chapter two - fire and man
FIRE AND MAN
Cenozoic Era
(72.1 million – 11.700 thousand years)
Throughout the Cenozoic all the continents
continued to separate. In the Cenozoic the
last holdout, Australia, broke free of Antarctica moving north to where it is today. This caused major climate shifts for both Australia and Antarctica as had already happened to other continents after the breakup of the Pangaea. Australia began to dry out as it moved north toward the equator becoming arid in the interior with forest plant
species still able to hang on around the periphery of the continent. Antarctica was thrown into a deep freeze because cold ocean currents could now circulate around the whole continent without being blocked by Australia.
With the evolution of fire grassland ecosystems in the early part of the Cenozoic Era and the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, the stage was set for the evolution of mammals. The early mammals were now able to expand and diversify to fill the environment niches left behind by the dinosaurs. This diversification led to the evolution of primates, hominids, other species of Homo, and finally, Homo sapiens. If the asteroid had not hit and knocked the dinosaurs and reptiles back, it’s quite
possible that an intelligent two legged dinosaur would have evolved to fill the environmental niches opening up on the land. At the end of the Cretaceous there were already some small dinosaur raptors that were already growing rapidly in intelligence.
One cannot but be impressed about the way nature’s ecosystems and geology evolve new species. On the one hand we have this steady movement forward toward niche specialization in ecosystems, but on the other hand nature seems to roll the dice to create indeterminate outcomes. As our understanding of how evolution works on worlds other than our own increases, I think we will be just amazed by the diversity being created in the universe. I suspect there are worlds where other intelligent predators develop the technology for space travel and leave their home worlds behind, just as we are now doing.
Homo sapiens evolutionary linage can be traced back to the Late Cretaceous period. According to genetic studies primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago, but the earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene around 55 million years ago. According to Wikipedia, the family Hominidae diverged from the Hylobatidae (Gibbon) family 15 -20 million years ago. Around 14 million years ago, the Orangutans diverged from the Hominidae family.
Cenozoic Era
(72.1 million – 11.700 thousand years)
Throughout the Cenozoic all the continents
continued to separate. In the Cenozoic the
last holdout, Australia, broke free of Antarctica moving north to where it is today. This caused major climate shifts for both Australia and Antarctica as had already happened to other continents after the breakup of the Pangaea. Australia began to dry out as it moved north toward the equator becoming arid in the interior with forest plant
species still able to hang on around the periphery of the continent. Antarctica was thrown into a deep freeze because cold ocean currents could now circulate around the whole continent without being blocked by Australia.
With the evolution of fire grassland ecosystems in the early part of the Cenozoic Era and the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, the stage was set for the evolution of mammals. The early mammals were now able to expand and diversify to fill the environment niches left behind by the dinosaurs. This diversification led to the evolution of primates, hominids, other species of Homo, and finally, Homo sapiens. If the asteroid had not hit and knocked the dinosaurs and reptiles back, it’s quite
possible that an intelligent two legged dinosaur would have evolved to fill the environmental niches opening up on the land. At the end of the Cretaceous there were already some small dinosaur raptors that were already growing rapidly in intelligence.
One cannot but be impressed about the way nature’s ecosystems and geology evolve new species. On the one hand we have this steady movement forward toward niche specialization in ecosystems, but on the other hand nature seems to roll the dice to create indeterminate outcomes. As our understanding of how evolution works on worlds other than our own increases, I think we will be just amazed by the diversity being created in the universe. I suspect there are worlds where other intelligent predators develop the technology for space travel and leave their home worlds behind, just as we are now doing.
Homo sapiens evolutionary linage can be traced back to the Late Cretaceous period. According to genetic studies primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago, but the earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene around 55 million years ago. According to Wikipedia, the family Hominidae diverged from the Hylobatidae (Gibbon) family 15 -20 million years ago. Around 14 million years ago, the Orangutans diverged from the Hominidae family.
Bipedalism is the basic adaption of the Hominin line. The earliest bipedal Hominin is considered to be either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin, with Ardipithecus, a full bipedal, coming later. The gorilla and chimpanzee diverged around this same time, about 4-6 million years ago with either Sahelantropus or Orrorin our last shared ancestor. The early bipedals evolved into the Australopithecines, and later the genus Homo. Ardipithecus image [45] Wikipedia states:
“The earliest documented members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.3 million years ago, the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of use of stone tools. The brains of these early hominins were about the size of that of a chimpanzee. During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had
doubled to 850 cm.” This puts the genus Homo squarely in the Paleolithic Era (2.6 million to 12,000 years) of geologic history. Homo habilis image [46]
“The earliest documented members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.3 million years ago, the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of use of stone tools. The brains of these early hominins were about the size of that of a chimpanzee. During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had
doubled to 850 cm.” This puts the genus Homo squarely in the Paleolithic Era (2.6 million to 12,000 years) of geologic history. Homo habilis image [46]
“Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first of the hominina to leave Africa, and these species spread through Africa, Asia and Europe 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago. It is believed that these species were the first to use fire and complex tools. According to the Recent African Ancestry theory, modern humans evolved in Africa possibly from Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor, who migrated out of the continent some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, replacing local populations of Homo erectus, Homo denisova, Homo floresiensis and Homo neanderthalensis.”
“Archaic Homo sapiens, the forerunner of anatomically modern humans, evolved between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago. Recent DNA evidence suggests that several haplotypes of Neanderthal origin are present among all non-African populations and Neanderthals and other hominids, such as Denisova hominin may have contributed up to 6% of their genome to present day humans.”
“Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago. The transition to behavioral modernity with the development of symbolic culture, language and specialized lithic technology happened about 50,000 years ago according to many anthropologists although some suggest a gradual change in behavior over a longer time span.” [47]
Of particular interest to us is that Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first species to use fire and complex tools. What this means is that prior to them other earlier species may have been reacting and adapting to fire environments, but not actively using fire to manipulate those environments. This in spite of the fact some ancestors were already making and using stone tools before the time of Homo erectus and Homo ergaster. [48]
I would not be surprised that evidence will continue to surface pushing back the use of fire by various species of Homo to manipulate their fire environments. If these earlier species were manufacturing stone tools, I suspect they may have been using fire to their advantage. I think it’s possible that Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were using fire 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago and maybe even Homo habilis as early as 2.3 million years ago.
“Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago. The transition to behavioral modernity with the development of symbolic culture, language and specialized lithic technology happened about 50,000 years ago according to many anthropologists although some suggest a gradual change in behavior over a longer time span.” [47]
Of particular interest to us is that Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first species to use fire and complex tools. What this means is that prior to them other earlier species may have been reacting and adapting to fire environments, but not actively using fire to manipulate those environments. This in spite of the fact some ancestors were already making and using stone tools before the time of Homo erectus and Homo ergaster. [48]
I would not be surprised that evidence will continue to surface pushing back the use of fire by various species of Homo to manipulate their fire environments. If these earlier species were manufacturing stone tools, I suspect they may have been using fire to their advantage. I think it’s possible that Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were using fire 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago and maybe even Homo habilis as early as 2.3 million years ago.
Fire is much easier to handle and manipulate than people realize. If one has the intelligence to make stone tools and weapons, it’s easy enough to take a little grass and spread a light backfire around to better collect insects, or light a hot head-fire with a ember to move game grazing in dry grass to where they can be easily ambushed.
Under my father’s watchful eye when I was five years of age, I was already playing around with fire in this manner when we were out burning the woods and fields of our Birdsong Plantation together. Chimpanzees and other animals have surprised researchers in the past with their tool making abilities, causing researchers to rethink what it means to be human. So I don’t think it is too farfetched to speculate that our early ancestors might have been using fire in simple ways much further back in time.
Regardless, if Homo erectus was using fire for warmth, protection from predators and cooking, he-she was also using it to help forage and hunt game. This would be sure to increase the low intensity fires in these already very fire prone environments. This in turn would lead to increased light fire and catastrophic fire adaptations and expansion of grasslands and savannas into forested areas. It is suspected that this might well have affected the climate in Africa at the time.
Modern man is no different. He is still pushing back the forest ecosystems in favor of grassland and
or agricultural ecosystems and is still using fire as one of the tools to do this as in Africa and South America. This has already been done in North America and Europe for thousands of years as well and is called slash and burn agriculture. I saw this in practice when I was in Southern Mexico as a boy. Trees and brush were cut down and burned, and crops planted right away in the ash fertilized soil. When the soil wore out the indigenous people moved to a new spot. This agricultural practice created a
diverse mosaic of successionary stages of plants and animals in areas that would not be normally be prone to fire.
My father in his paper, The Use of Fire: An Historical Background, published in the first Tall Timbers proceedings in 1962 devotes the first paragraphs of his paper to point out that Man is a creature mostly of grasslands. Ed Komarek Sr. states:
"Fire in nature and its use by man has been the subject of much controversy throughout the world for many years. I, however, cannot help but be impressed, after a perusal of world literature on fire, by the great number of excellent studies that have verified the “folk-wisdom” of pioneer peoples and primitive tribes who had to take their sustenance directly from the land. These peoples, generation upon generation, developed knowledge of the use of fire that was akin to “art.” This art of the use of fire was not only used for very definite purposes that were valuable to them but was virtually necessary for their existence.
Some historical geographers have pointed out that “Primeval forest is the enemy and not the friend of man; primitive man may make expeditions into the forest but will not settle permanently there” (Hoops; fide East, 1920). Others have used the term “negative” for the influence that forests had to the early spread and occupation of land by man and the term “positive” for open or grasslands. This attitude seems apparent even today for large areas where farm lands have reverted to forest the human population has decreased considerably.
Man throughout his long history has had little use for forest except for fuel and wood for shelter. On
continent after continent he fought the forest with fire and other means to increase grassland and field land for pasture and farming. It was only in the early nineteenth century along with man’s early technological development that forest products began to loom large in his economy, and it was only then that he began to protect and replace the forests he had formerly tried so hard to destroy. This awareness of the future importance to him of forests first became apparent in central Europe, and then it spread to northeastern United States and to southeastern India. Curiously enough, these are the only large areas of hardwood deciduous species (beech and maple) in the world where fire can be said to be the most damaging and perhaps of the least possible use in forest management.”
In the central United States, fire suppression and agriculture have led to the loss of the vast fire adapted prairie grasslands. Now forests can grow where there was only grass in the past. We all know the effect man is having on the environment today; but, we are slow to appreciate the effect early man has had on the environment, especially when fire has been used as a tool. Early man used fire for hundreds of thousands of years to reshape the fire ecosystems in which he has lived in order to improve his livelihood just as he does today.
As we can see from the following Wikipedia entry, there is still debate among scientists as to just when man’s ancestors began to use fire. I think as more evidence accumulates, it will be proved that man’s ancestors used fire even earlier than the one million years indicated here. Wikipedia states:
“Sites in Europe and Asia seem to indicate controlled use of fire by H. erectus, dating back at least 1 million years.[45] A presentation at the Paleoanthropology Society annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec in March 2004 stated that there is evidence for controlled fires in excavations in northern Israel from about 690,000 to 790,000 years ago. A site called Terra Amata, located on the French Riviera, which lies on an ancient beach, seems to have been occupied by H.erectus; it contains evidence of controlled fire, dated at around 300,000 years ago.[46]”
“Excavations dating from approximately 790,000 years ago in Israel suggest that H. erectus not only controlled fire but could light fires.[46] Finally, evidence from a site in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa is consistent with controlled fire use by H. erectus one million years ago.[45] Despite these examples, some scholars continue to assert that the controlled use of fire was not typical of H. erectus, but only of later species of Homo, such as H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens).” [49]
Another Wikipedia entry called Control of fire by early humans is more conservative, but still indicates debate on evidence for controlled fire going back 1.8 million years by man’s ancestors. I think we can safely say that fire use goes back hundreds of thousands of years if not millions. As this Wikipedia entry points out, the control and use of fire as a tool was a turning point in the cultural aspect of human evolution that allowed humans to cook food and obtain warmth and protection. It also allowed the expansion of human activity into the dark and colder hours of the night to provide protection from predators and insects. I would also add that fire as a tool could easily be used to alter and manipulate the high fire ecosystems in which these ancestral humans lived, especially in the fire grasslands and savannas of Africa in which humans first evolved. This more conservative Wikipedia entry says that:
“Evidence for the controlled use of fire by Homo erectus beginning some 400,000 years ago has wide scholarly support, while claims regarding earlier evidence are mostly dismissed as inconclusive and sketchy. Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo,
range from 0.2 to 1.7 million years ago.” [50]
The controversy around when man’s ancestors used fire can become quite heated because of the
complexity involved in interpreting the evidence. The article (Who Mastered Fire) discusses this controversy in depth. [51]
Some scientists such as Richard Wrangham of Harvard University believe the control of fire and cooking explains the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller digestive tract, smaller teeth and jaws and decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1.8 million years ago. Richard says that raw meat and vegetables could not have provided the necessary energy to support the normal hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. Other anthropologists in the mainstream dispute this claim believing that human brain-size occurred well before the advent of cooking, due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat.
The teeth of Homo erectus do show gradual shrinking suggesting a transition from crunchier foods
to softer foods such as meat and various cooked foods. The evidence of cooking comes from blackened animal bones found at various archaeological sites.
Recently an international team in 2012 found evidence that Homo erectus used fire for cooking one million years ago. This international team was led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University and has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors according to Science Daily. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.
“Analysis of the sediment by lead authors Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg (pictured below right) of Boston University revealed ash plant remains and burned bone fragments both of which appear to have been burned locally rather than carried into the cave by wind or water. The researchers also found extensive evidence of surface discoloration that is typical of burning.”
““The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution,” said Chazan. “The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society. Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human.”” [51]
Searching the internet I find that there have been recent finds that are filling in the evidentiary base for fire use at least a million years as in a recent BBC, Early human fire skills revealed article. Author
Paul Rincon says:
“Human-like species migrating out of their African homeland had mastered the use of fire up to 790,000 years ago, the journal Science reports. The evidence from northern Israel, suggests species such as Homo erectus may have been surprising sophisticated in their behavior.” [52]
Modern human “blacksmiths” in Africa have been found to have been using fire to manufacture stone tools at least 72,000 years ago according an article in Telegraph.. “We show that early modern humans at 72,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa, were using carefully controlled hearths in a complex process to heat stone and change its properties, the process known as heat treatment.” [53]
So increasingly it looks as if man’s ancestors have been using fire over a million years, not just for cooking and protection, but I and others suspect also to alter and shape the fire landscape in which they lived. It might have been as simple as children playing with fire brands letting the fire get away into the surrounding dry grass, or much more complex behavior using fire to herd game and insects.
Even today in some parts of Africa, native peoples burn small patches of dead grass in order to attract game. They then place snares and traps around the area to capture the game when it comes into the burnt patch to feed on the fresh green grass from the fire. We also have modern day accounts where native peoples use the fire to herd animals into areas where they can be captured and killed.
The Cenozoic Era ends 11.700 thousand years ago with modern man firmly entrenched on all
continents except Antarctica. By now man has evolved to the point where he no longer reacting and adapting to nature, but he is actively manipulating global ecosystems to his own ends. Fire has become a major tool used by Homo sapiens to create and manipulate fire ecosystems to his advantage both knowingly or unknowingly. During the early stages of agriculture, man learns to genetically manipulate fire grasses for food through the process of selection, and learns to domesticate and herd wild animals for his livelihood as well.
The Holocene
(11,500 years – present)
The Holocene is considered a warm period, an interglacial period in the current ice age. Wikipedia states:
“The Holocene also encompasses within it the growth and impacts of the human species world-wide, including all its written history and overall significant transition toward urban living in the present.” [54]
According to the scientific paper, Holocene biomass burning and global dynamics of the carbon cycle,
“Fire regimes have changed significantly during the Holocene due to changes in climate, vegetation and in human practices.” “In Europe the significant increase of fire activity is dated to approximately 6000 years ago. In north-eastern North America burning activity was greatest before 7500 years ago, very low between 7500 -3000 years, and has been increasing since 3000 years ago.”
“In tropical America, the pattern is more complex and apparently latitudinally zonal. Maximum burning occurred in the southern Amazon basin and in Central America during the middle Holocene and during the last 2000 years in the northern Amazon basin. In Oceania, biomass burning has decreased since a maximum 5000 years ago. Biomass burning has broadly increased in the Northern and Southern hemispheres throughout the second half of the Holocene associated with changes in climate and human practices.” (link)
As I search the Internet I see a huge amount of specialized information relating to indigenous peoples increased frequent light fire activities during the Holocene as well as a drop off of frequent fire activity in favor of more catastrophic fire activity during the period of European colonization. One such example is the paper, Reconstructing Holocene fire history in a southern Appalachian forest using soil charcoal. The authors state:
“Summed probability analysis taking into account radiometric errors, suggests that fires became more frequent approximately 1000 years ago, coinciding with the appearance of Woodland Tradition Native Americans in this region.” [55]
It’s really good to see scientists obtaining proof as to the decrease of light intensity fire and an increase of high intensity fire during and after European colonization. Mitchell Power writes of an attempt to do just that in 2013. He states:
“During the Holocene, the last 11,000 years, climate, vegetation, and likely, humans have been key controls to changing fire regimes in the Americas. A long-accepted paradigm is that of the 'noble savage', whereby indigenous peoples lived in harmony within a pristine wilderness, with little or no significant impact upon natural ecosystems. However, increasing evidence for extensive, large-scale landscape modification is leading many archaeologists to argue that the very notion of 'virgin' forests is a myth, and that prior to the Spanish Conquest, forests, grasslands, and savannas were heavily managed using fire, transforming a once pristine wilderness into a 'cultural parkland' (Heckenberger et al. 2003).”
“According to this theory, the 'pristine wilderness' first encountered by Europeans was in fact secondary forest recovering after the catastrophic crash in indigenous populations caused by first exposure to European diseases that swept through the Americas in advance of European settlers (Mann, 2006). If true, then fire frequencies would be expected to be significantly lower in the 16 and 17th centuries compared with the 15th century. We aim to test this hypothesis using data from the recently created Global Charcoal Database, analyzing charcoal data from throughout the Americas.” [56]
Jenn Marlon at this same Internet site indicates a broad scientific consensus developing as to the damage being done to fire environments and to mankind by increased fire suppression in the 20th century and into the 21th especially in places like the Western United States. The question is what are we going to do about this sad state of affairs? Marlon states:
“Since the late 1800s, human activities and the ecological effects of recent high fire activity caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the LIA fire decline. Consequently, there is now a forest “fire deficit” in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.”
A Wikipedia entry on Historical Ecology continues to drive the point home that man has been a continuing and intrinsic part of global fire ecosystems for a long time. Any careless and foolhardy attempt to return ecosystems to a state before man will lead to do even more damage to fire ecosystems and the plants and animals that have become fire adapted.
“Both destructive and at times constructive, anthropogenic fire is the most immediately visible human-mediated disturbance, and without it, many landscapes would become denatured. Humans have practiced controlled burns of forests globally for thousands of years, shaping landscapes in order
to better fit their needs. They burned vegetation and forests to create space for crops, sometimes resulting in higher levels of species diversity.”
“Today, in the absence of indigenous populations who once practiced controlled burns (most notably in North America and Australia), naturally ignited wildfires have increased. In addition, there has been destabilization of "ecosystem after ecosystem, and there is good documentation to suggest fire exclusion by Europeans has led to floral and faunal extinctions." [57] (Historical Ecology)
I am glad to see in this UN study on global fire management called Fire management – global assessment 2006, the recognition that man is an intrinsic part of past and present ecosystems. It also stresses the importance of prescribed fire in managing these ecosystems all over the world. In the forward Peter Holmgren states:
“This study presents information on fire in greater depth than was possible in FRA 2005, including its incidence, impact and management in different regions of the world. It recognizes that not all fires are destructive, and that fire management is an essential part of sustainable forest management. Indeed, some ecosystems require fire to induce regeneration and to maintain or enhance biodiversity, agricultural productivity and the carrying capacity of pastoral systems. The study also finds that people are the overwhelming cause of fires in every region, for a wide range of reasons.”
