By Steve Pyne
The Pleistocene epoch that began 2.6 million years ago sent ice in waves through Yosemite.
Glaciers gouged out great valleys along the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, ice sheets rounded granite domes, cirques sculpted the High Sierra. John Muir traced virtually every landscape feature of Yosemite to its legacy of ice.
Now the residual ice is melting, the streams and waterfalls are drying and the living landscape is burning. In 1990, the A-Rock fire closed the park for the only time in its history, so far. The 2013 Rim fire burned around the Hetch Hetchy reservoir; the 2018 Ferguson fire burned along the park’s Wawona Road. Where the fires didn’t spread, their smoke did.
Add in the industrial combustion of fossil fuels, with its climatic impacts, and virtually every management issue of Yosemite today traces back to fire.
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Humans have always used fire: It’s our ecological signature.
The end of the last glaciation allowed us, a fire-wielding species, to interact with an increasingly fire-receptive planet. Our pact with fire was mutual. Fire allowed us to flourish; in return, we have taken fire everywhere, even to Antarctica.
The pact had to operate within boundaries set by living landscapes. After all, fire was a creation of life, which furnished its oxygen and fuel and established ecological barriers. Then we discovered an immense reservoir of combustibles buried in geologic time. It was as though we had found a new world –- a fossilized, “lithic” landscape –we could work the way we did living landscapes. The only constraints were those people chose to impose on themselves.
Add up all the burning that people now do in living, and it would seem we are refashioning the Earth with the fire-informed equivalent of an Ice Age, complete with a change in climate, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, major shifts in biogeography and smoke palls. Little on Earth is unaffected.
Fire is driving off the last vestiges of the Pleistocene, from its ice to its mammoths. We have been creating a Pyrocene for millennia, but binge-burning fossil fuels put the process on afterburners.
Fifty years ago Yosemite recognized that its fire scene was out of whack. The problem then was not too much of the wrong kind of fire but too little of the right kind. The park sought to restore pre-settlement fire regimes. Among targeted sites was Illilouette Creek, an elevated basin southeast of Glacier Point.
The park recognized that suppressing fire had stockpiled fuels from the foothills to the crestline, caused Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to overflow with invasive conifers that blocked views, and prevented the fabled sequoias from regenerating. The park introduced prescribed fire and learned to loose-herd wildfires. The Illilouette basin shuffled toward something like its former fire regime.
No place has the fire program it wants, but Yosemite seems better positioned than the national forests and private lands around it to cope. The issue is no longer to restore natural fire but to find the right mix of fires suppressed and prescribed, and of wildfires managed, to ward off the megafires that are plaguing everyplace else.
Yosemite deals with fires that can threaten small and not-so-small villages. Its specialty is working with wildland fire.
By Aug. 20 of this year the park had coped with 54 fires, 43 from lightning and 11 from people. Some were put out. Some were confined within natural barriers. And a few burning in Illilouette Basin were tweaked as nature’s invisible hand massaged them into five decades of layered burning. The legacy of past fires had altered the conditions for the fires that followed, softening the shock of tougher, meaner burns.
Yosemite has long been celebrated for distilling into near-crystalline state the magnificence of the Western landscape. As it moves from ice to fire, it is showing that it may also serve as a proxy for some of what the Earth needs to do to survive our deepening fire age. There is no way we can’t not manage fire.
Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range where this article was first published. It is a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.
Water before instead of after the fact.
Irrigate forests at night from the sky in aircraft with night vision capability from May to October.
Mechanically thin, brush and harvest a forest. Don’t attempt any longer to “control” it by fire.
Replant and surveil the forest from space, from water and retardant laden aircraft in the sky and heat sensors, cameras and personnel on the ground to apprehend would be arsonists and careless campers.
Budget water, save property, save resources and save lives. AMEN? Amen!
“Irrigate forests at night from the sky in aircraft with night vision capability from May to October.”
Someone has NO IDEA how vast our forests are.
