While reading today, somehow I got into thinking about forest fires, and how even though they appear threatening to human eyes property, they actually serve important ecological purposes. A short page about this lists the following positive effects of forest fires:
- Reduce the build-up of fuel, and thus the intensity of future burns.
- Recycle nutrients bound up in litter.
- Reduce competition, allowing existing trees to grow larger.
- Leave snags that provide nesting spots for woodpeckers and other birds.
- Sprout seeds of native plants. For example, the cones of many lodgepole pines — the characteristic tree of Yellowstone — will only open after exposure to fire.
- Kill non-native plants that are not adapted to fire.
I think that’s totally incredible about the lodgepole pine, how their cones will stay unopened on the tree for years until a forest fire comes, and the intense heat causes them to open and the drop their seeds into the soil which has been fertilized by the burn.
On this page about prescribed burns (ie, man-made intentional, controlled forest fires), they talk a bit about how there were policies in place to avert all forest fires for many years, which resulted in greater problems in forests than would have occurred had fire been allowed to do its work. So I got to thinking that maybe this is somehow analogous to all the intense negative shit which is happening now, or is poised to happen shortly. That the only way the “seeds are going to drop” and the land be sustained is by going through the flames.
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