“Much more must be done to help the general public and policy-makers understand the scale of this threat and take long-term preventive action, not simply emergency suppression measures when a fire disaster strikes. More must be done, as well, to improve the understanding of fire by urban people at the wildland/urban interface, especially the need to reduce fire threat through fuel management, including prescribed fire burning.”
It’s important to reconstruct indigenous people’s use of fire and their close relationship to their fire environments. With the today’s concentration of populations in the cities, people have lost a lot of this connectedness to the land. Sure one can venture out into the wilderness from time to time, but how close are you really getting.
I was raised on a plantation in the Deep South where I lived and played on the land just about every day. I went over this square mile of land and stepped on just about every square yard of it at one time or another. I got to intimately know most every tree, animal, and plant so when I controlled burned, I was very careful to not unnecessarily scar a pine tree or damage even a small ecosystem.
Leon Neel has pointed out in his book (The Art of Managing Longleaf), how well some quail plantations in the Deep South manage their fire ecosystems right down to single pine trees. This book presents a model that government fire managers should emulate based on a deep spiritual connectedness to natural ecosystems, due to spending so much time on individual properties. This is what native peoples for thousands of years even hundreds of thousands of years have been doing.
How different it is today where government fire managers stream out of the city to burn public lands on an industrial scale, dressed in heavy boots, gloves and helmets and clothing like environmental storm troopers. :-) These troopers find themselves cast in a losing battle, underfunded and trying to use
prescribed fire in a short fire season window. To make matters worse they have to comply with increasingly stifling EPA smoke regulations.
How can these land managers be expected to effectively manage micro fire habitats? How can they be concerned about individual trees or small plant communities? It’s as if they are forced to make war on fire with fire, rather than develop a friendly relationship with fire and the fire environment. In order to understand how native peoples got it right, let’s take more of a look at individual countries and regions to understand how native peoples not only coped and adapted to fire, but how they lived on the land and managed fire for a livelihood during the Holocene. This knowledge and wisdom of native peoples must be incorporated into the restructuring of our present dysfunctional, over centralized government land management bureaucracies.
Under my father’s watchful eye when I was five years of age, I was already playing around with fire in this manner when we were out burning the woods and fields of our Birdsong Plantation together. Chimpanzees and other animals have surprised researchers in the past with their tool making abilities, causing researchers to rethink what it means to be human. So I don’t think it is too farfetched to speculate that our early ancestors might have been using fire in simple ways much further back in time.
Regardless, if Homo erectus was using fire for warmth, protection from predators and cooking, he-she was also using it to help forage and hunt game. This would be sure to increase the low intensity fires in these already very fire prone environments. This in turn would lead to increased light fire and catastrophic fire adaptations and expansion of grasslands and savannas into forested areas. It is suspected that this might well have affected the climate in Africa at the time.
Modern man is no different. He is still pushing back the forest ecosystems in favor of grassland and
or agricultural ecosystems and is still using fire as one of the tools to do this as in Africa and South America. This has already been done in North America and Europe for thousands of years as well and is called slash and burn agriculture. I saw this in practice when I was in Southern Mexico as a boy. Trees and brush were cut down and burned, and crops planted right away in the ash fertilized soil. When the soil wore out the indigenous people moved to a new spot. This agricultural practice created a
diverse mosaic of successionary stages of plants and animals in areas that would not be normally be prone to fire.
My father in his paper, The Use of Fire: An Historical Background, published in the first Tall Timbers proceedings in 1962 devotes the first paragraphs of his paper to point out that Man is a creature mostly of grasslands. Ed Komarek Sr. states:
"Fire in nature and its use by man has been the subject of much controversy throughout the world for many years. I, however, cannot help but be impressed, after a perusal of world literature on fire, by the great number of excellent studies that have verified the “folk-wisdom” of pioneer peoples and primitive tribes who had to take their sustenance directly from the land. These peoples, generation upon generation, developed knowledge of the use of fire that was akin to “art.” This art of the use of fire was not only used for very definite purposes that were valuable to them but was virtually necessary for their existence.
Some historical geographers have pointed out that “Primeval forest is the enemy and not the friend of man; primitive man may make expeditions into the forest but will not settle permanently there” (Hoops; fide East, 1920). Others have used the term “negative” for the influence that forests had to the early spread and occupation of land by man and the term “positive” for open or grasslands. This attitude seems apparent even today for large areas where farm lands have reverted to forest the human population has decreased considerably.
Man throughout his long history has had little use for forest except for fuel and wood for shelter. On
continent after continent he fought the forest with fire and other means to increase grassland and field land for pasture and farming. It was only in the early nineteenth century along with man’s early technological development that forest products began to loom large in his economy, and it was only then that he began to protect and replace the forests he had formerly tried so hard to destroy. This awareness of the future importance to him of forests first became apparent in central Europe, and then it spread to northeastern United States and to southeastern India. Curiously enough, these are the only large areas of hardwood deciduous species (beech and maple) in the world where fire can be said to be the most damaging and perhaps of the least possible use in forest management.”
In the central United States, fire suppression and agriculture have led to the loss of the vast fire adapted prairie grasslands. Now forests can grow where there was only grass in the past. We all know the effect man is having on the environment today; but, we are slow to appreciate the effect early man has had on the environment, especially when fire has been used as a tool. Early man used fire for hundreds of thousands of years to reshape the fire ecosystems in which he has lived in order to improve his livelihood just as he does today.
As we can see from the following Wikipedia entry, there is still debate among scientists as to just when man’s ancestors began to use fire. I think as more evidence accumulates, it will be proved that man’s ancestors used fire even earlier than the one million years indicated here. Wikipedia states:
“Sites in Europe and Asia seem to indicate controlled use of fire by H. erectus, dating back at least 1 million years.[45] A presentation at the Paleoanthropology Society annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec in March 2004 stated that there is evidence for controlled fires in excavations in northern Israel from about 690,000 to 790,000 years ago. A site called Terra Amata, located on the French Riviera, which lies on an ancient beach, seems to have been occupied by H.erectus; it contains evidence of controlled fire, dated at around 300,000 years ago.[46]”
“Excavations dating from approximately 790,000 years ago in Israel suggest that H. erectus not only controlled fire but could light fires.[46] Finally, evidence from a site in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa is consistent with controlled fire use by H. erectus one million years ago.[45] Despite these examples, some scholars continue to assert that the controlled use of fire was not typical of H. erectus, but only of later species of Homo, such as H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens).” [49]
Another Wikipedia entry called Control of fire by early humans is more conservative, but still indicates debate on evidence for controlled fire going back 1.8 million years by man’s ancestors. I think we can safely say that fire use goes back hundreds of thousands of years if not millions. As this Wikipedia entry points out, the control and use of fire as a tool was a turning point in the cultural aspect of human evolution that allowed humans to cook food and obtain warmth and protection. It also allowed the expansion of human activity into the dark and colder hours of the night to provide protection from predators and insects. I would also add that fire as a tool could easily be used to alter and manipulate the high fire ecosystems in which these ancestral humans lived, especially in the fire grasslands and savannas of Africa in which humans first evolved. This more conservative Wikipedia entry says that:
“Evidence for the controlled use of fire by Homo erectus beginning some 400,000 years ago has wide scholarly support, while claims regarding earlier evidence are mostly dismissed as inconclusive and sketchy. Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo,
range from 0.2 to 1.7 million years ago.” [50]
The controversy around when man’s ancestors used fire can become quite heated because of the
complexity involved in interpreting the evidence. The article (Who Mastered Fire) discusses this controversy in depth. [51]
Some scientists such as Richard Wrangham of Harvard University believe the control of fire and cooking explains the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller digestive tract, smaller teeth and jaws and decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1.8 million years ago. Richard says that raw meat and vegetables could not have provided the necessary energy to support the normal hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. Other anthropologists in the mainstream dispute this claim believing that human brain-size occurred well before the advent of cooking, due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat.
The teeth of Homo erectus do show gradual shrinking suggesting a transition from crunchier foods
to softer foods such as meat and various cooked foods. The evidence of cooking comes from blackened animal bones found at various archaeological sites.
Recently an international team in 2012 found evidence that Homo erectus used fire for cooking one million years ago. This international team was led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University and has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors according to Science Daily. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.
“Analysis of the sediment by lead authors Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg (pictured below right) of Boston University revealed ash plant remains and burned bone fragments both of which appear to have been burned locally rather than carried into the cave by wind or water. The researchers also found extensive evidence of surface discoloration that is typical of burning.”
““The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution,” said Chazan. “The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society. Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human.”” [51]
Searching the internet I find that there have been recent finds that are filling in the evidentiary base for fire use at least a million years as in a recent BBC, Early human fire skills revealed article. Author
Paul Rincon says:
“Human-like species migrating out of their African homeland had mastered the use of fire up to 790,000 years ago, the journal Science reports. The evidence from northern Israel, suggests species such as Homo erectus may have been surprising sophisticated in their behavior.” [52]
Modern human “blacksmiths” in Africa have been found to have been using fire to manufacture stone tools at least 72,000 years ago according an article in Telegraph.. “We show that early modern humans at 72,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa, were using carefully controlled hearths in a complex process to heat stone and change its properties, the process known as heat treatment.” [53]
So increasingly it looks as if man’s ancestors have been using fire over a million years, not just for cooking and protection, but I and others suspect also to alter and shape the fire landscape in which they lived. It might have been as simple as children playing with fire brands letting the fire get away into the surrounding dry grass, or much more complex behavior using fire to herd game and insects.
Even today in some parts of Africa, native peoples burn small patches of dead grass in order to attract game. They then place snares and traps around the area to capture the game when it comes into the burnt patch to feed on the fresh green grass from the fire. We also have modern day accounts where native peoples use the fire to herd animals into areas where they can be captured and killed.
The Cenozoic Era ends 11.700 thousand years ago with modern man firmly entrenched on all
continents except Antarctica. By now man has evolved to the point where he no longer reacting and adapting to nature, but he is actively manipulating global ecosystems to his own ends. Fire has become a major tool used by Homo sapiens to create and manipulate fire ecosystems to his advantage both knowingly or unknowingly. During the early stages of agriculture, man learns to genetically manipulate fire grasses for food through the process of selection, and learns to domesticate and herd wild animals for his livelihood as well.
The Holocene
(11,500 years – present)
The Holocene is considered a warm period, an interglacial period in the current ice age. Wikipedia states:
“The Holocene also encompasses within it the growth and impacts of the human species world-wide, including all its written history and overall significant transition toward urban living in the present.” [54]
According to the scientific paper, Holocene biomass burning and global dynamics of the carbon cycle,
“Fire regimes have changed significantly during the Holocene due to changes in climate, vegetation and in human practices.” “In Europe the significant increase of fire activity is dated to approximately 6000 years ago. In north-eastern North America burning activity was greatest before 7500 years ago, very low between 7500 -3000 years, and has been increasing since 3000 years ago.”
“In tropical America, the pattern is more complex and apparently latitudinally zonal. Maximum burning occurred in the southern Amazon basin and in Central America during the middle Holocene and during the last 2000 years in the northern Amazon basin. In Oceania, biomass burning has decreased since a maximum 5000 years ago. Biomass burning has broadly increased in the Northern and Southern hemispheres throughout the second half of the Holocene associated with changes in climate and human practices.” (link)
As I search the Internet I see a huge amount of specialized information relating to indigenous peoples increased frequent light fire activities during the Holocene as well as a drop off of frequent fire activity in favor of more catastrophic fire activity during the period of European colonization. One such example is the paper, Reconstructing Holocene fire history in a southern Appalachian forest using soil charcoal. The authors state:
“Summed probability analysis taking into account radiometric errors, suggests that fires became more frequent approximately 1000 years ago, coinciding with the appearance of Woodland Tradition Native Americans in this region.” [55]
It’s really good to see scientists obtaining proof as to the decrease of light intensity fire and an increase of high intensity fire during and after European colonization. Mitchell Power writes of an attempt to do just that in 2013. He states:
“During the Holocene, the last 11,000 years, climate, vegetation, and likely, humans have been key controls to changing fire regimes in the Americas. A long-accepted paradigm is that of the 'noble savage', whereby indigenous peoples lived in harmony within a pristine wilderness, with little or no significant impact upon natural ecosystems. However, increasing evidence for extensive, large-scale landscape modification is leading many archaeologists to argue that the very notion of 'virgin' forests is a myth, and that prior to the Spanish Conquest, forests, grasslands, and savannas were heavily managed using fire, transforming a once pristine wilderness into a 'cultural parkland' (Heckenberger et al. 2003).”
“According to this theory, the 'pristine wilderness' first encountered by Europeans was in fact secondary forest recovering after the catastrophic crash in indigenous populations caused by first exposure to European diseases that swept through the Americas in advance of European settlers (Mann, 2006). If true, then fire frequencies would be expected to be significantly lower in the 16 and 17th centuries compared with the 15th century. We aim to test this hypothesis using data from the recently created Global Charcoal Database, analyzing charcoal data from throughout the Americas.” [56]
Jenn Marlon at this same Internet site indicates a broad scientific consensus developing as to the damage being done to fire environments and to mankind by increased fire suppression in the 20th century and into the 21th especially in places like the Western United States. The question is what are we going to do about this sad state of affairs? Marlon states:
“Since the late 1800s, human activities and the ecological effects of recent high fire activity caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the LIA fire decline. Consequently, there is now a forest “fire deficit” in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.”
A Wikipedia entry on Historical Ecology continues to drive the point home that man has been a continuing and intrinsic part of global fire ecosystems for a long time. Any careless and foolhardy attempt to return ecosystems to a state before man will lead to do even more damage to fire ecosystems and the plants and animals that have become fire adapted.
“Both destructive and at times constructive, anthropogenic fire is the most immediately visible human-mediated disturbance, and without it, many landscapes would become denatured. Humans have practiced controlled burns of forests globally for thousands of years, shaping landscapes in order
to better fit their needs. They burned vegetation and forests to create space for crops, sometimes resulting in higher levels of species diversity.”
“Today, in the absence of indigenous populations who once practiced controlled burns (most notably in North America and Australia), naturally ignited wildfires have increased. In addition, there has been destabilization of "ecosystem after ecosystem, and there is good documentation to suggest fire exclusion by Europeans has led to floral and faunal extinctions." [57] (Historical Ecology)
I am glad to see in this UN study on global fire management called Fire management – global assessment 2006, the recognition that man is an intrinsic part of past and present ecosystems. It also stresses the importance of prescribed fire in managing these ecosystems all over the world. In the forward Peter Holmgren states:
“This study presents information on fire in greater depth than was possible in FRA 2005, including its incidence, impact and management in different regions of the world. It recognizes that not all fires are destructive, and that fire management is an essential part of sustainable forest management. Indeed, some ecosystems require fire to induce regeneration and to maintain or enhance biodiversity, agricultural productivity and the carrying capacity of pastoral systems. The study also finds that people are the overwhelming cause of fires in every region, for a wide range of reasons.”
“Much more must be done to help the general public and policy-makers understand the scale of this threat and take long-term preventive action, not simply emergency suppression measures when a fire disaster strikes. More must be done, as well, to improve the understanding of fire by urban people at the wildland/urban interface, especially the need to reduce fire threat through fuel management, including prescribed fire burning.”
It’s important to reconstruct indigenous people’s use of fire and their close relationship to their fire environments. With the today’s concentration of populations in the cities, people have lost a lot of this connectedness to the land. Sure one can venture out into the wilderness from time to time, but how close are you really getting.
I was raised on a plantation in the Deep South where I lived and played on the land just about every day. I went over this square mile of land and stepped on just about every square yard of it at one time or another. I got to intimately know most every tree, animal, and plant so when I controlled burned, I was very careful to not unnecessarily scar a pine tree or damage even a small ecosystem.
Leon Neel has pointed out in his book (The Art of Managing Longleaf), how well some quail plantations in the Deep South manage their fire ecosystems right down to single pine trees. This book presents a model that government fire managers should emulate based on a deep spiritual connectedness to natural ecosystems, due to spending so much time on individual properties. This is what native peoples for thousands of years even hundreds of thousands of years have been doing.
How different it is today where government fire managers stream out of the city to burn public lands on an industrial scale, dressed in heavy boots, gloves and helmets and clothing like environmental storm troopers. :-) These troopers find themselves cast in a losing battle, underfunded and trying to use
prescribed fire in a short fire season window. To make matters worse they have to comply with increasingly stifling EPA smoke regulations.
How can these land managers be expected to effectively manage micro fire habitats? How can they be concerned about individual trees or small plant communities? It’s as if they are forced to make war on fire with fire, rather than develop a friendly relationship with fire and the fire environment. In order to understand how native peoples got it right, let’s take more of a look at individual countries and regions to understand how native peoples not only coped and adapted to fire, but how they lived on the land and managed fire for a livelihood during the Holocene. This knowledge and wisdom of native peoples must be incorporated into the restructuring of our present dysfunctional, over centralized government land management bureaucracies.
Man and Fire in Africa
The climate in northern Africa at the beginning of the Holocene had a moist climate that supported tropical vegetation and this period continued to about 4300 years ago. At that time
North Africa began to dry out creating the Sahara Desert where there was once freshwater lakes, hippos and crocodiles. In Southwestern Africa the climate fluctuated between humid and dryer conditions from the beginning of the Holocene to about 3500 years when the climate became more arid. Overall this drying out of Africa meant shifting fire ecosystems as well, and it became necessary for human African populations to adapt, both in
hunting-gathering societies and in agriculture societies.
Africa is considered the fire continent by ecologists because of widespread annual burning by man. Today 90% of all African fires are ignited by man’s controlled burns and about 10% by lightning. The most extensive area of fire grasslands and savanna in the world are in the southern, western, and eastern regions of Africa. These regions become extremely flammable in the dry season which is from
May to October in Southern Africa, and January to April, in west and east Africa. Stephen Pyne correctly points out in his World On Fire article that:
“Unlike human-caused burning in regions of the world that are not naturally given to a fire ecology, such as the South American tropical rainforest, fire is an integral component of the African ecosystem that scientists believe has an extensive and important evolutionary history on the continent. Many African plant species and animals, for example, have growth and reproduction cycles so linked to Africa's fire seasons that they would likely become locally extinct without fire.” [58]
Subsistence hunting using fire by man and his ancestors has surely been going on in Africa for at least hundreds of thousands of years and little unchanged from techniques used today. The following is from an article, Wildlife and food security in Africa that discusses subsistence hunting and gathering in Africa.
“The use of fire in group hunting is more common in the grassland savannah areas. Members of the group are positioned strategically around a patch of grassland known to contain wild animals. The area is then set on fire and animals are killed with cutlasses and clubs as they run out of the area to escape the fire.”
“Within the forest areas, fire is regularly used to smoke out rodents such as the giant rat Cricetomys gambianus from their burrows. A group of rat hunters would search for rat holes and set fire at the entrance using palm branches and dry leaves. The smoke penetrates the burrow and forces the rat to
come out. In the meantime, members of the group would be waiting at strategic points around the burrow ready to kill the rat as soon as it comes out. Often the animal dies in the burrow out of suffocation from the smoke, in which case, it is dug out.” [59]
There are remnant populations of Bushmen in Africa that still live primarily by hunting and gathering, but who now contract with tourist operators. They are allowed to hunt and forage in the big game parks of Tanzania. The Hadza live in central Tanzania around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and on Serengeti Plateau. According the article Enduring Cultures:
“The Bushmen people raise no livestock grow no food. And live without calendars or rules. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. It is estimated that the Hadza number just under 1000. Today they are the last functioning hunter-gathers in Africa.”