The USFS has used the words “managed wildfire” for a number of years and it is very confusing to many.
First of all, I submit that this particular use of terminology is an oxymoron; they are not compatible.
We can manage “prescribed burns” that are conducted on specified conditions but wildfires are not truly “managed,” but rather “flanked and herded” by land and air until extinguished. To use the word “managed” suggests that one is in control, when we know very well that is not the case. Look no further than the CA fires for proof.
As a geologist, you should know that the Pleistocene ended about 11,700 years ago; we’re in the Holocene epoch now. There’s an ongoing debate as to whether we entered the “Anthrocene” epoch with the beginning of the industrial revolution.
“There is no way we can’t not manage fire.”
This is meant to be a strong statement, to be sure, but I’ve tried twelve times and I can’t work my way through that many negatives in one sentence. I want very much to understand what is meant here but I can’t seem to do it.
Hi Victor and Bill,
A picture is worth a 1000 words!!! Study (ponder) the photo of the controlled burn and find the MOON!!! This photo is little different than the other photos we have seen of the wildfires which burned the needles off of the conifers in less than 5 minutes and produced intense heat. Except there was no moon in the background. The fact that we can see the moon dimly is that that there was little ‘smoke’ or other solid particles being produced by the controlled burn.
I lost a cabin and shed to the BootLeg wildfire and there was very little ash to be found (something which I ponder). However, and observed fact is that a ponderosa pine (maybe more than 60 feet high, which stood less than 6 feet from the side of the shed (whose peak was more than 20 feet from the ground), still had 10 feet, or so, green needles at its top when I viewed the remains weeks after the fire.
I am a physical scientist and I ponder facts (observations) which I know to be the TRUTH!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
I think the state of the art won’t advance much, until the Resolve and Intent is mustered to deal with the situation of fire-fighters such as the man that jumped off Highway 8 in San Diego in November 2017, in between the Santa Rosa fire in October and some other California fire in December.
I always felt like that man took some very important secrets with him, and that the general community would benefit from finding out their concerns, and moving Heaven and Earth, or Earth and Earth, as necessary to really deal with the realities of fire-fighting, that the fire-fighters deal with.
I think in general they need to be paid like and recognized as professionals, i.e. $200K a year and with a budget for equipment, e.g. expensive specialized shoes, Per Diem for lodging. Pretty much the way a Civil Engineer working on a job for a month gets paid.
Ahhhh yes the A Rock Fire of 1990 and flyin into Fresno on a beeeeautiful B727 w the rear air stairs
The saweeeeet smell of the Fresno Fairgrounds and the nearby cattle droppings
Ahhh yes…seeing the Hetch Hetchy from a nearby high Vista….
Well said and original. But please note that “managed fires” are now called prescribed fires,, because managers don’t want to be blamed when things get out of control. They used to be called “controlled” fires, but when you play with fire control can be problematic. Great effort and expense is needed. What will it be like when and if we expand nuclear fuel fires?
Hi Victor and Bill,
A picture is worth a 1000 words!!! Study (ponder) the photo of the controlled burn and find the MOON!!! This photo is little different than the other photos we have seen of the wildfires which burned the needles off of the conifers in less than 5 minutes and produced intense heat. Except there was no moon in the background. The fact that we can see the moon dimly is that that there was little ‘smoke’ or other solid particles being produced by the controlled burn.
I lost a cabin and shed to the BootLeg wildfire and there was very little ash to be found (something which I ponder). However, and observed fact is that a ponderosa pine (maybe more than 60 feet high, which stood less than 6 feet from the side of the shed (whose peak was more than 20 feet from the ground), still had 10 feet, or so, green needles at its top when I viewed the remains weeks after the fire.
I am a physical scientist and I ponder facts (observations) which I know to be the TRUTH!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
You misread the author by picking bones. He writes about “managing fire,” not “managed fires.” Any human intervention in fire is managing fire. He’s speaking to the bigger picture. And he refers to prescribed burns as just that.