself.

But whatever we preferred to think, the limits have always been there. Nature
has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil. The atmosphere
can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable. When
you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay,
which means that monster fires are here to stay.

After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier
of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was
assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and
Afghanistan. On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of
desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny -- and the
West is ours to lose.
______________________
A former grassroots organizer and librarian, Chip Ward, TomDispatch regular,
writes from Torrey, Utah. He is the author of two books, Canaries on the Rim:
Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the
American Land. His essays can be found by clicking here. To listen to Timothy
MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global
“weirding,” click here, or download it to your iPod here.





  • [Livingontheland] How The West Was Lost, Tradingpost, 06/16/2011

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page