Genetic testing seems to indicate that the Hadza are more closely related to the Pygmies than to any
other peoples of Africa. They still retain a click language that may go back 40,000 years. None of their neighbors have this click language which again argues for their isolation from other tribes in the region.
The Enduring Cultures article says:
“Hadza men hunt individually or in groups and use simple bows and poisoned arrows to hunt small and large game. If the catch small animals – such as squirrels or birds – they will light a fire and toss the carcass into the flames to cook and eat it then and there.”
It’s not hard to see that such fires could easily spread to surrounding vegetation if the people were careless, or deliberately being used for hunting of game in these fire environments. [60] In the South African Kalahari the San people still live where their ancestors were hunter – gathers for thousands of years maybe even tens of thousands of years. The San people are known for their rock art and there are 15000 known rock art sites in their region. This rock art is one of the archaeological wonders of the world and it expresses the religious and spiritual beliefs of the San people. According to this article on South African history:
“The most important part of the San’s lives is fire. The men are responsible for making fire and use two fire sticks that they carry with them at all times. They would rub the two sticks together until it makes a spark to light some dry grass. Their lives revolved around their fire because it provided warmth, light and a way to cook food. The family would also hang their possessions in bushes close to the fire.”
"The San people developed their own type of bow and arrow and used poisoned heads on the arrows. They stalk a large animal by following the tracks and then shoot the animal with the poison arrow. The narrow shaft of the arrow falls to the ground but the poison tip remains in the animal. It takes hours and even days for the poison to slow down the animal where the hunters can get close enough to finish it off with arrows and spears. We can see that these hunting techniques are widespread across Africa, and intrinsic to primitive African culture. The same can be said as to fire use and adaptation to fire environments in which these people hunt and gather food.
The climate in northern Africa at the beginning of the Holocene had a moist climate that supported tropical vegetation and this period continued to about 4300 years ago. At that time
North Africa began to dry out creating the Sahara Desert where there was once freshwater lakes, hippos and crocodiles. In Southwestern Africa the climate fluctuated between humid and dryer conditions from the beginning of the Holocene to about 3500 years when the climate became more arid. Overall this drying out of Africa meant shifting fire ecosystems as well, and it became necessary for human African populations to adapt, both in
hunting-gathering societies and in agriculture societies.
Africa is considered the fire continent by ecologists because of widespread annual burning by man. Today 90% of all African fires are ignited by man’s controlled burns and about 10% by lightning. The most extensive area of fire grasslands and savanna in the world are in the southern, western, and eastern regions of Africa. These regions become extremely flammable in the dry season which is from
May to October in Southern Africa, and January to April, in west and east Africa. Stephen Pyne correctly points out in his World On Fire article that:
“Unlike human-caused burning in regions of the world that are not naturally given to a fire ecology, such as the South American tropical rainforest, fire is an integral component of the African ecosystem that scientists believe has an extensive and important evolutionary history on the continent. Many African plant species and animals, for example, have growth and reproduction cycles so linked to Africa's fire seasons that they would likely become locally extinct without fire.” [58]
Subsistence hunting using fire by man and his ancestors has surely been going on in Africa for at least hundreds of thousands of years and little unchanged from techniques used today. The following is from an article, Wildlife and food security in Africa that discusses subsistence hunting and gathering in Africa.
“The use of fire in group hunting is more common in the grassland savannah areas. Members of the group are positioned strategically around a patch of grassland known to contain wild animals. The area is then set on fire and animals are killed with cutlasses and clubs as they run out of the area to escape the fire.”
“Within the forest areas, fire is regularly used to smoke out rodents such as the giant rat Cricetomys gambianus from their burrows. A group of rat hunters would search for rat holes and set fire at the entrance using palm branches and dry leaves. The smoke penetrates the burrow and forces the rat to
come out. In the meantime, members of the group would be waiting at strategic points around the burrow ready to kill the rat as soon as it comes out. Often the animal dies in the burrow out of suffocation from the smoke, in which case, it is dug out.” [59]
There are remnant populations of Bushmen in Africa that still live primarily by hunting and gathering, but who now contract with tourist operators. They are allowed to hunt and forage in the big game parks of Tanzania. The Hadza live in central Tanzania around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and on Serengeti Plateau. According the article Enduring Cultures:
“The Bushmen people raise no livestock grow no food. And live without calendars or rules. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. It is estimated that the Hadza number just under 1000. Today they are the last functioning hunter-gathers in Africa.”
Genetic testing seems to indicate that the Hadza are more closely related to the Pygmies than to any
other peoples of Africa. They still retain a click language that may go back 40,000 years. None of their neighbors have this click language which again argues for their isolation from other tribes in the region.
The Enduring Cultures article says:
“Hadza men hunt individually or in groups and use simple bows and poisoned arrows to hunt small and large game. If the catch small animals – such as squirrels or birds – they will light a fire and toss the carcass into the flames to cook and eat it then and there.”
It’s not hard to see that such fires could easily spread to surrounding vegetation if the people were careless, or deliberately being used for hunting of game in these fire environments. [60] In the South African Kalahari the San people still live where their ancestors were hunter – gathers for thousands of years maybe even tens of thousands of years. The San people are known for their rock art and there are 15000 known rock art sites in their region. This rock art is one of the archaeological wonders of the world and it expresses the religious and spiritual beliefs of the San people. According to this article on South African history:
“The most important part of the San’s lives is fire. The men are responsible for making fire and use two fire sticks that they carry with them at all times. They would rub the two sticks together until it makes a spark to light some dry grass. Their lives revolved around their fire because it provided warmth, light and a way to cook food. The family would also hang their possessions in bushes close to the fire.”
"The San people developed their own type of bow and arrow and used poisoned heads on the arrows. They stalk a large animal by following the tracks and then shoot the animal with the poison arrow. The narrow shaft of the arrow falls to the ground but the poison tip remains in the animal. It takes hours and even days for the poison to slow down the animal where the hunters can get close enough to finish it off with arrows and spears. We can see that these hunting techniques are widespread across Africa, and intrinsic to primitive African culture. The same can be said as to fire use and adaptation to fire environments in which these people hunt and gather food.
Man and Fire Australia
Much of Australia is composed of fire ecosystems that continued to evolve as Australia separated from Antarctica finalizing the breakup of Pangaea and Gondwana. The drying up of Australia’s interior evolved major changes to Australia’s ecosystems and I am glad to see fire ecologists like Jim Kohen in his paper, The Impact of Fire: An Historical Perspective, stresses the importance of understanding both geologic history and human history in order to best understand today’s fire environments in Australia. Jim states:
“Climatic change and the drying out of the Australian environment resulted in the decline of rainforests and the dominance of sclerophyllous vegetation. Fire has been a major component of this process, promoting those plants which could cope with fire at the expense of those which could not. Aboriginal people added to the firing frequency, but maintained low population densities until the last 5,000 years, when fire became an integral component of their economic system. They used fire as a tool to promote and maintain the vegetation associations which were most productive. Once traditional Aboriginal burning regimes ceased following European settlement, the standing fuel increased, resulting in sporadic but more intense fires.”
“The old Gondwana forests had been dominated by gymnosperms - the conifers, auracaria and podocarps, but just as Gondwana broke up, the angiosperms began to radiate. Because of the large size and climatic diversity which existed within Gondwana, the vegetation associations were varied, and when Australia separated it took with it enough angiosperms to expand and almost fill the entire continent. Nothofagus, the Antarctic beech, was one of the early angiosperms which were present on Gondwana when Australia became isolated. Minor families included the Myrtaceae, the grasses, the Xanthorrhoeas, and the chenopods (Pyne, 1991). A few of the genera which were present and which later became important included Eucalyptus, Banksia, Hakea and Melaleuca. A similar vegetation
association characterized parts of Antarctica, South America and New Zealand. Where the rainfall was year round and moderately high, rainforests were maintained, but the minor flora adapted and spread, filling many of the niches in the drier areas.”
“This regular firing favored not only fire-tolerant or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favored by more open country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did impact on the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximize productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aborigines. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone" (Jones, 1969).”
In Australia by 38,000 years ago the Auracarian rainforest had mostly disappeared with casuarina beginning to be replaced by eucalypts. According to scientists there was a huge amount of charcoal deposited in lakes and swamps and the cause seemed to be that the new evolving vegetation was
very fire prone. It is interesting that this was not long after Aboriginal people began to settle in Australia
using fire as a tool for subsistence living.
According to Kohen, Rhys Jones in 1969 came up with the idea of “firestick farming” by Aboriginal people. Jones was one of the first to suggest that the Aboriginal people were doing controlled burning using light fire to increase the productivity of the land, replacing mature forests with open woodlands and grasslands. Aboriginal traditional burning increased the diversity of their fire environments by creating a mosaic of fire patterns depending on the intensity of the fire and the time of the year the land was burned.
Because the people lived on the land and derived their livelihood from the land, they had an intimate
knowledge not only of fire as a tool, but just about every square foot of the land they occupied. This was an intimate knowledge passed down from generation to generation, quite the opposite for today’s fire managers of European descent. Where ever we go in the world today this still pretty much rings true. Kohen provides just one more example of European ignorance of fire ecosystems that continues to this day, continuing to devastate Australia’s ecosystems and causing much property damage and loss of life due to catastrophic fire.
“When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they found a landscape dominated by eucalypts.
Certainly there were some areas of dense vegetation which contained a greater diversity of trees. However, the dominant feature of the landscape was the ubiquitous gum tree. When expeditions began exploring the countryside around Sydney, they encountered a range of vegetation associations very different to those which we see in the National Parks around Sydney today.
On soils derived from Hawkesbury sandstone, Wianamatta shale, Tertiary alluvial deposits, and igneous intrusions, they found environments which reminded them of the manicured parks of England, with trees well-spaced and a grassy understory. Peter Cunningham (1827) described the country west of Parramatta and Liverpool as "a fine timbered country, perfectly clear of bush, through which you might, generally speaking, drive a gig in all directions, without any impediment in the shape of rocks, scrubs, or close forest".
This confirmed earlier accounts by Governor Phillip, who suggested that the trees were "growing at a distance of some twenty to forty feet from each other, and in general entirely free from brushwood ..." (Phillip, 1789). It is clear that it was primarily Aboriginal burning practices which maintained an open environment dominated by well-spaced trees and grass. Once the Aborigines stopped burning, the underbrush returned where none had previously existed. Benson and Howell (1990: 20) suggest that the growth of Bursaria spinosa in the Sydney area in the 1820s may be related to a changed fire regime, the cessation of Aboriginal burning.”
We can find numerous accounts of Aboriginal burning and hunting practices. Fire by Australia’s indigenous people was made in several ways including fire drills, flints, and pyrites. The traditional desert Aboriginal men cut a wedge out of a soft wood and placed tinder in the wedge, soft grass or kangaroo dung. They then took the edge of their spear thrower or boomerang and using a sawing motion ignited the tinder in the wedge. It was the man’s job to start the fire and the woman’s job to keep the fire burning.
In the Stanford Report called, Aboriginal hunting and burning increase Australia’s desert biodiversity, Stanford researchers give some good detail on a group of Martu, indigenous Australians that inhabit the Western Desert. The Martu hunter-gathers light fires to expose the hiding places of their prey like monitor lizards that can grow up to 6 feet long. According to this Stanford Report and Stanford’s anthropologists Douglas and Rebecca Bird, these generations-old day-to-day routines have reshaped Australia’s Western Desert habitats. [61] The Stanford Report correctly states:
“In many cases, humans aren't the wrench in nature's gears but an important piece of the clockwork, he added. And because so much of Australia's Western Desert, from lizards to shrubs, revolves around Martu practices, conservation efforts will succeed only if they incorporate traditional goanna-hunting practices, he said. "We're trying to demonstrate what would happen if you did pull people off the landscape," he said. "What happens when you break all of these co-evolutionary links between people who've lived on the landscape for thousands of years and the diversity of the faunal and floral community?"
Also of great importance, this article discusses the great importance of the Martu’s intimate knowledge and respect for the land. This is something we rarely see with today’s global public and private land managers. Managers who are trapped by inexperience and limited resources to struggle to just keep accumulating heavy fuel loads down with controlled fire, with no time or resources to really become intimate with the land they are burning.
“Martu life revolves around hunting and fire," Douglas Bird explained. "Martu inherit ritual duties that correspond to certain tracts of desert called "estates." An important part of this inheritance is the knowledge of when and where to light smoldering brush fires. Martu never start blazes without knowing every nook and cranny of a territory and often forgo campfires when traveling through foreign estates, he said
"You never burn unless you're with someone who has all of that knowledge about that estate," he added. "If your fire were to threaten one of those totemic spots where they keep all their religious paraphernalia associated with these rituals, it's technically punishable by death." The middle-aged and elderly women who typically hunt for goanna can spot the animal's burrows and tracks better in burn scars than in thick spinifex grass, explained Rebecca Bird, an associate professor of anthropology.
Burning desert in about 55-acre chunks, the hunters make their grounds a patchwork quilt of recently burnt earth and recovering vegetation. These scars are much smaller than those left by lightning wildfires, which char an average of 2,000 acres. Burning back grasses and other fire-prone plants encourages the growth of a diverse range of annual vegetation, she said. The variable turf of Martu hunting grounds allows small mammals to find plenty of places to hide from predators, she added, while areas free of human burning lack this patchwork quality and are home to fewer plants and animals.”
One of the good things about Africa is that unlike North America and Australia, European fire exclusion policies really never caught hold. Furthermore, the native fire managers were never devastated as badly as in the rest of the world from disease. Throughout the 20th century the native fire managers in Africa continued to use fire as they always had done. They burned much of Africa with light periodic fire, while forests, savannas and grasslands elsewhere stagnated, decayed and exploded with catastrophic fire because of stupid European fire suppression policies.
Much of Australia is composed of fire ecosystems that continued to evolve as Australia separated from Antarctica finalizing the breakup of Pangaea and Gondwana. The drying up of Australia’s interior evolved major changes to Australia’s ecosystems and I am glad to see fire ecologists like Jim Kohen in his paper, The Impact of Fire: An Historical Perspective, stresses the importance of understanding both geologic history and human history in order to best understand today’s fire environments in Australia. Jim states:
“Climatic change and the drying out of the Australian environment resulted in the decline of rainforests and the dominance of sclerophyllous vegetation. Fire has been a major component of this process, promoting those plants which could cope with fire at the expense of those which could not. Aboriginal people added to the firing frequency, but maintained low population densities until the last 5,000 years, when fire became an integral component of their economic system. They used fire as a tool to promote and maintain the vegetation associations which were most productive. Once traditional Aboriginal burning regimes ceased following European settlement, the standing fuel increased, resulting in sporadic but more intense fires.”
“The old Gondwana forests had been dominated by gymnosperms - the conifers, auracaria and podocarps, but just as Gondwana broke up, the angiosperms began to radiate. Because of the large size and climatic diversity which existed within Gondwana, the vegetation associations were varied, and when Australia separated it took with it enough angiosperms to expand and almost fill the entire continent. Nothofagus, the Antarctic beech, was one of the early angiosperms which were present on Gondwana when Australia became isolated. Minor families included the Myrtaceae, the grasses, the Xanthorrhoeas, and the chenopods (Pyne, 1991). A few of the genera which were present and which later became important included Eucalyptus, Banksia, Hakea and Melaleuca. A similar vegetation
association characterized parts of Antarctica, South America and New Zealand. Where the rainfall was year round and moderately high, rainforests were maintained, but the minor flora adapted and spread, filling many of the niches in the drier areas.”
“This regular firing favored not only fire-tolerant or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favored by more open country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did impact on the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximize productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aborigines. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone" (Jones, 1969).”
In Australia by 38,000 years ago the Auracarian rainforest had mostly disappeared with casuarina beginning to be replaced by eucalypts. According to scientists there was a huge amount of charcoal deposited in lakes and swamps and the cause seemed to be that the new evolving vegetation was
very fire prone. It is interesting that this was not long after Aboriginal people began to settle in Australia
using fire as a tool for subsistence living.
According to Kohen, Rhys Jones in 1969 came up with the idea of “firestick farming” by Aboriginal people. Jones was one of the first to suggest that the Aboriginal people were doing controlled burning using light fire to increase the productivity of the land, replacing mature forests with open woodlands and grasslands. Aboriginal traditional burning increased the diversity of their fire environments by creating a mosaic of fire patterns depending on the intensity of the fire and the time of the year the land was burned.
Because the people lived on the land and derived their livelihood from the land, they had an intimate
knowledge not only of fire as a tool, but just about every square foot of the land they occupied. This was an intimate knowledge passed down from generation to generation, quite the opposite for today’s fire managers of European descent. Where ever we go in the world today this still pretty much rings true. Kohen provides just one more example of European ignorance of fire ecosystems that continues to this day, continuing to devastate Australia’s ecosystems and causing much property damage and loss of life due to catastrophic fire.
“When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they found a landscape dominated by eucalypts.
Certainly there were some areas of dense vegetation which contained a greater diversity of trees. However, the dominant feature of the landscape was the ubiquitous gum tree. When expeditions began exploring the countryside around Sydney, they encountered a range of vegetation associations very different to those which we see in the National Parks around Sydney today.
On soils derived from Hawkesbury sandstone, Wianamatta shale, Tertiary alluvial deposits, and igneous intrusions, they found environments which reminded them of the manicured parks of England, with trees well-spaced and a grassy understory. Peter Cunningham (1827) described the country west of Parramatta and Liverpool as "a fine timbered country, perfectly clear of bush, through which you might, generally speaking, drive a gig in all directions, without any impediment in the shape of rocks, scrubs, or close forest".
This confirmed earlier accounts by Governor Phillip, who suggested that the trees were "growing at a distance of some twenty to forty feet from each other, and in general entirely free from brushwood ..." (Phillip, 1789). It is clear that it was primarily Aboriginal burning practices which maintained an open environment dominated by well-spaced trees and grass. Once the Aborigines stopped burning, the underbrush returned where none had previously existed. Benson and Howell (1990: 20) suggest that the growth of Bursaria spinosa in the Sydney area in the 1820s may be related to a changed fire regime, the cessation of Aboriginal burning.”
We can find numerous accounts of Aboriginal burning and hunting practices. Fire by Australia’s indigenous people was made in several ways including fire drills, flints, and pyrites. The traditional desert Aboriginal men cut a wedge out of a soft wood and placed tinder in the wedge, soft grass or kangaroo dung. They then took the edge of their spear thrower or boomerang and using a sawing motion ignited the tinder in the wedge. It was the man’s job to start the fire and the woman’s job to keep the fire burning.
In the Stanford Report called, Aboriginal hunting and burning increase Australia’s desert biodiversity, Stanford researchers give some good detail on a group of Martu, indigenous Australians that inhabit the Western Desert. The Martu hunter-gathers light fires to expose the hiding places of their prey like monitor lizards that can grow up to 6 feet long. According to this Stanford Report and Stanford’s anthropologists Douglas and Rebecca Bird, these generations-old day-to-day routines have reshaped Australia’s Western Desert habitats. [61] The Stanford Report correctly states:
“In many cases, humans aren't the wrench in nature's gears but an important piece of the clockwork, he added. And because so much of Australia's Western Desert, from lizards to shrubs, revolves around Martu practices, conservation efforts will succeed only if they incorporate traditional goanna-hunting practices, he said. "We're trying to demonstrate what would happen if you did pull people off the landscape," he said. "What happens when you break all of these co-evolutionary links between people who've lived on the landscape for thousands of years and the diversity of the faunal and floral community?"
