Forests and fires

Most Americans, when they think of a forest fire, imagine something like this wildfire that raged through California's San Bernardino Mountains in 2003. But some forest fires are beneficial, and some ecosystems are actually dependent on fire. (Photo by Dave Schumaker. More about the photograph)

Americans of different eras have viewed forest fires very differently. Most modern Americans view them as natural disasters. They base this opinion on widely publicized devastating fires that have swept through the brushland areas near Los Angeles and Yellowstone Park in recent years, on the U.S. Forest Service’s Smoky the Bear campaign, and on the common sense assumption that burning is bad for combustible things like forests.

But for many types of forests — savannas, seasonal tropical forests, and northern boreal coniferous forests — it is now clear that fire is necessary for both regeneration of trees and recycling the nutrients that sustain tree growth. Native Americans in the precolonial era of North Carolina apparently understood the sustaining role of fires in coastal plain pine savannas, as they set fire to them every fall to drive deer towards their hunters. The controversy and confusion about fire in forests is understandable, though, since fire in other types of forests damage valuable timber and may permanently alter the forest ecosystem — as in tropical diptocarp forests of Borneo, many of which have been converted to grasslands by repeated, uncontrolled burning.

Forest managers differ in their opinions about the role of fires in forests. Some managers maintain that fire must be suppressed for proper forest development. Others argue that fire is a useful tool to control undergrowth that fuels damaging fires that destroy the forest being managed. The latter view is increasingly held by managers of southeastern coastal plain pine forests.

This field trip will take you to several publicly inaccessible forests of Camp Lejeune, a U.S. Marine Corps base where fire is used to restore and sustain longleaf pine communities and the rare and endangered species that live there. I was lucky enough to be taken to these places by members of the Forestry staff. This trip would not have been possible without them, and my thanks go to Pete Black, the Base Forester, and to Dan Becker for their help with this project.

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