Cattle and deer graze together on the Cochetopa National Forest in Colorado. USFS photo from a 1938 slide show.

A Nevada state Assemblyman has written an op-ed piece for the Winnemucca, Nevada Silver Pinyon Journal about livestock grazing and its relationship to wildfires. Assemblyman Ira Hansen, who is a licensed master plumber and owns a plumbing and heating business, is running for reelection and is not afraid to express his opinions. Here are some excerpts from his article in the February 22 edition of the newspaper:

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“At our January 27, 2012 Public Lands Committee meeting, a briefing paper by Bob Sommer, Fire Staff Officer for the Humboldt – Toiyabe National Forest, U.S. Forest Service, was read into the record. A single paragraph caught my eye: “…in 2007, the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension Service issued a report titled “Northeastern Nevada Wildfires 2006, part 2 – Can livestock grazing be used to reduce wildfires? They concluded “…livestock grazing is not a panacea for wildfire reduction on Northern Nevada rangelands.”

I had read the 2006 UNR report mentioned and recalled a quite different conclusion. In fact, the UNR report reads: “Can livestock grazing reduce the risk of large recurring wildfires? In a word yes, but with limitations…In site specific situations, livestock can be used as a tool to lower fire risk by reducing the amount, height and distribution of fuel. Livestock can also be used to manage invasive weeds in some cases and even to improve wildlife habitat. This under-utilized tool (emphasis mine)…”

In short, while grazing is not a “panacea”, (which means “cure-all”) it is a valuable tool and in the opinion of the authors of the 2006 UNR report an “under-utilized” tool as well.

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Also to consider is the business end of fires. As James Young, UNR range scientist for 43 years noted, “Fire suppression [has become] a multi-million dollar business that reaches from the rangelands of Nevada to corporate America It is not in everyone’s interest to biologically suppress the cheatgrass-wildfire cycle on Nevada rangelands.”

Today hundreds if not thousands are employed in a government funded range fire industry that was a token of what we see today when compared to only a little over a decade ago. The BLM/Forest Service fire budget is now in the hundreds of millions, and a range reseeding/recovery industry has been spawned as well, all relying paradoxically on a continuation of range fires. A conflict of interests exists; the successful long term solving of the million acre fires means the elimination of employment for this dramatically expanded bureaucracy.”

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A motorcyclist riding a Yamaha FJR 1300 on a lonely highway in Nevada, August 16, 2011. Photo by Marsha Rogers

Reconstruction of actual site 3 of a peat-forming forest of earliest Permian age that was preserved by a volcanic ash-fall near Wuda, Inner Mongolia, China.

In the United State when we think of an old-growth forest, it may be 100 or 200 years old. Researchers in China have discovered a preserved forest that was buried by volcanic ash 298 million years ago. The trees and other vegetation were buried over a period of days by huge quantities of ash, much like the humans, animals, and buildings that were found in Pompeii in 1749 after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Here is an excerpt from an article in the University of Pennsylvania Penn News:

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“PHILADELPHIA — Pompeii-like, a 300-million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China. A new study by University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn and colleagues presents a reconstruction of this fossilized forest, lending insight into the ecology and climate of its time.

Pfefferkorn, a professor in Penn’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science, collaborated on the work with three Chinese colleagues: Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Zhang of Shenyang Normal University and Zhuo Feng of Yunnan University.

Their [Open Access] paper was published this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study site, located near Wuda, China, is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest in the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.

Reconstruction of the peat-forming forest of earliest Permian age preserved by a volcanic ash-fall that buried stems, broke off twigs, toppled trees, and preserved the forest at site 1 (of Figs. 1 and 2) near Wuda, Inner Mongolia, China, based on actual location of trees.

“It’s marvelously preserved,” Pfefferkorn said. “We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting.”

The researchers also found some smaller trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones intact, preserved in their entirety.

Due to nearby coal-mining activities unearthing large tracts of rock, the size of the researchers’ study plots is also unusual. They were able to examine a total of 1,000 m² of the ash layer in three different sites located near one another, an area considered large enough to meaningfully characterize the local paleoecology.

The fact that the coal beds exist is a legacy of the ancient forests, which were peat-depositing tropical forests. The peat beds, pressurized over time, transformed into the coal deposits.

The scientists were able to date the ash layer to approximately 298 million years ago. That falls at the beginning of a geologic period called the Permian, during which Earth’s continental plates were still moving toward each other to form the supercontinent Pangea. North America and Europe were fused together, and China existed as two smaller continents. All overlapped the equator and thus had tropical climates.

At that time, Earth’s climate was comparable to what it is today, making it of interest to researchers like Pfefferkorn who look at ancient climate patterns to help understand contemporary climate variations.

In each of the three study sites, Pfefferkorn and collaborators counted and mapped the fossilized plants they encountered. In all, they identified six groups of trees. Tree ferns formed a lower canopy while much taller trees — Sigillaria and Cordaites — soared to 80 feet above the ground. The researchers also found nearly complete specimens of a group of trees called Noeggerathiales. These extinct spore-bearing trees, relatives of ferns, had been identified from sites in North America and Europe but appeared to be much more common in these Asian sites.”

The early results from our Wildfire Today poll in which our readers selected the most significant wildfire stories of 2011 show that the fires in Texas is in the lead. Coming in second is the Wallow fire, and tied for third place are Aero Union closing down their air tanker operation and the U.S. Forest Service’s management of the large air tanker fleet.

You can still cast your vote. Check it out HERE.

Rocky Barker, a writer for the Idaho Statesman and author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America, co-wrote an article on the newspaper’s web site about the land management platforms of some of the candidates for President. Rick Santorum, for example, thinks the federal government should sell or transfer much of their land, and Ron Paul wants to eliminate the Department of Interior.

Check out Mr. Barker’s article, but here are a few excerpts:

–GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s call to sell or transfer federally owned public lands Tuesday night in Boise earned him several rounds of applause.

–“We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector,” Santorum told an overflow crowd at Boise’s Capital High School. “And we can make money doing it.”

–Santorum said Tuesday the nation could not afford to manage its federal estate. “The federal government doesn’t care about it, they don’t care about this land,” he said. “They don’t live here, they don’t care about it, we don’t care about it in Washington. It’s just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”

–Rep. Ron Paul has called for eliminating the Department of Interior, which manages more than 500 million acres of public land and a big chunk of Idaho, almost two-thirds of which is owned by the federal government. “I’d rather see the land owned and controlled by the states,” Paul told a crowd in Elko, Nev., earlier this month.

–Earlier this month, Romney told the Reno-Gazette Journal that he didn’t know why the federal government owned all the land and that he hadn’t studied the transfer issue. “But where government ownership of land is designed to satisfy, let’s say, the most extreme environmentalists, from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other resources for the benefit of the state, I would find that to be unacceptable,” Romney said.