Also of great importance, this article discusses the great importance of the Martu’s intimate knowledge and respect for the land. This is something we rarely see with today’s global public and private land managers. Managers who are trapped by inexperience and limited resources to struggle to just keep accumulating heavy fuel loads down with controlled fire, with no time or resources to really become intimate with the land they are burning.
“Martu life revolves around hunting and fire," Douglas Bird explained. "Martu inherit ritual duties that correspond to certain tracts of desert called "estates." An important part of this inheritance is the knowledge of when and where to light smoldering brush fires. Martu never start blazes without knowing every nook and cranny of a territory and often forgo campfires when traveling through foreign estates, he said
"You never burn unless you're with someone who has all of that knowledge about that estate," he added. "If your fire were to threaten one of those totemic spots where they keep all their religious paraphernalia associated with these rituals, it's technically punishable by death." The middle-aged and elderly women who typically hunt for goanna can spot the animal's burrows and tracks better in burn scars than in thick spinifex grass, explained Rebecca Bird, an associate professor of anthropology.
Burning desert in about 55-acre chunks, the hunters make their grounds a patchwork quilt of recently burnt earth and recovering vegetation. These scars are much smaller than those left by lightning wildfires, which char an average of 2,000 acres. Burning back grasses and other fire-prone plants encourages the growth of a diverse range of annual vegetation, she said. The variable turf of Martu hunting grounds allows small mammals to find plenty of places to hide from predators, she added, while areas free of human burning lack this patchwork quality and are home to fewer plants and animals.”
One of the good things about Africa is that unlike North America and Australia, European fire exclusion policies really never caught hold. Furthermore, the native fire managers were never devastated as badly as in the rest of the world from disease. Throughout the 20th century the native fire managers in Africa continued to use fire as they always had done. They burned much of Africa with light periodic fire, while forests, savannas and grasslands elsewhere stagnated, decayed and exploded with catastrophic fire because of stupid European fire suppression policies.
Man and Fire in Asia and India
In the Cenozoic, India collided with Asia 55 to 45 million years ago and Arabia collided with Eurasia closing the Tethys ocean about 35 million years ago. The continent of India drove itself into Asia forcing up the Himalayan Mountains and finally South America became attached to North America.
Homo erectus left Africa and populated China as early as 1.66 million years based on stone tools found in the Nihewan Basin. Stone tools found at Xiaochangliang were dated to 1.36 million years. The archaeological site of Xihoudu in Shanxi Province is the earliest recorded use of fire by Homo erectus, which is dated at 1.27 million years. Southeast Asia was reached 1.7 million years ago and then West Europe 1.2 million years ago. [62]
It seems that there were two migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa that spread out and displaced
Homo erectus. One was across the Red Sea traveling along the coastal regions to India and the other from East Africa heading north and crossing into Asia through the Sinai. It now seems that one group of humans entered India 70,000 years ago and displaced Homo heidelbergensis before they entered Europe and displaced the Neanderthals. [63]
The first wave of migrations seems to have happened 90,000 to 130,000 years ago and the first
populations reached South Asia 50,000 years ago with East Asia (Korea, Japan) reached 30,000 years ago. [64] So we see that Homo erectus using fire could have been altering fire landscapes over a million years ago, but just how much effect there was is hard to determine. In Asia as elsewhere the effects of Homo sapiens seems to have been pronounced using fire to expand the fire ecosystems to which he was so adapted.
A cursory investigation of the role of fire in India’s fire ecosystems shows that India is far behind in understanding the beneficial role of fire in nature especially among government policymakers. India has strict laws against lighting forest fires seemly inspired by the European colonizers, but native peoples still go about their burning for their livelihood as they have since they arrived on the Indian continent.
I have found some lonely pro-fire articles that remind me what it was like when my father rounded
up global pro-fire mavericks in face of powerful US Forest Service government opposition in the 1950s and 1960s. In India as in the Western United States, unknowledgeable land managers and politicians scapegoat fire for man caused problems. In India the real problem is not fire, but overpopulation and overgrazing.
The native peoples of India are just doing what they have always done to make a living off the land
and that is pushing back the forest using fire. The problem with the severe loss of forest land in India should not be blamed on fire, no more than man caused clear-cutting, excessive logging, and increasing fuel load accumulations in the Western United States be blamed on fire. The article, A Fiery History pretty much sums up the situation in India. [65]
The authors in this article correctly point out that humans have been using fire since they first arrived on the subcontinent of India.
“Ethnographers have compared the centrality of the role fire has played in the life and culture of adivasis in the Andamans—and possibly adivasis elsewhere in India—with the role fire has played in the culture of the Australian aborigines. Fire was also important in the lives of the early Aryans and their livestock, with Agni, the fire god, occupying a prominent place amongst their deities.”
“Fire continues to be a forest management tool for forest-dependent communities across the country
today. This is so even though the Indian Forest Act of 1927 regards the setting of fires to be a punishable offence and makes it mandatory for all forest dwellers to assist in the prevention and control of fires. People burn for a variety of reasons, whether it is to encourage fresh fodder for grazing livestock, or to aid in the collection of non-timber forest products such as mahua and tendu, or to encourage regeneration of particular species.”
“However, because of the prevailing ban-and-punish policy, fires today are often set surreptitiously
and can become uncontrolled. There is also evidence that with shrinking forest areas and increased demographic pressures there has been a reduction in fire return intervals over the past century. And increasingly, there has been a breakdown of traditional fire management systems (e.g., in the northeast). All of this further fuels the widespread opinion that all fires are destructive and
result in forest degradation. The reality, however, is probably much more
nuanced.”
The official policy on fire in India has been fire suppression instituted by Europeans in the late 19th century, who deceptively called it “scientific”, when in fact such policy had no scientific basis. This official policy faced skepticism right from the beginning from local people and a few European foresters, who understood correctly from long direct experience that fire was an integral part of forest, savanna and grassland ecosystems of India. In spite of this official policy some controlled burning was strictly controlled, but legally allowed, for forest practices. The general public just ignored the laws and kept
on burning as they had for thousands of years albeit more covertly than before.
According to this article attitudes are slowly changing in India and there are attempts underway
to move toward an official recognition that fire is important to India’s fire ecosystems. They also point out the necessity of engaging local people who are experienced fire managers with an intimate connectivity to the land.
“Our engagement with the Soliga community in the BR Hills has shown that their knowledge of the ecological role of fires is very sophisticated, and that fire has played an important role in their management of the forest. Far from regarding fire as a destructive force, they recognize a number of benefits of fire for the dynamics of the forests. They also recognize the importance of the timing of fire occurrence, distinguishing beneficial early-dry-season fires—for which they have a particular name, the tharagu benki—from the more severe and destructive fires that occur later in the dry season. Given this background, any attempt to manage this landscape, and possibly other landscapes like it, cannot but engage with its fire history.”
Gaurav Moghe tells us a little about the Soliga native peoples of India in this entry called, The Soliga community of Karnataka, and their intimate relationship with nature. These people’s ancestral lands have now been deemed a wildlife sanctuary. This combined with the general over population problems all over India is putting these native peoples under tremendous stress. [66]
“The Soligas are nomadic people who have lived in the Biligiriranga Hills region of Southern Karnataka for centuries. Soligas - whose name means Children of the Bamboo - live off forest produce like honey, berries and timber. They do cultivate a little bit of pigeon peas, beans, pumpkins and millet but mostly for their own consumption [1]. Many Soligas, even today, live in small shelters called pudus deep inside the dense forests of Southern Western Ghats. The community is so dependent on biodiversity that they revere Mother Nature - not just the forests, the animals and the trees, but even the land they walk upon [2].
The knowledge that Soligas possess about the forests of the Western Ghats can be used for biodiversity conservation. For example, a study performed in 2008 looked at the Soliga claim that forest fires are in-fact beneficial for biodiversity [3]. Generally, forest fires would be extinguished by the forest department using modern fire-suppression regimes. However, the Soligas claimed that natural fires are inherent part of the forest biome and extinguishing such fires leads to increased parasitic load. The above study looked at infections of Loranthus - a plant parasite - on Phyllanthus emblica (Aamla) trees and found that fire indeed reduced the parasitic load on these trees and increased their survival [3]. This example points to the importance of considering local, folk knowledge in any biodiversity conservation
regime.”
In the Cenozoic, India collided with Asia 55 to 45 million years ago and Arabia collided with Eurasia closing the Tethys ocean about 35 million years ago. The continent of India drove itself into Asia forcing up the Himalayan Mountains and finally South America became attached to North America.
Homo erectus left Africa and populated China as early as 1.66 million years based on stone tools found in the Nihewan Basin. Stone tools found at Xiaochangliang were dated to 1.36 million years. The archaeological site of Xihoudu in Shanxi Province is the earliest recorded use of fire by Homo erectus, which is dated at 1.27 million years. Southeast Asia was reached 1.7 million years ago and then West Europe 1.2 million years ago. [62]
It seems that there were two migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa that spread out and displaced
Homo erectus. One was across the Red Sea traveling along the coastal regions to India and the other from East Africa heading north and crossing into Asia through the Sinai. It now seems that one group of humans entered India 70,000 years ago and displaced Homo heidelbergensis before they entered Europe and displaced the Neanderthals. [63]
The first wave of migrations seems to have happened 90,000 to 130,000 years ago and the first
populations reached South Asia 50,000 years ago with East Asia (Korea, Japan) reached 30,000 years ago. [64] So we see that Homo erectus using fire could have been altering fire landscapes over a million years ago, but just how much effect there was is hard to determine. In Asia as elsewhere the effects of Homo sapiens seems to have been pronounced using fire to expand the fire ecosystems to which he was so adapted.
A cursory investigation of the role of fire in India’s fire ecosystems shows that India is far behind in understanding the beneficial role of fire in nature especially among government policymakers. India has strict laws against lighting forest fires seemly inspired by the European colonizers, but native peoples still go about their burning for their livelihood as they have since they arrived on the Indian continent.
I have found some lonely pro-fire articles that remind me what it was like when my father rounded
up global pro-fire mavericks in face of powerful US Forest Service government opposition in the 1950s and 1960s. In India as in the Western United States, unknowledgeable land managers and politicians scapegoat fire for man caused problems. In India the real problem is not fire, but overpopulation and overgrazing.
The native peoples of India are just doing what they have always done to make a living off the land
and that is pushing back the forest using fire. The problem with the severe loss of forest land in India should not be blamed on fire, no more than man caused clear-cutting, excessive logging, and increasing fuel load accumulations in the Western United States be blamed on fire. The article, A Fiery History pretty much sums up the situation in India. [65]
The authors in this article correctly point out that humans have been using fire since they first arrived on the subcontinent of India.
“Ethnographers have compared the centrality of the role fire has played in the life and culture of adivasis in the Andamans—and possibly adivasis elsewhere in India—with the role fire has played in the culture of the Australian aborigines. Fire was also important in the lives of the early Aryans and their livestock, with Agni, the fire god, occupying a prominent place amongst their deities.”
“Fire continues to be a forest management tool for forest-dependent communities across the country
today. This is so even though the Indian Forest Act of 1927 regards the setting of fires to be a punishable offence and makes it mandatory for all forest dwellers to assist in the prevention and control of fires. People burn for a variety of reasons, whether it is to encourage fresh fodder for grazing livestock, or to aid in the collection of non-timber forest products such as mahua and tendu, or to encourage regeneration of particular species.”
“However, because of the prevailing ban-and-punish policy, fires today are often set surreptitiously
and can become uncontrolled. There is also evidence that with shrinking forest areas and increased demographic pressures there has been a reduction in fire return intervals over the past century. And increasingly, there has been a breakdown of traditional fire management systems (e.g., in the northeast). All of this further fuels the widespread opinion that all fires are destructive and
result in forest degradation. The reality, however, is probably much more
nuanced.”
The official policy on fire in India has been fire suppression instituted by Europeans in the late 19th century, who deceptively called it “scientific”, when in fact such policy had no scientific basis. This official policy faced skepticism right from the beginning from local people and a few European foresters, who understood correctly from long direct experience that fire was an integral part of forest, savanna and grassland ecosystems of India. In spite of this official policy some controlled burning was strictly controlled, but legally allowed, for forest practices. The general public just ignored the laws and kept
on burning as they had for thousands of years albeit more covertly than before.
According to this article attitudes are slowly changing in India and there are attempts underway
to move toward an official recognition that fire is important to India’s fire ecosystems. They also point out the necessity of engaging local people who are experienced fire managers with an intimate connectivity to the land.
“Our engagement with the Soliga community in the BR Hills has shown that their knowledge of the ecological role of fires is very sophisticated, and that fire has played an important role in their management of the forest. Far from regarding fire as a destructive force, they recognize a number of benefits of fire for the dynamics of the forests. They also recognize the importance of the timing of fire occurrence, distinguishing beneficial early-dry-season fires—for which they have a particular name, the tharagu benki—from the more severe and destructive fires that occur later in the dry season. Given this background, any attempt to manage this landscape, and possibly other landscapes like it, cannot but engage with its fire history.”
Gaurav Moghe tells us a little about the Soliga native peoples of India in this entry called, The Soliga community of Karnataka, and their intimate relationship with nature. These people’s ancestral lands have now been deemed a wildlife sanctuary. This combined with the general over population problems all over India is putting these native peoples under tremendous stress. [66]
“The Soligas are nomadic people who have lived in the Biligiriranga Hills region of Southern Karnataka for centuries. Soligas - whose name means Children of the Bamboo - live off forest produce like honey, berries and timber. They do cultivate a little bit of pigeon peas, beans, pumpkins and millet but mostly for their own consumption [1]. Many Soligas, even today, live in small shelters called pudus deep inside the dense forests of Southern Western Ghats. The community is so dependent on biodiversity that they revere Mother Nature - not just the forests, the animals and the trees, but even the land they walk upon [2].
The knowledge that Soligas possess about the forests of the Western Ghats can be used for biodiversity conservation. For example, a study performed in 2008 looked at the Soliga claim that forest fires are in-fact beneficial for biodiversity [3]. Generally, forest fires would be extinguished by the forest department using modern fire-suppression regimes. However, the Soligas claimed that natural fires are inherent part of the forest biome and extinguishing such fires leads to increased parasitic load. The above study looked at infections of Loranthus - a plant parasite - on Phyllanthus emblica (Aamla) trees and found that fire indeed reduced the parasitic load on these trees and increased their survival [3]. This example points to the importance of considering local, folk knowledge in any biodiversity conservation
regime.”
China
China is a vast country and is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations and can roughly be divided into North and South China. Since the beginning of the Cenozoic, North China has been impacted greatly by intercontinental rifting and extensional tectonics as the Continent of India drives itself into Asia creating the Himalayan Mountain Range. North China is chilly and composed of flat plains, grasslands and desert. South China is warm and rainy and is composed of lush mountains and rivers. Consequently there is a great diversity of fire ecosystems across China.
China is the home of 1.3 billion people according to the 2000 Census and encompasses a huge variety of climates and landscapes with its borders extending through Central, South and South-East Asia from the Pacific Ocean, the tropical jungles of South-East Asia to the Himalayas. It contains mostly plateaus and mountains in the east, grasslands and plains in the North and the south is dominated by hills and low mountain ranges.
Much of the population lives in the east along or near the shores of the Yellow and East China Sea and on the plains of the rivers flowing into the Pacific, such as the Yangtze and the Huang He. Because of its size and diversity of geographic features, it has diversity of human cultures and societies throughout antiquity. China has over 100 distinct ethnic groups.
In the lower Yangtze it is believed that rice was first domesticated. The adoption of cereal cultivation out of fire adapted grasses was one of the most important cultural processes in human history and marked the transition from hunting and gathering by Mesolithic foragers to the food producing economy of Neolithic farmers. The article Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China states:
“Here we report detailed evidence from Kuahuqiao that reveals the precise cultural and environmental context of rice cultivation at this earliest known Neolithic site in eastern China, 7,700 calibrated years before present (cal. yr. bp). Pollen, algal, fungal spore and micro-charcoal data from sediments demonstrate that these Neolithic communities selected lowland swamps for their rice cultivation and settlement, using fire to clear alder-dominated wetland scrub and prepare the site for occupation, then to maintain wet grassland vegetation of paddy type.”
While Homo erectus made it to China over a million years ago and used fire, the modern human presence has been dated to 67,000 years ago in Guangxi. So we can expect that these Chinese ecosystems have been substantially modified by indigenous peoples using fire for tens of thousands of years for hunting-gathering and for agriculture. Unfortunately, like so much of the rest of the world, European anti-fire policies have spread to China suppressing light fire burning in the 20th century.
The result has been a predictable rise in catastrophic fires that have killed hundreds of people and burnt forests to the ground as in the Western United States and Australia. In the past few decades because of rapid economic development, China now has the resources and capability to suppress natural light fires so essential to most fire ecosystems with the predictable catastrophic fire results. In India and Africa the central governments have not been able to exercise the kind of control over the people necessary to suppress fires and build fuel loads to catastrophic levels.
Here are some examples. The 1987 Daxinganling wildfire also known as the May 6 fire began in northeast Daxinganling Prefecture Heilongjiang on May 6, 1987. It burned almost a month and was stopped on June 2, 1987. The fire covered 2,500,000 acres with about 266 people wounded, 211 dead,
and 50,000 left homeless. The 2010 Dawu fire was a grassland fire that killed 22 people. It was short and lasted only 17 hours and 30 minutes with the fire occurring in extreme terrain. The 2010 Guangxi wildfire started on March 3, 2010 and lasted 6 days and 22 hours. The fire burnt 93 hectares of forest and brush in the mountain region.
In the article China Pilots Wildfire Detection Sensor Network, we see that China is on the leading edge of fire suppression abilities. We can see that China is advancing its wildfire suppression capabilities which will surely lead to even higher accumulations of fuel, same as in the Western United States and Australia. Eventually as we see over and over again, nature will eventually burn fire ecosystems with fires that will overwhelm the best fire suppression capabilities. All fire suppression does is make for larger more catastrophic fires that are not good for nature or man. Yet even in this article it is belatedly acknowledged by the Chinese that fire has a role in nature even while the next sentences sound right out of the Smokey the Bear playbook. :-)
“While forests play an important role in global climate and environment, wildfire is common occurrence in China, especially in dry winter, challenges the environmental balance and causes losses in lives and property. According to data release by China’s State Forestry Administration, around 2 per cent of the country’s forest area, or 28 times the landmass of Hong Kong, is destroyed by wildfire every year.” [67]
Currently China relies on manned lookout towers and from forest visitors to detect fire. Satellite imagery systems can detect large fires but not fires in the early stages. The new method is to fill the forests with wireless sensors that can detect changes in humidity and temperature, gas concentrate and the infrared level of the specific area where wildfire breaks out. The sensors notify the control center in 0.5 seconds and the fire scene can be immediately located and a drone sent to investigate.
According to the article Exploring Forest Management, Fire Suppression and Environmental Conservation in China the Chinese are learning the hard way as are there counterparts, that fire suppression leads to more and more catastrophic fire. They are also learning to appreciate the native people’s intimate knowledge of fire being handed down through generations and thousands of years. Fire ecologist Meg Krawchuk traveled to China to see for herself the fire landscapes of China. [68]
“Dr. Shu's data showed that roughly 884,400 hectares of forest burn every year in China. Since 1988, changes in law, law enforcement and fire management have caused the average area burned to decrease by over 90% compared to the 38-year period prior to the Black Dragon Fire of 1987. The Black Dragon Fire burned through roughly 1.2 million hectares in northern Heilongjiang Province, killing 200 people. For comparison, roughly 250,000 hectares burned in the Greater Yellowstone Region in 1988. There is some concern the strong effect of fire suppression is leading to high fuel loading in some areas, as we've seen through the suppression of fire in low- and moderate-severity fire environments in parts of the western United States. Prescribed burning is used in some places as a preventative tool to reduce fire intensity.”
