by donstewart » Mon 20 Mar 2017, 01:30:26
Suburbs; Exurbs; Country Houses; Eco-Villages in the Forest; Fires; ETP
If you believe that climate change is increasing fire risk in places from Tennessee to California to Alberta, and if you believe that Peak Oil in one form or another is reducing our ability to fight fires, and if you agree that a house in the woods is exceptionally exposed to forest fires...then I recommend reading the following.
I sent it to Albert Bates as a question on his current series of posts about what we need to do to both sequester carbon and reduce consumption of natural resources. He did publish the question, but has not responded. If you have no idea what M. Kat Anderson and Bill Gammage were talking about, I suggest a quick search on their books. You will see pictures which are worth a thousand words.
Don Stewart
Albert
I learned a week ago that Earthhaven Ecovillage was threatened by the same fires that burned Gatlinburg, TN as well as lots of other forest lands across the Southeastern US. (Earthhaven, along with The Farm, were 2 positive examples you cited in terms of ecovillages sequestering carbon because both had extensive forests) I remembered reading a recent story about someone who was caught up in a California wildfire, and she was talking about how the current crop of wildfires would never have happened under the management practices of the native Americans. She referred to M. Kat Anderson’s book Tending the Wild. I also remembered having read Bill Gammage’s book on Australia…The Biggest Estate on Earth.
An essential feature of both the California and Australian management practices was fire. In California, Anderson argues that fire increased the harvest of acorns, a major source of food. In Australia, Gammage builds a case for increased productivity of the regularly burned land.
I was recently in the national forests on the headwaters of the Gila river in New Mexico. There was a forest service sign saying that, 500 years ago, you would not have seen any tall trees due to periodic fires.
Before Columbus, long-leaf pine forests, which are fire adapted, stretched from Virginia to Texas. With climate change probably increasing the chance of more fires like the summer of 2016, do you think reforestation efforts should aim at the more ‘savannah like’ or the ‘dense forest’ model? If planting trees to sequester carbon is a foundational part of what we need to do, it seems we need to first establish what sort of forest or savannah we are trying to grow.
It seems doubtful to me that our declining society would be successful in suppressing fire. Is it time to learn to live with it?
Don Stewart