“The People's Republic of China contains regions of many terrestrial biomes, and from that diversity one would expect fire would find a niche as an important disturbance agent in some. For example, Heilongjiang Province at the northeastern tip of China largely contains temperate coniferous and boreal/taiga forests. In other parts of the world, fire is a dominant ecological process in these forest types. Though the country is heavily influenced by the East-Asian monsoon, with wet summers and relatively dry winters, lightning during the warm summer season starts many fires in the north during periods of dryness or drought, and there is a growing recognition of fire's importance to these ecosystems.”
“In the south, Yunnan Province spans a vast gradient in ecosystems, from the subtropical south to
temperate mixed and conifer forests to higher elevation shrub-lands in the Tibetan Plateau in the north. Yunnan is one of the three provinces with the most fire activity in China, but the majority of it is human-caused.”
Meg Krawchuk also points out that:
“For at least three centuries, swidden agriculture had been the practice of Yi and Lisu peoples on the hills in the regions around Lijiang. Families would cut and burn patches of forest to clear it for agriculture, then would move to a new area after three to 10 years as soil quality diminished.” These old patterns going back hundreds but most like tens of thousands of years have now been stopped with a 1998 law, but questions now remain how adapted to man’s activities have these ecosystems become and is stopping this activity wise.
In addition other forms of more extensive agriculture used to grow crops could be more environmentally damaging. “Could it be that some of the biodiversity in these landscapes could depend on fire? Recent controversy over swidden agriculture has suggested that in some situations, the practice can result in a benefit for biodiversity, cultural heritage, soil and water conservation, and carbon sequestration.”
Prescribed burning, as Chinese official policy, started in the 1980s after the 1987 Black Dragon fire forced the authorities to rethink their fire suppression position. So in China as well as other areas around the world, some good does come out of these extremely destructive man caused catastrophic fires. Let’s hope that there will be more appreciation of the “fire folk-wisdom” of native populations in China that is beginning to develop elsewhere around the world.
China is a vast country and is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations and can roughly be divided into North and South China. Since the beginning of the Cenozoic, North China has been impacted greatly by intercontinental rifting and extensional tectonics as the Continent of India drives itself into Asia creating the Himalayan Mountain Range. North China is chilly and composed of flat plains, grasslands and desert. South China is warm and rainy and is composed of lush mountains and rivers. Consequently there is a great diversity of fire ecosystems across China.
China is the home of 1.3 billion people according to the 2000 Census and encompasses a huge variety of climates and landscapes with its borders extending through Central, South and South-East Asia from the Pacific Ocean, the tropical jungles of South-East Asia to the Himalayas. It contains mostly plateaus and mountains in the east, grasslands and plains in the North and the south is dominated by hills and low mountain ranges.
Much of the population lives in the east along or near the shores of the Yellow and East China Sea and on the plains of the rivers flowing into the Pacific, such as the Yangtze and the Huang He. Because of its size and diversity of geographic features, it has diversity of human cultures and societies throughout antiquity. China has over 100 distinct ethnic groups.
In the lower Yangtze it is believed that rice was first domesticated. The adoption of cereal cultivation out of fire adapted grasses was one of the most important cultural processes in human history and marked the transition from hunting and gathering by Mesolithic foragers to the food producing economy of Neolithic farmers. The article Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China states:
“Here we report detailed evidence from Kuahuqiao that reveals the precise cultural and environmental context of rice cultivation at this earliest known Neolithic site in eastern China, 7,700 calibrated years before present (cal. yr. bp). Pollen, algal, fungal spore and micro-charcoal data from sediments demonstrate that these Neolithic communities selected lowland swamps for their rice cultivation and settlement, using fire to clear alder-dominated wetland scrub and prepare the site for occupation, then to maintain wet grassland vegetation of paddy type.”
While Homo erectus made it to China over a million years ago and used fire, the modern human presence has been dated to 67,000 years ago in Guangxi. So we can expect that these Chinese ecosystems have been substantially modified by indigenous peoples using fire for tens of thousands of years for hunting-gathering and for agriculture. Unfortunately, like so much of the rest of the world, European anti-fire policies have spread to China suppressing light fire burning in the 20th century.
The result has been a predictable rise in catastrophic fires that have killed hundreds of people and burnt forests to the ground as in the Western United States and Australia. In the past few decades because of rapid economic development, China now has the resources and capability to suppress natural light fires so essential to most fire ecosystems with the predictable catastrophic fire results. In India and Africa the central governments have not been able to exercise the kind of control over the people necessary to suppress fires and build fuel loads to catastrophic levels.
Here are some examples. The 1987 Daxinganling wildfire also known as the May 6 fire began in northeast Daxinganling Prefecture Heilongjiang on May 6, 1987. It burned almost a month and was stopped on June 2, 1987. The fire covered 2,500,000 acres with about 266 people wounded, 211 dead,
and 50,000 left homeless. The 2010 Dawu fire was a grassland fire that killed 22 people. It was short and lasted only 17 hours and 30 minutes with the fire occurring in extreme terrain. The 2010 Guangxi wildfire started on March 3, 2010 and lasted 6 days and 22 hours. The fire burnt 93 hectares of forest and brush in the mountain region.
In the article China Pilots Wildfire Detection Sensor Network, we see that China is on the leading edge of fire suppression abilities. We can see that China is advancing its wildfire suppression capabilities which will surely lead to even higher accumulations of fuel, same as in the Western United States and Australia. Eventually as we see over and over again, nature will eventually burn fire ecosystems with fires that will overwhelm the best fire suppression capabilities. All fire suppression does is make for larger more catastrophic fires that are not good for nature or man. Yet even in this article it is belatedly acknowledged by the Chinese that fire has a role in nature even while the next sentences sound right out of the Smokey the Bear playbook. :-)
“While forests play an important role in global climate and environment, wildfire is common occurrence in China, especially in dry winter, challenges the environmental balance and causes losses in lives and property. According to data release by China’s State Forestry Administration, around 2 per cent of the country’s forest area, or 28 times the landmass of Hong Kong, is destroyed by wildfire every year.” [67]
Currently China relies on manned lookout towers and from forest visitors to detect fire. Satellite imagery systems can detect large fires but not fires in the early stages. The new method is to fill the forests with wireless sensors that can detect changes in humidity and temperature, gas concentrate and the infrared level of the specific area where wildfire breaks out. The sensors notify the control center in 0.5 seconds and the fire scene can be immediately located and a drone sent to investigate.
According to the article Exploring Forest Management, Fire Suppression and Environmental Conservation in China the Chinese are learning the hard way as are there counterparts, that fire suppression leads to more and more catastrophic fire. They are also learning to appreciate the native people’s intimate knowledge of fire being handed down through generations and thousands of years. Fire ecologist Meg Krawchuk traveled to China to see for herself the fire landscapes of China. [68]
“Dr. Shu's data showed that roughly 884,400 hectares of forest burn every year in China. Since 1988, changes in law, law enforcement and fire management have caused the average area burned to decrease by over 90% compared to the 38-year period prior to the Black Dragon Fire of 1987. The Black Dragon Fire burned through roughly 1.2 million hectares in northern Heilongjiang Province, killing 200 people. For comparison, roughly 250,000 hectares burned in the Greater Yellowstone Region in 1988. There is some concern the strong effect of fire suppression is leading to high fuel loading in some areas, as we've seen through the suppression of fire in low- and moderate-severity fire environments in parts of the western United States. Prescribed burning is used in some places as a preventative tool to reduce fire intensity.”
“The People's Republic of China contains regions of many terrestrial biomes, and from that diversity one would expect fire would find a niche as an important disturbance agent in some. For example, Heilongjiang Province at the northeastern tip of China largely contains temperate coniferous and boreal/taiga forests. In other parts of the world, fire is a dominant ecological process in these forest types. Though the country is heavily influenced by the East-Asian monsoon, with wet summers and relatively dry winters, lightning during the warm summer season starts many fires in the north during periods of dryness or drought, and there is a growing recognition of fire's importance to these ecosystems.”
“In the south, Yunnan Province spans a vast gradient in ecosystems, from the subtropical south to
temperate mixed and conifer forests to higher elevation shrub-lands in the Tibetan Plateau in the north. Yunnan is one of the three provinces with the most fire activity in China, but the majority of it is human-caused.”
Meg Krawchuk also points out that:
“For at least three centuries, swidden agriculture had been the practice of Yi and Lisu peoples on the hills in the regions around Lijiang. Families would cut and burn patches of forest to clear it for agriculture, then would move to a new area after three to 10 years as soil quality diminished.” These old patterns going back hundreds but most like tens of thousands of years have now been stopped with a 1998 law, but questions now remain how adapted to man’s activities have these ecosystems become and is stopping this activity wise.
In addition other forms of more extensive agriculture used to grow crops could be more environmentally damaging. “Could it be that some of the biodiversity in these landscapes could depend on fire? Recent controversy over swidden agriculture has suggested that in some situations, the practice can result in a benefit for biodiversity, cultural heritage, soil and water conservation, and carbon sequestration.”
Prescribed burning, as Chinese official policy, started in the 1980s after the 1987 Black Dragon fire forced the authorities to rethink their fire suppression position. So in China as well as other areas around the world, some good does come out of these extremely destructive man caused catastrophic fires. Let’s hope that there will be more appreciation of the “fire folk-wisdom” of native populations in China that is beginning to develop elsewhere around the world.
Man and Fire in Southeast Asia
In the Cenozoic when India collided with Eurasia, a series of complex chain reactions caused the formation and destruction of sedimentary basins within the domain of the collision belt. This area continues to be very active geologically to this day. Changes in the rate and angle of the convergence between the India and Eurasia plates caused complex kinds of tectonic surface features in Southeast Asia. This created the South China Sea and continuing motions of the Sino-Burma-Thailand, Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Kalimantan plate blocks produced basins stretching from north Sumatra to central Thailand and on to the Natural area. [69]
All this geologic activity created a diverse ecological landscape in Southeast Asia. The more arid regions are fire ecosystems, but the wet tropical areas are not well adapted to fire. The native peoples have used fire for grazing and agriculture in harmony with nature until recent times. The slash and burn agricultural practices on relatively small areas created a mosaic of plant and animal species diversity.
However this is being replaced by very rapid economic development and ecosystem devastation since the 1960s. Small farmers and native peoples are being thrown off their land by powerful economic interests. International timber corporations go into the tropical forests to log the old growth timber. People then use the logging roads to claim land for agriculture using fire to clean up the logged over landscape. Then other international corporations come in and use catastrophic fire after clear-cutting to clear huge areas for their timber plantations and palm oil plantations. Some displaced people retaliate by burning out planted timber in the timber plantations.
The environmental devastation came to worldwide attention during droughts where tropical rainforests already deluded of old growth timber burned readily. Millions of hectares have burned in Borneo, the Philippines, Sumatra and mainland Southeast Asia. In 1982-83 three million hectares burned on the island of Borneo alone. In 1997 catastrophic blazes set mostly by man produced so much smoke that it created a haze for months that disrupted travel and the air pollution was so severe that it affected 80 million people with a financial loss of over one billion dollars. While wildfire gets the blame, the real culprits are government-linked companies, engaged in clearing the forest to establish palm oil and rubber plantations. In the book Communities and Forest Management in Southeast Asia by Mark Poffenberger the author makes the point:
“Fire has always been an important element in managing the natural forest environments of Southeast Asia, especially in the drier ecosystems. Most long-rotation swidden farming systems rely on fire to clear fields, recycle nutrients, and manage pests. Most farmers, with the oversight of community institutions, carefully control such burns. In these contexts, fire has been used for generations as a means of managing the landscape in culturally prescribed ways. Unfortunately, documentation of indigenous systems of fire use and management is limited, vague and judgmental. Some scientists are urging that a greater effort be made to understand the indigenous use of fire and collaboration with local communities.”
Mark hits the nail on the head when he points out the real cause for these devastating fires rather than blame fire as so many in the region still do. This is reminiscent of the days of the timber barons in the economically developing United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They clear-cut the old growth timber devastating forests and combined with the removal of the native Indians and settlers, caused huge fuel accumulations that blew up in great conflagrations burning both forests and cities to the ground. In a very similar knee jerk reaction, politicians, economic interests and even scientists still blame fire and native peoples for these catastrophic fires and divert public attention away from the real culprits. Mark is not fooled; he understands who the real culprits are and says:
“It is clear that commercial resource exploitation through logging and mining, as well as estate crop
establishment has greatly contributed to the degradation of vast areas, both in terms of their ecological and productive functions. At the same time, over the past century, the role of communities in managing natural forests has been curtailed legally and administratively. A serious political commitment will be required from national leaders and international organizations if the community forest management paradigm to be meaningful empowered through legislative and operational actions throughout the region.”
In the Cenozoic when India collided with Eurasia, a series of complex chain reactions caused the formation and destruction of sedimentary basins within the domain of the collision belt. This area continues to be very active geologically to this day. Changes in the rate and angle of the convergence between the India and Eurasia plates caused complex kinds of tectonic surface features in Southeast Asia. This created the South China Sea and continuing motions of the Sino-Burma-Thailand, Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Kalimantan plate blocks produced basins stretching from north Sumatra to central Thailand and on to the Natural area. [69]
All this geologic activity created a diverse ecological landscape in Southeast Asia. The more arid regions are fire ecosystems, but the wet tropical areas are not well adapted to fire. The native peoples have used fire for grazing and agriculture in harmony with nature until recent times. The slash and burn agricultural practices on relatively small areas created a mosaic of plant and animal species diversity.
However this is being replaced by very rapid economic development and ecosystem devastation since the 1960s. Small farmers and native peoples are being thrown off their land by powerful economic interests. International timber corporations go into the tropical forests to log the old growth timber. People then use the logging roads to claim land for agriculture using fire to clean up the logged over landscape. Then other international corporations come in and use catastrophic fire after clear-cutting to clear huge areas for their timber plantations and palm oil plantations. Some displaced people retaliate by burning out planted timber in the timber plantations.
The environmental devastation came to worldwide attention during droughts where tropical rainforests already deluded of old growth timber burned readily. Millions of hectares have burned in Borneo, the Philippines, Sumatra and mainland Southeast Asia. In 1982-83 three million hectares burned on the island of Borneo alone. In 1997 catastrophic blazes set mostly by man produced so much smoke that it created a haze for months that disrupted travel and the air pollution was so severe that it affected 80 million people with a financial loss of over one billion dollars. While wildfire gets the blame, the real culprits are government-linked companies, engaged in clearing the forest to establish palm oil and rubber plantations. In the book Communities and Forest Management in Southeast Asia by Mark Poffenberger the author makes the point:
“Fire has always been an important element in managing the natural forest environments of Southeast Asia, especially in the drier ecosystems. Most long-rotation swidden farming systems rely on fire to clear fields, recycle nutrients, and manage pests. Most farmers, with the oversight of community institutions, carefully control such burns. In these contexts, fire has been used for generations as a means of managing the landscape in culturally prescribed ways. Unfortunately, documentation of indigenous systems of fire use and management is limited, vague and judgmental. Some scientists are urging that a greater effort be made to understand the indigenous use of fire and collaboration with local communities.”
Mark hits the nail on the head when he points out the real cause for these devastating fires rather than blame fire as so many in the region still do. This is reminiscent of the days of the timber barons in the economically developing United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They clear-cut the old growth timber devastating forests and combined with the removal of the native Indians and settlers, caused huge fuel accumulations that blew up in great conflagrations burning both forests and cities to the ground. In a very similar knee jerk reaction, politicians, economic interests and even scientists still blame fire and native peoples for these catastrophic fires and divert public attention away from the real culprits. Mark is not fooled; he understands who the real culprits are and says:
“It is clear that commercial resource exploitation through logging and mining, as well as estate crop
establishment has greatly contributed to the degradation of vast areas, both in terms of their ecological and productive functions. At the same time, over the past century, the role of communities in managing natural forests has been curtailed legally and administratively. A serious political commitment will be required from national leaders and international organizations if the community forest management paradigm to be meaningful empowered through legislative and operational actions throughout the region.”
Man and Fire in Europe
The Alps and the Carpathian mountains in Southern Europe were created during the Cenozoic. The climate of the early Cenozoic was much warmer than it is today with a cooling trend, that continues to this day into the current interglacial period. Glaciation began in Europe and North America recently between 3 and 2.5 million years ago and had a huge impact on Europe and American ecosystems and geology. The great diversity
of plant communities today is from the expansion and adaptive radiation of the angiosperms that began in the Late Cretaceous. As the climate cooled during the Cenozoic, plants became more and more specialized with deciduous angiosperms developing in the colder regions and evergreen types evolving in the tropics and subtropics. [70]
The Cenozoic is known to be the age of mammals and led to a mega-fauna of ice age mammals in Europe and elsewhere. Around 8,000 to 10,000 there was a major extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of much of the mega-fauna that has been attributed to climate change and especially the Paleolithic humans with a rapidly improving hunting technology and techniques.
The Neanderthals that occupied Europe for hundreds of thousands of years had learned to use fire as a tool; so, they must have added to the frequency of fire in their European ranges. Neanderthals were a lot smarter than folks previously believed and could well have used fire to scare game to stampeded large game into traps. The Article Neanderthals Were Nifty at Controlling Fire points out that Neanderthals were quite skilled in their hunting techniques.
“But the archaeological record shows Neanderthals drove herds of big game animals into dead-end ravines and ambushed them, as evidenced by repeatedly used kill sites -- a sign of long-term planning and coordination among hunters, she said.”
As it turns out Neanderthals also had more manufacturing skills than previously thought.
“According to Villa, one of the most spectacular uses of fire by Neanderthals was in the production of a sticky liquid called pitch from the bark of birch trees that was used by Neanderthals to haft, or fit wooden shafts on, stone tools. Since the only way to create pitch from the trees is to burn bark peels in the absence of air, archaeologists surmise Neanderthals dug holes in the ground, inserted birch bark peels, lit them and covered the hole tightly with stones to block incoming air.
"This means Neanderthals were not only able to use naturally occurring adhesive gums as part of their daily lives, they were actually able to manufacture their own," Villa said. "For those who say Neanderthals did not have elevated mental capacities, I think this is good evidence to the contrary." [70]
While Neanderthals were plenty smart, their numbers were not that large, and it seems that it was not until Homo sapiens moved into Europe in large numbers that there was a significant increase in man caused fires. Light intensity fires were first used for hunting-gathering, and later in the Holocene, to remove, or open up the European forests into savannas and grasslands for grazing domesticated livestock and agriculture.
Modern human hunter-gatherers began arriving in Europe 45,000 years ago and replaced and or integrated Neanderthals into their genome. The hunter-gatherers experienced varied climatic changes until after the last ice age 11,000 years ago, but in a couple thousand years farmers began to move into Europe coexisting but not initially interbreeding with the hunter-gatherers according to genetic studies.
“The study identifies the Carpathian Basin as the origin for early Central European farmers. It seems that farmers of the Linearbandkeramik culture immigrated from what is modern day Hungary around 7,500 years ago into Central Europe, initially without mixing with local hunter gatherers," says Barbara Bramanti, first author of the study. "This is surprising, because there were cultural contacts between
the locals and the immigrants, but, it appears, no genetic exchange of women." [71]
Farming that affected Europe was first developed in the high diverse fire environments of the Fertile Crescent also known at the cradle of civilization because farming gave rise to cities and civilization there. The Fertile Crescent is a relatively moist fertile crescent-shaped region in arid and semi-arid Western Asia, in the Nile valley and delta of Northeast Africa. The fire adapted grasses that grew wild were harvested and eaten by hunter-gatherers living in the region allowing for a gradual domestication of these wild grasses over time. Wikipedia states:
“The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climate, and major climatic changes encouraging the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants. The region's dramatic variety of elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to the eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e. wild progenitors to emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species of domesticated animals—cows, goats, sheep, and pigs—and the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.” [72]
The introduction of farming to Europe must have changed hunting-gathering fire lifestyles to fire farming lifestyles and so changed the type of controlled burning these people were doing previous to farming. Burning was surely used to increase the grasslands for livestock, and the introduction of slash and burn agriculture must have had a great effect on forest and savanna ecosystems. The slash and burn agriculture seems to then have been replaced by more permanent agriculture using animals to plow the fields.
Fire regimes in Europe have a wide range from subtropical to arid to boreal. In these fire ecosystems, plants and animals have adapted first to natural fires usually started by lightning and later to more frequent light burning by man. Just like elsewhere in the world the fire ecosystems and all their diversity we have today have been highly impacted by man. If we were to try to revert back to a time before man, that would be catastrophic for many species of plants and animals adapted to more frequent fire. Perhaps it would even be more catastrophic than current fire suppression activity by man.
Fire ecologists classify a large region of the world as Europe and divide it into sub-regions. The Mediterranean region surrounds the Mediterranean Sea, including Northern Africa, and Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. The European fire region extends from Iceland to Morocco including around 50 countries. [73] Lexi Krock’s The World on Fire article does a good of summarizing the role of fire on all continents including Europe.
“The two European fire regions differ in their use of prescribed fire to thin potential wildfire fuels. In the Mediterranean region, particularly Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and North African and Near Eastern countries almost never use prescribed burning, because it has proved less costly for these nations to fight fires as they arise. On average, some 50,000 fires burn annually in the Mediterranean basin, usually in the spring and summer months. Most of these fires result from human negligence and accidents.
In Western, Eastern, and Northern Europe, by contrast, forest managers increasingly use prescribed fire as a means of both maintaining forest ecosystems for wildlife and preventing the encroachment of bush vegetation. Many of the fires that burn during the summer months in these regions are the result of such prescribed burning.
The largest area of forests in the European region, spanning eleven time zones, is Russia. Approximately 95 percent of Russian forests lie in the boreal zone, as in Canada, and Russia's fire seasons closely resemble Canada's, with most burning occurring in late summer. A majority of Russia's boreal forests are remote and contain large amounts of accumulated fuel matter.
Unmanaged fires burn freely during the fire season. Agricultural burning occurs in pockets of the Russian Federation, and many of these human-set fires quickly become uncontrolled wildfires. In recent years, fire-management teams in Russia have begun to assess ways to limit uncontrolled fires in the boreal forests, for they are a major source of carbon emissions; the carbon stored in these boreal forests accounts for approximately 37 percent of the total global carbon pool.”
The Alps and the Carpathian mountains in Southern Europe were created during the Cenozoic. The climate of the early Cenozoic was much warmer than it is today with a cooling trend, that continues to this day into the current interglacial period. Glaciation began in Europe and North America recently between 3 and 2.5 million years ago and had a huge impact on Europe and American ecosystems and geology. The great diversity
of plant communities today is from the expansion and adaptive radiation of the angiosperms that began in the Late Cretaceous. As the climate cooled during the Cenozoic, plants became more and more specialized with deciduous angiosperms developing in the colder regions and evergreen types evolving in the tropics and subtropics. [70]
The Cenozoic is known to be the age of mammals and led to a mega-fauna of ice age mammals in Europe and elsewhere. Around 8,000 to 10,000 there was a major extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of much of the mega-fauna that has been attributed to climate change and especially the Paleolithic humans with a rapidly improving hunting technology and techniques.
The Neanderthals that occupied Europe for hundreds of thousands of years had learned to use fire as a tool; so, they must have added to the frequency of fire in their European ranges. Neanderthals were a lot smarter than folks previously believed and could well have used fire to scare game to stampeded large game into traps. The Article Neanderthals Were Nifty at Controlling Fire points out that Neanderthals were quite skilled in their hunting techniques.
“But the archaeological record shows Neanderthals drove herds of big game animals into dead-end ravines and ambushed them, as evidenced by repeatedly used kill sites -- a sign of long-term planning and coordination among hunters, she said.”
As it turns out Neanderthals also had more manufacturing skills than previously thought.
“According to Villa, one of the most spectacular uses of fire by Neanderthals was in the production of a sticky liquid called pitch from the bark of birch trees that was used by Neanderthals to haft, or fit wooden shafts on, stone tools. Since the only way to create pitch from the trees is to burn bark peels in the absence of air, archaeologists surmise Neanderthals dug holes in the ground, inserted birch bark peels, lit them and covered the hole tightly with stones to block incoming air.
"This means Neanderthals were not only able to use naturally occurring adhesive gums as part of their daily lives, they were actually able to manufacture their own," Villa said. "For those who say Neanderthals did not have elevated mental capacities, I think this is good evidence to the contrary." [70]
While Neanderthals were plenty smart, their numbers were not that large, and it seems that it was not until Homo sapiens moved into Europe in large numbers that there was a significant increase in man caused fires. Light intensity fires were first used for hunting-gathering, and later in the Holocene, to remove, or open up the European forests into savannas and grasslands for grazing domesticated livestock and agriculture.
Modern human hunter-gatherers began arriving in Europe 45,000 years ago and replaced and or integrated Neanderthals into their genome. The hunter-gatherers experienced varied climatic changes until after the last ice age 11,000 years ago, but in a couple thousand years farmers began to move into Europe coexisting but not initially interbreeding with the hunter-gatherers according to genetic studies.
“The study identifies the Carpathian Basin as the origin for early Central European farmers. It seems that farmers of the Linearbandkeramik culture immigrated from what is modern day Hungary around 7,500 years ago into Central Europe, initially without mixing with local hunter gatherers," says Barbara Bramanti, first author of the study. "This is surprising, because there were cultural contacts between
the locals and the immigrants, but, it appears, no genetic exchange of women." [71]
Farming that affected Europe was first developed in the high diverse fire environments of the Fertile Crescent also known at the cradle of civilization because farming gave rise to cities and civilization there. The Fertile Crescent is a relatively moist fertile crescent-shaped region in arid and semi-arid Western Asia, in the Nile valley and delta of Northeast Africa. The fire adapted grasses that grew wild were harvested and eaten by hunter-gatherers living in the region allowing for a gradual domestication of these wild grasses over time. Wikipedia states:
“The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climate, and major climatic changes encouraging the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants. The region's dramatic variety of elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to the eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e. wild progenitors to emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species of domesticated animals—cows, goats, sheep, and pigs—and the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.” [72]
The introduction of farming to Europe must have changed hunting-gathering fire lifestyles to fire farming lifestyles and so changed the type of controlled burning these people were doing previous to farming. Burning was surely used to increase the grasslands for livestock, and the introduction of slash and burn agriculture must have had a great effect on forest and savanna ecosystems. The slash and burn agriculture seems to then have been replaced by more permanent agriculture using animals to plow the fields.
Fire regimes in Europe have a wide range from subtropical to arid to boreal. In these fire ecosystems, plants and animals have adapted first to natural fires usually started by lightning and later to more frequent light burning by man. Just like elsewhere in the world the fire ecosystems and all their diversity we have today have been highly impacted by man. If we were to try to revert back to a time before man, that would be catastrophic for many species of plants and animals adapted to more frequent fire. Perhaps it would even be more catastrophic than current fire suppression activity by man.
Fire ecologists classify a large region of the world as Europe and divide it into sub-regions. The Mediterranean region surrounds the Mediterranean Sea, including Northern Africa, and Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. The European fire region extends from Iceland to Morocco including around 50 countries. [73] Lexi Krock’s The World on Fire article does a good of summarizing the role of fire on all continents including Europe.
“The two European fire regions differ in their use of prescribed fire to thin potential wildfire fuels. In the Mediterranean region, particularly Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and North African and Near Eastern countries almost never use prescribed burning, because it has proved less costly for these nations to fight fires as they arise. On average, some 50,000 fires burn annually in the Mediterranean basin, usually in the spring and summer months. Most of these fires result from human negligence and accidents.
In Western, Eastern, and Northern Europe, by contrast, forest managers increasingly use prescribed fire as a means of both maintaining forest ecosystems for wildlife and preventing the encroachment of bush vegetation. Many of the fires that burn during the summer months in these regions are the result of such prescribed burning.
The largest area of forests in the European region, spanning eleven time zones, is Russia. Approximately 95 percent of Russian forests lie in the boreal zone, as in Canada, and Russia's fire seasons closely resemble Canada's, with most burning occurring in late summer. A majority of Russia's boreal forests are remote and contain large amounts of accumulated fuel matter.
Unmanaged fires burn freely during the fire season. Agricultural burning occurs in pockets of the Russian Federation, and many of these human-set fires quickly become uncontrolled wildfires. In recent years, fire-management teams in Russia have begun to assess ways to limit uncontrolled fires in the boreal forests, for they are a major source of carbon emissions; the carbon stored in these boreal forests accounts for approximately 37 percent of the total global carbon pool.”
Man and Fire in the Americas
When South America detached from Antarctica, the climate cooled significantly because the Antarctic Circumpolar Current brought cool deep Antarctic water to the surface. When South America became attached to North America, it continued to cool due to the strengthening of the Humboldt and Gulf Stream currents eventually leading to the glaciations of the Quaternary ice age and to the current interglacial period of the Holocene today. [74]
In the Cenozoic, fire type grasses became widespread opening up many forests into grassland savanna and insects and flowering plants became co-dependent. Grasses played a very important role in this era, shaping the evolution of birds and mammals that fed on grass and the predators that fed on the grazing mammals. Man himself evolved in these fire grasslands and savannas of Africa and then spread around the globe arriving late in North and South America perhaps in several migrations 15,000 to 30,000 years ago from Asia via Alaska and maybe even Europe via Iceland and Greenland.
The Americas stretch almost from pole to pole and with many geological features that created diverse and complex habitats for plants and animals from artic conditions to tropical conditions. In the Cenozoic, the Andes in South America and the Rockies in North America formed as tectonic plates collided.
In the Holocene when modern man spread from Africa into North and South America, he drastically increased the already frequent fire activity caused by lightning. Fortunately during the past century Fire Ecologists have done a lot of research in the Americans on native peoples and fire. We also have the early historical records of white settlers when the first came to the Americas and this really helps the understanding of what the ecosystems looked like prior to European colonization and fire suppression activities.
Today we have this growing awareness among fire ecologists as to the Native American’s role in shaping the fire ecosystems of the Americas especially North America. We see this growing awareness indicated in the Wikipedia entry Native American use of fire. When I was a boy Herb Stoddard, Leon Neel, Roy Komarek and my father Ed Komarek Sr. and their associates were well aware of the native peoples fire use before European colonization. [75]
However, today there has been so much more research so that American and Australian Fire Ecologists are leading the way in pointing out the importance of native people’s fire practices in these countries and around the world. All I can say is it’s about time, being that it was the United States Government that did so much damage to American global ecosystems by promoting extremely misguided and false fire exclusion policies.
This false meme that fire and early indigenous people were bad for the environment is still being supported by bureaucrats, politicians and special interests all around the world closely linked to the fire suppression industry. This false meme is still causing extreme environmental and societal damage in the Western United States and elsewhere, even today, as evidenced by huge catastrophic fires where fire suppression has allowed huge fuel accumulations to build.
In another chapter I will give an overview on the battle for fire’s place in global ecosystems that was centered on the evolving Fire Ecologists living in the plantation country around Thomasville Georgia. I grew up in and among these Ecologists, so I had a front row seat to this battle against the US Forest Service and Smokey the Bear. It’s a battle that is far from won and is still playing out around the world. It can only be won by widespread public awareness of fire and native man’s important role in fashioning global ecosystems. Wikipedia states:
“Many people believe that North America, before the coming of the Spanish explorers, missionaries,
and settlers, was a totally pristine, natural, wilderness world with ancient forests covering the landscapes. This ideal world was populated by millions of Indian people who, somewhat amazingly, “were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance. This peaceful, mythic, magical ideal — sometimes referred to as tabula rasa — has symbolized the thinking behind much of the modern environmental movement. However, these impressions of a "benign people treading lightly on the land", is wrong in its view of an entirely natural landscape: natives played a large role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystems.
Fire scientists and ecologists often find old fire scars in trees going back hundreds of years. Geographers studying lake sediments often find evidence of charcoal layers going back thousands of years, attributing the data to prehistoric fires caused by climatic warming and drying conditions. Since the trees and sediments cannot document how the fires started, lightning becomes the easiest “natural”
explanation. Early researchers thought that no large burning was carried out by natives, but research during the latter half of the 20th century has shown that many or most of the pre-settlement fires were intentionally caused.
Keeping large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth and small trees was just one of many reasons for using fire in ecosystems. Intentional burning has greatly modified landscapes across the continent in many subtle ways that have often been interpreted as natural by the early explorers, trappers, and settlers. Many research scientists who study pre-settlement forest and savanna fire evidence tend to attribute most prehistoric fires as being caused by lightning (natural) rather than by humans. This problem arises because there was no systematic record keeping of these fire events. Thus the interaction of people and ecosystems is down played or ignored, which often leads to the conclusion that people are a problem in "natural" ecosystems rather than the primary force in their development.
Romantic and primitivist writers such as William Henry Hudson, Longfellow, Francis Parkman, and Thoreau were major inventors of the t he Pristine Myth, which became part of American heritage. Influenced by Western prejudice against primitivism and hunter-gatherer societies, many people still believe that Native Americans lived in complete harmony with the environment and neither disturbed nor destroyed but took only what was absolutely needed for survival. One of the powerful technologies which Native Americans had was fire, and they clearly changed the landscape with it. Sometimes to clear the woods, sometimes to create a berry patch, the changes spread across the continents.”
I could not have said it better myself. :-) Fire historian Steve Pyne echoes these sentiments when he wrote:
“The modification of the American continent by fire at the hands of "Indigenous people" was the result of repeated, controlled, surface burns on a cycle of one to three years, broken by occasional holocausts from escape fires and periodic conflagrations during times of drought. Even under ideal circumstances, accidents occurred: signal fires escaped and campfires spread, with the result that valuable range was untimely scorched, buffalo driven away, and villages threatened. Burned corpses on the prairie were far from rare.
So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general
consequence of the Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savanna, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush. Most of the impenetrable woods encountered by explorers were in bogs or swamps from which fire was excluded; naturally drained landscape was nearly everywhere burned. Conversely, almost wherever the European
went, forests followed. The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it.”
It was in the fire grasslands of Mexico that grasses were being harvested for food as elsewhere in the Americas. A very fire adapted grass called Tripsacum that can be found in the Americas was first thought to be one of the ancestors of corn. It has a very tough outer covering, but it can be pounded or popped and eaten like popcorn. The important thing about Tripsacum is that because of this hard covering it can be stored for long periods without being damaged by insects. It could be an important resource for native peoples when other food resources would be hard to find. It tastes like corn and it was once thought to be an ancestor of corn, but modern genetic testing indicates that corn derived from Teosinte (another fire grass that is found in Mexico).
Corn was developed from Teosinte according to genetic testing from a variety called Balsas Teosinte
native to the Balsas River valley in Mexico’s southwestern highlands. However, archaeobotanical studies indicate development in the Balsas River valley where stone milling tools with maize residue have been found dating to 8,700 years ago. An early corn was being grown in Southern Mexico, Central America and Northern South America 7,000 years ago.
About 2500 BC, maize cultivation spread over the Americas. It was first cultivated in the United States in 2100 BC. About 1100 AD the size of the cobs and corn expanded greatly from the small primitive varieties being cultivated before. Over a thousand years ago maize finally reached the Southeastern United States after already spreading over much of North America." [76]
Before the White Man, just along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, there were millions of
Indians cultivating Maize and other crops significantly altering the landscape with crops growing in a patchwork of fields among open annually burned forests and savannas. The only areas that did not get annual or frequent burning, was where the Indians kept back fire to grow berry bushes and nut trees. But even these areas had to be rejuvenated over time by fire.
In the Southeastern United States where I live, they would plant a new field either in a small clearing caused by lighting and bugs in the upland Longleaf Pine Savannas they managed with fire, or girdled a few trees using a stone axe. When the soil nutrients ran out, they would move to another clearing or open up one. In order to increase the production on these sites, beans were planted next to the corn to nitrify the soil and squash to suppress the weeds between the plants. When the first Spaniards arrived in North Florida, they found that the road from St. Augustine to Tallahassee was boarded on both sides by Indian farming as far as the eye could see, there was such a high population of Indians in the area.
The Longleaf would then seed into the new field just as it did where there were lightning strikes and so piecemeal regenerate itself. This patchwork of fields also added wildlife cover and successionary stages of undergrowth until the pines grew tall and burnt out this undergrowth leaving wiregrass, legumes and wild orchids for the wildlife dependent on these fire ecosystems. This was so unlike the clear-cutting of the old growth longleaf for timber and cotton plantations that followed in the wake of European colonization and the general extermination of the Native Americans by disease, war and displacement to reservations.
When the Civil War bankrupted the South, the Cotton plantations began to revert back to nature with
second growth pines seeding into the old fields. Wealthy people from the North began to buy up this cheap land and create hunting plantations using fire to protect the timber and improve the land for wildlife. Their plantation managers often came from settler stock, who in turn, had learned to manage the land with fire for wildlife from the Indians. The well managed quail plantations came to look much like the land before the Europeans arrived and like the way the Indians had managed for thousands of years.
In the central United States, in what came to be called the Great Plains, the Indians managed and hunted with fire to greatly expand these vast tall-grass and short-grass prairies that nature had previously managed with lightning. In the Cretaceous Period, the Great Plains was covered by a shallow inland sea called the Western Interior Seaway. During the late Cretaceous 65-55 million years ago the seaway began to recede leaving behind a flat plain covered with thick marine deposits. [77] Wikipedia states:
“ Paleontological finds in the area have yielded bones of woolly mammoths, saber toothed tigers and other ancient animals,[6] as well as dozens of other mega-fauna (large animals over 100 lb. (45 kg)) – such as giant sloths, horses, mastodons, and American lion – that dominated the area of the ancient Great Plains for millions of years. The vast majority of these animals went extinct in North America around 13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene.”
The first Americans arrived on the Great Plains around 10,000 years ago with waves of migration that swept into the North American Continent from Asia across the Bering Straits land bridge. They hunted the plentiful bison as part of the culture of the Plains Indians. The Plains Indians migrated onto the plains from different areas of North America and greatly increased with the arrival of the horse for transportation thanks to the early Spanish explorers. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador, provided the first recorded account of a meeting with the Plains Indians in Texas, Kansas and Nebraska in 1540-1542. About that same time, Hernando de Soto crossed into what is now Oklahoma and Texas.
It is believed that a combination of frequent fire and buffalo grazing created the mostly treeless Plains in the center of the continent and the forested savannas around the periphery from the relatively recent uplifted Rocky Mountains to the west and the old eroded Appalachian Mountains to east. European trappers moved onto the plains in the next 100 years and by the time of the Louisiana Purchase, one half to two thirds of the Plains Indians had died of European diseases.
During the 1800s, the Great Plains became settled with the Westward Expansion by the Europeans. The remaining Indians were defeated, put on reservations. Most of the buffalo were exterminated. The overgrazing by cattle farmers, agriculture plowing under of the sod, clear-cutting the forest savannas into the Rockies, had by the 1930s, almost completely wiped out the previous Great Plains ecosystem.
Much of this European caused activity including clear-cutting of the old growth light fire Ponderosa forests, redwoods and sequoias, the overgrazing the grasses on the ground with cattle, and removal of the Indian frequent fire managers, caused huge buildups of fuel. This led to catastrophic fires that by the early 1900s consumed much of the remaining forest and even whole towns both east and west of the Rockies. Government short sighted public land managers and foresters wrongly blamed fire for the disasters, as they still do in the West today and in developing countries.
These government agencies then instituted misguided fire suppression policies that went into effect all over the United States creating catastrophic fire consequences for generations to come. Even as suppression improved, fuels continued to build through the 1900s and into the 2000s creating a powerful fire suppression industry.
Today this industry has a powerful political lobbying arm that obstructs a move away from fire suppression to frequent fire management. The fledging public fire management teams have little political clout but they are beginning to gain some support from large insurance companies that have incurred large losses from these catastrophic fires.
Ultimately, resistance to these fire exclusion policies began in the 1920s and became centered in the Southeastern United States to which as a boy I had a front row seat in the 1950s and 1960s. I will cover
this battle to bring fire back into the Nation’s and ultimately the world’s forests, grasslands and Savannas, in a later chapter of this book.
In the Western United States, where the prairie leaves off and the land continues on through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, we not only find Ponderosa Pine but remnants of ancient frequent fire and catastrophic fire forests, savannas and grasslands. The conifer tree species of the subfamily Sequoioideae were widespread in the northern hemisphere beginning in the Jurassic. Fossil remains of the genus Sequoia have been found in North America, Greenland, and the Eurasian continent. This indicates that these vast frequent fire adapted forests covered much of northern hemisphere. Only three species have survived the ice ages of the Cenozoic, the Giant Sequoia, Coast Redwood and the Dawn Redwood in Southwest China. [78]
These are huge extremely fire adapted trees that burn out the competition with frequent fire but have been destroyed by misguided fire exclusion policies that allow catastrophic fire type trees to build up in the understory. When these catastrophic fire type trees burn, the fire runs up the trunk into the crown,
and the whole tree is consumed in an inferno. Even the redwoods and the sequoia with its up to two feet thick bark cannot withstand these crown fires. They also can’t take burning smoldering duff around the roots, where unburned dead organic matter has been allowed to build up over decades.
Conservation measures that took hold in the early part of the 20th century, including the creation of the Serra Club, gained protection from logging in Parks and National Forests and helped save these forests. However fire exclusion policies and not so competent attempts at controlled burning still endanger these forests. It’s a daunting task to just learn how to use controlled fire well, let along remove the decade’s accumulation of fuel on the forest floor.
In the Southeast, I and others have to burn Longleaf, Loblolly and Slash Pine right after a rain to remove the “duff” one layer at a time for several years until we are free to control burn normally. Inexperienced people either burn when its dry and kill the trees with crown fire, or really hot ground fires, as is still happening today on public lands, or they use a back fire or a night fire to burn through the forest but the “duff” accumulated around the base of the tree smolders like a fuse killing the tree around the base.
In the northern part of North America in Alaska and Canada we run into the catastrophic fire type
boreal forests. Some of these trees can take a light burn; but, in Alaska and Canada the Central Black Spruce and willow bog forests and Upland Birch and aspen burn in the heat of summer killing everything to the ground. Over the years through successionary stages willow sprouts and grasses provide grazing for big game animals like moose and elk and small game like grouse. Eventually the brush, trees and other organic matter builds up and the forest and bogs burn clearing the way for diverse successionary stages to again create habitats for plants and wildlife.
I moved to Alaska to go to College and worked for Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game during the summers and the interior of Alaska would fill up with smoke from the burning fires that would continue into the fall. One of my good friends was a Smoke Jumper who jumped on these fires to put some of them out, but already by this time in the late 1960s and 1970s foresters were beginning to understand that these fires were important for regeneration and in spite of a general fire suppression policy they let fires burn. When the wildfires were no threat to settlements, they were allowed to burn, and besides, they just did not have the resources to put all the fires down anyway. [79]
Recognition of fire’s role in fire ecosystems is beginning to advance rapidly in Canada. Many people don’t realize that the Great Plains Prairie Ecosystem reaches up into Canada where some of it is being preserved. While the United States has lost most of its prairie to agriculture with some efforts being made to restore it using fire and bison, in Canada they still have some virgin prairie left. Much of it is in Canada’s Grasslands National Park (a mixed-grass prairie ecosystem). [80]
In Grasslands National Park, they now use prescribed fire and wildlife grazing to maintain this prairie ecosystem. Because of human development fires can no longer be allowed to run wild so the best that
can be done is to simulate wild-land fire with prescribed fire. The objective for using controlled burning in Grasslands is to shift the composition of plants from a non-native to native community, enhance native plant seed production, attract large grazers and reduce the amount of fuel loads in the park. [81]
Much of Canada is forested with boreal forests as is Alaska, but it has much more timber to be managed as a public resource for income and jobs. I remember that when I first traveled through Canada with my family as a boy there was large scale clear-cutting going on devastating the forest
ecosystems. Later. when as a young man I traveled through Canada, I saw that there was much more environmental awareness and the timber cutting was being logged in smaller patches, burned and replanted, simulating a natural mosaic of catastrophic fire and regeneration. This is a much more environmental friendly way to derive income from the forests but retain the diversity of plant and animal species. In the publication, the use of prescribed fire in the management of Canada’s forested lands, they state: [82]
“Present uses of prescribed fire in Canada are reviewed. Fire has been a natural component of many forested North American landscapes for millennia, making it an obvious choice as an effective forest management tool. It can be used in harmony with known fire adaptations of ecosystems to be managed. Prescribed fire uses are separated into six categories: (1) hazard reduction which evolved into (2) silviculture (including fire use for site preparation, managing competing vegetation, stand conversion, and stand rehabilitation (3) wildlife habitat enhancement (4) range burning (5) insect and disease control (6) conservation of natural ecosystems."
When South America detached from Antarctica, the climate cooled significantly because the Antarctic Circumpolar Current brought cool deep Antarctic water to the surface. When South America became attached to North America, it continued to cool due to the strengthening of the Humboldt and Gulf Stream currents eventually leading to the glaciations of the Quaternary ice age and to the current interglacial period of the Holocene today. [74]
In the Cenozoic, fire type grasses became widespread opening up many forests into grassland savanna and insects and flowering plants became co-dependent. Grasses played a very important role in this era, shaping the evolution of birds and mammals that fed on grass and the predators that fed on the grazing mammals. Man himself evolved in these fire grasslands and savannas of Africa and then spread around the globe arriving late in North and South America perhaps in several migrations 15,000 to 30,000 years ago from Asia via Alaska and maybe even Europe via Iceland and Greenland.
The Americas stretch almost from pole to pole and with many geological features that created diverse and complex habitats for plants and animals from artic conditions to tropical conditions. In the Cenozoic, the Andes in South America and the Rockies in North America formed as tectonic plates collided.
In the Holocene when modern man spread from Africa into North and South America, he drastically increased the already frequent fire activity caused by lightning. Fortunately during the past century Fire Ecologists have done a lot of research in the Americans on native peoples and fire. We also have the early historical records of white settlers when the first came to the Americas and this really helps the understanding of what the ecosystems looked like prior to European colonization and fire suppression activities.
Today we have this growing awareness among fire ecologists as to the Native American’s role in shaping the fire ecosystems of the Americas especially North America. We see this growing awareness indicated in the Wikipedia entry Native American use of fire. When I was a boy Herb Stoddard, Leon Neel, Roy Komarek and my father Ed Komarek Sr. and their associates were well aware of the native peoples fire use before European colonization. [75]
However, today there has been so much more research so that American and Australian Fire Ecologists are leading the way in pointing out the importance of native people’s fire practices in these countries and around the world. All I can say is it’s about time, being that it was the United States Government that did so much damage to American global ecosystems by promoting extremely misguided and false fire exclusion policies.
This false meme that fire and early indigenous people were bad for the environment is still being supported by bureaucrats, politicians and special interests all around the world closely linked to the fire suppression industry. This false meme is still causing extreme environmental and societal damage in the Western United States and elsewhere, even today, as evidenced by huge catastrophic fires where fire suppression has allowed huge fuel accumulations to build.
In another chapter I will give an overview on the battle for fire’s place in global ecosystems that was centered on the evolving Fire Ecologists living in the plantation country around Thomasville Georgia. I grew up in and among these Ecologists, so I had a front row seat to this battle against the US Forest Service and Smokey the Bear. It’s a battle that is far from won and is still playing out around the world. It can only be won by widespread public awareness of fire and native man’s important role in fashioning global ecosystems. Wikipedia states:
“Many people believe that North America, before the coming of the Spanish explorers, missionaries,
and settlers, was a totally pristine, natural, wilderness world with ancient forests covering the landscapes. This ideal world was populated by millions of Indian people who, somewhat amazingly, “were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance. This peaceful, mythic, magical ideal — sometimes referred to as tabula rasa — has symbolized the thinking behind much of the modern environmental movement. However, these impressions of a "benign people treading lightly on the land", is wrong in its view of an entirely natural landscape: natives played a large role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystems.
Fire scientists and ecologists often find old fire scars in trees going back hundreds of years. Geographers studying lake sediments often find evidence of charcoal layers going back thousands of years, attributing the data to prehistoric fires caused by climatic warming and drying conditions. Since the trees and sediments cannot document how the fires started, lightning becomes the easiest “natural”
explanation. Early researchers thought that no large burning was carried out by natives, but research during the latter half of the 20th century has shown that many or most of the pre-settlement fires were intentionally caused.
Keeping large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth and small trees was just one of many reasons for using fire in ecosystems. Intentional burning has greatly modified landscapes across the continent in many subtle ways that have often been interpreted as natural by the early explorers, trappers, and settlers. Many research scientists who study pre-settlement forest and savanna fire evidence tend to attribute most prehistoric fires as being caused by lightning (natural) rather than by humans. This problem arises because there was no systematic record keeping of these fire events. Thus the interaction of people and ecosystems is down played or ignored, which often leads to the conclusion that people are a problem in "natural" ecosystems rather than the primary force in their development.
Romantic and primitivist writers such as William Henry Hudson, Longfellow, Francis Parkman, and Thoreau were major inventors of the t he Pristine Myth, which became part of American heritage. Influenced by Western prejudice against primitivism and hunter-gatherer societies, many people still believe that Native Americans lived in complete harmony with the environment and neither disturbed nor destroyed but took only what was absolutely needed for survival. One of the powerful technologies which Native Americans had was fire, and they clearly changed the landscape with it. Sometimes to clear the woods, sometimes to create a berry patch, the changes spread across the continents.”
I could not have said it better myself. :-) Fire historian Steve Pyne echoes these sentiments when he wrote:
“The modification of the American continent by fire at the hands of "Indigenous people" was the result of repeated, controlled, surface burns on a cycle of one to three years, broken by occasional holocausts from escape fires and periodic conflagrations during times of drought. Even under ideal circumstances, accidents occurred: signal fires escaped and campfires spread, with the result that valuable range was untimely scorched, buffalo driven away, and villages threatened. Burned corpses on the prairie were far from rare.
So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general
consequence of the Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savanna, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush. Most of the impenetrable woods encountered by explorers were in bogs or swamps from which fire was excluded; naturally drained landscape was nearly everywhere burned. Conversely, almost wherever the European
went, forests followed. The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it.”
It was in the fire grasslands of Mexico that grasses were being harvested for food as elsewhere in the Americas. A very fire adapted grass called Tripsacum that can be found in the Americas was first thought to be one of the ancestors of corn. It has a very tough outer covering, but it can be pounded or popped and eaten like popcorn. The important thing about Tripsacum is that because of this hard covering it can be stored for long periods without being damaged by insects. It could be an important resource for native peoples when other food resources would be hard to find. It tastes like corn and it was once thought to be an ancestor of corn, but modern genetic testing indicates that corn derived from Teosinte (another fire grass that is found in Mexico).
Corn was developed from Teosinte according to genetic testing from a variety called Balsas Teosinte
native to the Balsas River valley in Mexico’s southwestern highlands. However, archaeobotanical studies indicate development in the Balsas River valley where stone milling tools with maize residue have been found dating to 8,700 years ago. An early corn was being grown in Southern Mexico, Central America and Northern South America 7,000 years ago.
About 2500 BC, maize cultivation spread over the Americas. It was first cultivated in the United States in 2100 BC. About 1100 AD the size of the cobs and corn expanded greatly from the small primitive varieties being cultivated before. Over a thousand years ago maize finally reached the Southeastern United States after already spreading over much of North America." [76]
Before the White Man, just along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, there were millions of
Indians cultivating Maize and other crops significantly altering the landscape with crops growing in a patchwork of fields among open annually burned forests and savannas. The only areas that did not get annual or frequent burning, was where the Indians kept back fire to grow berry bushes and nut trees. But even these areas had to be rejuvenated over time by fire.
In the Southeastern United States where I live, they would plant a new field either in a small clearing caused by lighting and bugs in the upland Longleaf Pine Savannas they managed with fire, or girdled a few trees using a stone axe. When the soil nutrients ran out, they would move to another clearing or open up one. In order to increase the production on these sites, beans were planted next to the corn to nitrify the soil and squash to suppress the weeds between the plants. When the first Spaniards arrived in North Florida, they found that the road from St. Augustine to Tallahassee was boarded on both sides by Indian farming as far as the eye could see, there was such a high population of Indians in the area.
The Longleaf would then seed into the new field just as it did where there were lightning strikes and so piecemeal regenerate itself. This patchwork of fields also added wildlife cover and successionary stages of undergrowth until the pines grew tall and burnt out this undergrowth leaving wiregrass, legumes and wild orchids for the wildlife dependent on these fire ecosystems. This was so unlike the clear-cutting of the old growth longleaf for timber and cotton plantations that followed in the wake of European colonization and the general extermination of the Native Americans by disease, war and displacement to reservations.
When the Civil War bankrupted the South, the Cotton plantations began to revert back to nature with
second growth pines seeding into the old fields. Wealthy people from the North began to buy up this cheap land and create hunting plantations using fire to protect the timber and improve the land for wildlife. Their plantation managers often came from settler stock, who in turn, had learned to manage the land with fire for wildlife from the Indians. The well managed quail plantations came to look much like the land before the Europeans arrived and like the way the Indians had managed for thousands of years.
In the central United States, in what came to be called the Great Plains, the Indians managed and hunted with fire to greatly expand these vast tall-grass and short-grass prairies that nature had previously managed with lightning. In the Cretaceous Period, the Great Plains was covered by a shallow inland sea called the Western Interior Seaway. During the late Cretaceous 65-55 million years ago the seaway began to recede leaving behind a flat plain covered with thick marine deposits. [77] Wikipedia states:
“ Paleontological finds in the area have yielded bones of woolly mammoths, saber toothed tigers and other ancient animals,[6] as well as dozens of other mega-fauna (large animals over 100 lb. (45 kg)) – such as giant sloths, horses, mastodons, and American lion – that dominated the area of the ancient Great Plains for millions of years. The vast majority of these animals went extinct in North America around 13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene.”
The first Americans arrived on the Great Plains around 10,000 years ago with waves of migration that swept into the North American Continent from Asia across the Bering Straits land bridge. They hunted the plentiful bison as part of the culture of the Plains Indians. The Plains Indians migrated onto the plains from different areas of North America and greatly increased with the arrival of the horse for transportation thanks to the early Spanish explorers. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador, provided the first recorded account of a meeting with the Plains Indians in Texas, Kansas and Nebraska in 1540-1542. About that same time, Hernando de Soto crossed into what is now Oklahoma and Texas.
It is believed that a combination of frequent fire and buffalo grazing created the mostly treeless Plains in the center of the continent and the forested savannas around the periphery from the relatively recent uplifted Rocky Mountains to the west and the old eroded Appalachian Mountains to east. European trappers moved onto the plains in the next 100 years and by the time of the Louisiana Purchase, one half to two thirds of the Plains Indians had died of European diseases.
During the 1800s, the Great Plains became settled with the Westward Expansion by the Europeans. The remaining Indians were defeated, put on reservations. Most of the buffalo were exterminated. The overgrazing by cattle farmers, agriculture plowing under of the sod, clear-cutting the forest savannas into the Rockies, had by the 1930s, almost completely wiped out the previous Great Plains ecosystem.
Much of this European caused activity including clear-cutting of the old growth light fire Ponderosa forests, redwoods and sequoias, the overgrazing the grasses on the ground with cattle, and removal of the Indian frequent fire managers, caused huge buildups of fuel. This led to catastrophic fires that by the early 1900s consumed much of the remaining forest and even whole towns both east and west of the Rockies. Government short sighted public land managers and foresters wrongly blamed fire for the disasters, as they still do in the West today and in developing countries.
These government agencies then instituted misguided fire suppression policies that went into effect all over the United States creating catastrophic fire consequences for generations to come. Even as suppression improved, fuels continued to build through the 1900s and into the 2000s creating a powerful fire suppression industry.
Today this industry has a powerful political lobbying arm that obstructs a move away from fire suppression to frequent fire management. The fledging public fire management teams have little political clout but they are beginning to gain some support from large insurance companies that have incurred large losses from these catastrophic fires.
Ultimately, resistance to these fire exclusion policies began in the 1920s and became centered in the Southeastern United States to which as a boy I had a front row seat in the 1950s and 1960s. I will cover
this battle to bring fire back into the Nation’s and ultimately the world’s forests, grasslands and Savannas, in a later chapter of this book.
In the Western United States, where the prairie leaves off and the land continues on through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, we not only find Ponderosa Pine but remnants of ancient frequent fire and catastrophic fire forests, savannas and grasslands. The conifer tree species of the subfamily Sequoioideae were widespread in the northern hemisphere beginning in the Jurassic. Fossil remains of the genus Sequoia have been found in North America, Greenland, and the Eurasian continent. This indicates that these vast frequent fire adapted forests covered much of northern hemisphere. Only three species have survived the ice ages of the Cenozoic, the Giant Sequoia, Coast Redwood and the Dawn Redwood in Southwest China. [78]
These are huge extremely fire adapted trees that burn out the competition with frequent fire but have been destroyed by misguided fire exclusion policies that allow catastrophic fire type trees to build up in the understory. When these catastrophic fire type trees burn, the fire runs up the trunk into the crown,
and the whole tree is consumed in an inferno. Even the redwoods and the sequoia with its up to two feet thick bark cannot withstand these crown fires. They also can’t take burning smoldering duff around the roots, where unburned dead organic matter has been allowed to build up over decades.
Conservation measures that took hold in the early part of the 20th century, including the creation of the Serra Club, gained protection from logging in Parks and National Forests and helped save these forests. However fire exclusion policies and not so competent attempts at controlled burning still endanger these forests. It’s a daunting task to just learn how to use controlled fire well, let along remove the decade’s accumulation of fuel on the forest floor.
In the Southeast, I and others have to burn Longleaf, Loblolly and Slash Pine right after a rain to remove the “duff” one layer at a time for several years until we are free to control burn normally. Inexperienced people either burn when its dry and kill the trees with crown fire, or really hot ground fires, as is still happening today on public lands, or they use a back fire or a night fire to burn through the forest but the “duff” accumulated around the base of the tree smolders like a fuse killing the tree around the base.
In the northern part of North America in Alaska and Canada we run into the catastrophic fire type
boreal forests. Some of these trees can take a light burn; but, in Alaska and Canada the Central Black Spruce and willow bog forests and Upland Birch and aspen burn in the heat of summer killing everything to the ground. Over the years through successionary stages willow sprouts and grasses provide grazing for big game animals like moose and elk and small game like grouse. Eventually the brush, trees and other organic matter builds up and the forest and bogs burn clearing the way for diverse successionary stages to again create habitats for plants and wildlife.
I moved to Alaska to go to College and worked for Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game during the summers and the interior of Alaska would fill up with smoke from the burning fires that would continue into the fall. One of my good friends was a Smoke Jumper who jumped on these fires to put some of them out, but already by this time in the late 1960s and 1970s foresters were beginning to understand that these fires were important for regeneration and in spite of a general fire suppression policy they let fires burn. When the wildfires were no threat to settlements, they were allowed to burn, and besides, they just did not have the resources to put all the fires down anyway. [79]
Recognition of fire’s role in fire ecosystems is beginning to advance rapidly in Canada. Many people don’t realize that the Great Plains Prairie Ecosystem reaches up into Canada where some of it is being preserved. While the United States has lost most of its prairie to agriculture with some efforts being made to restore it using fire and bison, in Canada they still have some virgin prairie left. Much of it is in Canada’s Grasslands National Park (a mixed-grass prairie ecosystem). [80]
In Grasslands National Park, they now use prescribed fire and wildlife grazing to maintain this prairie ecosystem. Because of human development fires can no longer be allowed to run wild so the best that
can be done is to simulate wild-land fire with prescribed fire. The objective for using controlled burning in Grasslands is to shift the composition of plants from a non-native to native community, enhance native plant seed production, attract large grazers and reduce the amount of fuel loads in the park. [81]
Much of Canada is forested with boreal forests as is Alaska, but it has much more timber to be managed as a public resource for income and jobs. I remember that when I first traveled through Canada with my family as a boy there was large scale clear-cutting going on devastating the forest
ecosystems. Later. when as a young man I traveled through Canada, I saw that there was much more environmental awareness and the timber cutting was being logged in smaller patches, burned and replanted, simulating a natural mosaic of catastrophic fire and regeneration. This is a much more environmental friendly way to derive income from the forests but retain the diversity of plant and animal species. In the publication, the use of prescribed fire in the management of Canada’s forested lands, they state: [82]
“Present uses of prescribed fire in Canada are reviewed. Fire has been a natural component of many forested North American landscapes for millennia, making it an obvious choice as an effective forest management tool. It can be used in harmony with known fire adaptations of ecosystems to be managed. Prescribed fire uses are separated into six categories: (1) hazard reduction which evolved into (2) silviculture (including fire use for site preparation, managing competing vegetation, stand conversion, and stand rehabilitation (3) wildlife habitat enhancement (4) range burning (5) insect and disease control (6) conservation of natural ecosystems."
Fire in Central and South America
In Central and South America, fire plays an important role in nature’s ecosystems as well providing a livelihood for the people past and present. Because of population pressures and corporate exploitation, what we hear most about is the use of slash and burn agriculture to decimate the tropical ecosystems of Central and South America just as we are seeing elsewhere in developing countries around the world.
It all seems to be fitting into a pattern of resource exploitation beginning in Europe with the removal of the forests for grazing and agriculture, then in the United States and now all around the world as nations move from being developing countries to developed countries. Once the country develops then the people begin to appreciate what has been lost and begin conservation and restoration projects as developed countries.
It is easy for people in the developed countries that are sucking up all these developing countries resources for their higher standard of living to decry the environmental destruction going on in South America and the rest of the developing world. But the protests ring hollow and hypocritical when the consumer of the resources attempts to shift all the blame to the developing world for the environmental destruction.
Yes it is true, the developing countries can learn not only about economic development from us, but
perhaps if we are humble enough, they can also learn from our mistakes. There have been huge environmental consequences in Europe and in the United States that are having to be rectified today. If they follow our reckless path of environmental destruction in the promotion of economic development they will also have to deal with the consequences eventually as we are doing.
Fire plays a major role in both South America and Central America. Lexi Krock in in his article the World on Fire states: [83]
"South American forests burn each year from both human-caused fires and natural wildfires. Throughout history, humans have practiced intentional burning in South America as a means of land conversion—to prepare land for crops or grazing and to clear large tracts of otherwise impenetrable forests for travel and hunting. Today, it is often difficult to discern which fires in South America are human-caused and which natural. Studies have shown that perhaps 50 to 90 percent of uncontrolled wildfires began as agricultural or land-conversion burns and then grew out of control. In general, as in Africa, the vast majority of forest fires in Brazil are begun intentionally.
Many of the large-scale fires in South America are concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela, where farmers and cattle ranchers undertake prescribed burns. These burns are usually set in and around grassland and savanna environments during the dry season from May to October, which closely corresponds to southern Africa's dry season.
An alarming proportion of South America's burning each year occurs in the Amazon rainforest region, often called the "lungs of the world." Though tropical thunderstorms in the rainforests preclude the ignition of fires by lightning almost 100 percent of the time, farmers converting large areas of Brazilia rainforest try year-round to start burns and keep them going wherever and whenever they can. Unfortunately, cleared rainforest land is rarely sustainable and reverts to non-arable land within a few growing seasons, causing farmers to undertake new burns every couple of years.
In the Chaco Region of Northwestern Argentina are fire grassland and savanna ecosystems. Vegetation in the Chaco Region is composed of a mixture of savannas, thorn shrub-lands and hardwood forests alternating in belts and patches. Rainfall is mostly in the summer months and the winters are dry and chilly with temperatures dropping below freezing. Before man, these grasslands and savannas were maintained by large native grazers and by natural lightning caused fires. When the native peoples arrived, they used the Chaco Grasslands that occupy about a third of Argentina for hunting and foraging and like elsewhere around the globe likely increased the frequency of light fires. Today the fire cycle is estimated to be about 3-5 years. The name Chaco means, “A site for hunting”. [84]
Cattle ranches existed since the very beginning of Spanish colonization and displaced or incorporated the native peoples in the area moving them from hunting gathering to agriculture to cattle ranching. Today the area is managed by the activities of ranchers and farmers and fire is used as a tool to push back brush and increase grazing and to keep the land clear for agriculture. The winter of 1993 was a severe fire season as it was very dry and cold. Around 100,000 hectares were burned by wildfire in the Southwestern Chaco Region and in the south 50,000 hectares were burned. This stimulated more interest in Fire Ecology research into the beneficial effects of prescribed fire to better manage these ecosystems."
The article Prescribed Fire Research in the Chaco Region says:
"Although ranches existed in the region since the very beginning of the Spanish settlement (XVI Century), extensive cow-calf and timber operations began in the mid XIX century largely due to European immigration. The practice of setting fires -- without too much concern about the consequences, as everywhere in the world -- is traditionally used by rangers to promote new growth in early spring, or to 'clean' native ranges. Coupled with overstocking, it led to savanna encroachment by Acacia, Celtis,Schinus and other shrubby/spiny species. Severely logged hardwood forest sites have been also invaded by early succession species and kept at this stage by overgrazing."
In Venezuela, it is good to see the appreciation of the indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. What is also telling is a willingness to cooperate with indigenous people today to develop fire management strategies that are good for both people and the environment. Sletto B. Rodriquez states in the abstract to his paper, Burning, fire prevention and landscape productions among the Pemon, Gran Sabana, Venezuela: toward an intercultural approach to wildland fire management in Neotropical Savannas that: [85]
“Wildland fire management in savanna landscapes increasingly incorporates indigenous knowledge to pursue strategies of controlled, prescriptive burning to control fuel loads. However, such participatory approaches are fraught with challenges because of contrasting views on the role of fire and the practices of prescribed burning between indigenous and state fire managers. Also, indigenous and state systems of knowledge and meanings associated with fire are not monolithic but instead characterized by conflicts and inconsistencies, which require new, communicative strategies in order to develop successful, intercultural approaches to fire management.
This paper is based on long-term research on indigenous Pemon social constructs, rules and regulations regarding fire use, and traditional system of prescribed burning in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. The authors review factors that act as constraints against successful intercultural fire management in the Gran Sabana, including conflicting perspectives on fire use within state agencies and in indigenous communities, and propose strategies for research and communicative planning to guide future efforts for more participatory and effective fire management.”
In Central and South America, fire plays an important role in nature’s ecosystems as well providing a livelihood for the people past and present. Because of population pressures and corporate exploitation, what we hear most about is the use of slash and burn agriculture to decimate the tropical ecosystems of Central and South America just as we are seeing elsewhere in developing countries around the world.
It all seems to be fitting into a pattern of resource exploitation beginning in Europe with the removal of the forests for grazing and agriculture, then in the United States and now all around the world as nations move from being developing countries to developed countries. Once the country develops then the people begin to appreciate what has been lost and begin conservation and restoration projects as developed countries.
It is easy for people in the developed countries that are sucking up all these developing countries resources for their higher standard of living to decry the environmental destruction going on in South America and the rest of the developing world. But the protests ring hollow and hypocritical when the consumer of the resources attempts to shift all the blame to the developing world for the environmental destruction.
Yes it is true, the developing countries can learn not only about economic development from us, but
perhaps if we are humble enough, they can also learn from our mistakes. There have been huge environmental consequences in Europe and in the United States that are having to be rectified today. If they follow our reckless path of environmental destruction in the promotion of economic development they will also have to deal with the consequences eventually as we are doing.
Fire plays a major role in both South America and Central America. Lexi Krock in in his article the World on Fire states: [83]
"South American forests burn each year from both human-caused fires and natural wildfires. Throughout history, humans have practiced intentional burning in South America as a means of land conversion—to prepare land for crops or grazing and to clear large tracts of otherwise impenetrable forests for travel and hunting. Today, it is often difficult to discern which fires in South America are human-caused and which natural. Studies have shown that perhaps 50 to 90 percent of uncontrolled wildfires began as agricultural or land-conversion burns and then grew out of control. In general, as in Africa, the vast majority of forest fires in Brazil are begun intentionally.
Many of the large-scale fires in South America are concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela, where farmers and cattle ranchers undertake prescribed burns. These burns are usually set in and around grassland and savanna environments during the dry season from May to October, which closely corresponds to southern Africa's dry season.
An alarming proportion of South America's burning each year occurs in the Amazon rainforest region, often called the "lungs of the world." Though tropical thunderstorms in the rainforests preclude the ignition of fires by lightning almost 100 percent of the time, farmers converting large areas of Brazilia rainforest try year-round to start burns and keep them going wherever and whenever they can. Unfortunately, cleared rainforest land is rarely sustainable and reverts to non-arable land within a few growing seasons, causing farmers to undertake new burns every couple of years.
In the Chaco Region of Northwestern Argentina are fire grassland and savanna ecosystems. Vegetation in the Chaco Region is composed of a mixture of savannas, thorn shrub-lands and hardwood forests alternating in belts and patches. Rainfall is mostly in the summer months and the winters are dry and chilly with temperatures dropping below freezing. Before man, these grasslands and savannas were maintained by large native grazers and by natural lightning caused fires. When the native peoples arrived, they used the Chaco Grasslands that occupy about a third of Argentina for hunting and foraging and like elsewhere around the globe likely increased the frequency of light fires. Today the fire cycle is estimated to be about 3-5 years. The name Chaco means, “A site for hunting”. [84]
Cattle ranches existed since the very beginning of Spanish colonization and displaced or incorporated the native peoples in the area moving them from hunting gathering to agriculture to cattle ranching. Today the area is managed by the activities of ranchers and farmers and fire is used as a tool to push back brush and increase grazing and to keep the land clear for agriculture. The winter of 1993 was a severe fire season as it was very dry and cold. Around 100,000 hectares were burned by wildfire in the Southwestern Chaco Region and in the south 50,000 hectares were burned. This stimulated more interest in Fire Ecology research into the beneficial effects of prescribed fire to better manage these ecosystems."
The article Prescribed Fire Research in the Chaco Region says:
"Although ranches existed in the region since the very beginning of the Spanish settlement (XVI Century), extensive cow-calf and timber operations began in the mid XIX century largely due to European immigration. The practice of setting fires -- without too much concern about the consequences, as everywhere in the world -- is traditionally used by rangers to promote new growth in early spring, or to 'clean' native ranges. Coupled with overstocking, it led to savanna encroachment by Acacia, Celtis,Schinus and other shrubby/spiny species. Severely logged hardwood forest sites have been also invaded by early succession species and kept at this stage by overgrazing."
In Venezuela, it is good to see the appreciation of the indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. What is also telling is a willingness to cooperate with indigenous people today to develop fire management strategies that are good for both people and the environment. Sletto B. Rodriquez states in the abstract to his paper, Burning, fire prevention and landscape productions among the Pemon, Gran Sabana, Venezuela: toward an intercultural approach to wildland fire management in Neotropical Savannas that: [85]
“Wildland fire management in savanna landscapes increasingly incorporates indigenous knowledge to pursue strategies of controlled, prescriptive burning to control fuel loads. However, such participatory approaches are fraught with challenges because of contrasting views on the role of fire and the practices of prescribed burning between indigenous and state fire managers. Also, indigenous and state systems of knowledge and meanings associated with fire are not monolithic but instead characterized by conflicts and inconsistencies, which require new, communicative strategies in order to develop successful, intercultural approaches to fire management.
This paper is based on long-term research on indigenous Pemon social constructs, rules and regulations regarding fire use, and traditional system of prescribed burning in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. The authors review factors that act as constraints against successful intercultural fire management in the Gran Sabana, including conflicting perspectives on fire use within state agencies and in indigenous communities, and propose strategies for research and communicative planning to guide future efforts for more participatory and effective fire management.”
Man and Fire’s Influence on Marine
Ecosystems
Best I can tell the ecological dynamics between land and sea is not well understood, let alone how man caused degradation of light fire ecosystems on land might be adversely impacting coastal sea life. One thing is for sure, large amounts of nutrients are flowing into the oceans providing food for sea life. Much of this sea life including, shrimp, crabs, and fish end up on our dinner table as well as on the menu of birds and animals.
Coastal birds and animals then often deposit nutrients back into the uplands and wetlands upstream of creeks and rivers when they roost. For instance on the Gulf Coast, in the Dickerson Bay area, near Panacea about 25 miles south of Tallahassee Florida, cormorants in large numbers feed in the coastal waters and then fly inland to freshwater Otter Lake to roost for the night. One has to wonder how many pounds of nutrients these cormorants alone are depositing into Otter Lake, feeding the lake and its creatures, but also the wetlands and the cypress trees around the lake.
The Ochlocknee River flows down from plantation country in South Georgia and North Florida near where I live and proceeds right on into the Gulf at Ochlocknee Bay, just a few miles from Panacea and Dickerson Bay. At one time, most of the uplands here were a fire climax upland savanna dominated by Longleaf Pine and wiregrass. Due to man’s activities, almost all of this has been replaced by other types of pines, hardwoods farmland, and residences.
The wholesale destruction of the once healthy ecosystems in this area has got to be effecting the marine environment on the Gulf of Mexico as well as elsewhere. The kind of vegetation decaying on unburned land must change the kinds of nutrients flowing downstream into the Gulf, as well as farming, logging and even the use of prescribed fire to simulate natural processes in such very fragmented
ecosystems.
One wonders if anybody has even done studies on the difference between nutrient decay runoff from different types of vegetation and that of runoff from wildfire and prescribed burns. My friend Jack Rudloe has done a few informal experiments depositing leaves, debris, logs and sticks around what he calls the Living Dock the subject of one of his books.
The idea was to understand if he could simulate natural process of debris floating down rivers into the Gulf to provide a substrate and nutrients for the growth of oysters, a very important commercial fishery in the area. He noticed that most leaves were broken down rather quickly by marine organisms, but not maple leaves for some reason. So we can assume that all types of decay and ash are not equal in nutrients, or how the nutrients are dispersed in the freshwater and marine environment. At this writing, we have been having a lot of rain and the rivers and oceans look like tea full of nutrients for the larval stages of sea life.
I got to thinking about all this and how my father and Jack were at one time starting to focus on this land-marine ecology. It occurs to me that much of the moisture in the form of rainfall we have here in the Southeast, comes off the Gulf and gets dumped into the uplands flushing nutrients down into the Gulf. Just how all this works and the role of fire in all this, should provide fertile research for both marine ecologists and land ecologists working together in the future.
I suspect that one of the reasons this is not well understood is because such collaboration between seemingly divergent perspectives as between Dad and Jack is rare. I think Tall Timbers dropped the ball in this situation with the destruction of Jack’s marine specimens held by Tall Timbers post Ed Komarek. I think Tall Timbers and FSU ought to revisit this promising early work and take a leading role in researching healthy upland fire ecosystem effects on marine ecosystems.
Of course there is a lot of work being done studying the interface between uplands and wetlands. While searching the Internet unsuccessfully for references as to fire’s effects on marine life, I did run into this study that discusses some interchanges between the New Jersey Pine Barrens maintained by fire being lost to other type ecosystems and effects on marine life. At this point, I expect this is about the best I can do is find indirect references as to fires role in marine ecosystems. [86]
I hope the reader can now better appreciate the importance of fire in nature and also man’s past and present role in maintaining these fire environments. Things certainly have come a long way since my father’s time, but this developing knowledge of the role of fire and man in global environments did not come easy.
Ecosystems
Best I can tell the ecological dynamics between land and sea is not well understood, let alone how man caused degradation of light fire ecosystems on land might be adversely impacting coastal sea life. One thing is for sure, large amounts of nutrients are flowing into the oceans providing food for sea life. Much of this sea life including, shrimp, crabs, and fish end up on our dinner table as well as on the menu of birds and animals.
Coastal birds and animals then often deposit nutrients back into the uplands and wetlands upstream of creeks and rivers when they roost. For instance on the Gulf Coast, in the Dickerson Bay area, near Panacea about 25 miles south of Tallahassee Florida, cormorants in large numbers feed in the coastal waters and then fly inland to freshwater Otter Lake to roost for the night. One has to wonder how many pounds of nutrients these cormorants alone are depositing into Otter Lake, feeding the lake and its creatures, but also the wetlands and the cypress trees around the lake.
The Ochlocknee River flows down from plantation country in South Georgia and North Florida near where I live and proceeds right on into the Gulf at Ochlocknee Bay, just a few miles from Panacea and Dickerson Bay. At one time, most of the uplands here were a fire climax upland savanna dominated by Longleaf Pine and wiregrass. Due to man’s activities, almost all of this has been replaced by other types of pines, hardwoods farmland, and residences.
The wholesale destruction of the once healthy ecosystems in this area has got to be effecting the marine environment on the Gulf of Mexico as well as elsewhere. The kind of vegetation decaying on unburned land must change the kinds of nutrients flowing downstream into the Gulf, as well as farming, logging and even the use of prescribed fire to simulate natural processes in such very fragmented
ecosystems.
One wonders if anybody has even done studies on the difference between nutrient decay runoff from different types of vegetation and that of runoff from wildfire and prescribed burns. My friend Jack Rudloe has done a few informal experiments depositing leaves, debris, logs and sticks around what he calls the Living Dock the subject of one of his books.
The idea was to understand if he could simulate natural process of debris floating down rivers into the Gulf to provide a substrate and nutrients for the growth of oysters, a very important commercial fishery in the area. He noticed that most leaves were broken down rather quickly by marine organisms, but not maple leaves for some reason. So we can assume that all types of decay and ash are not equal in nutrients, or how the nutrients are dispersed in the freshwater and marine environment. At this writing, we have been having a lot of rain and the rivers and oceans look like tea full of nutrients for the larval stages of sea life.
I got to thinking about all this and how my father and Jack were at one time starting to focus on this land-marine ecology. It occurs to me that much of the moisture in the form of rainfall we have here in the Southeast, comes off the Gulf and gets dumped into the uplands flushing nutrients down into the Gulf. Just how all this works and the role of fire in all this, should provide fertile research for both marine ecologists and land ecologists working together in the future.
I suspect that one of the reasons this is not well understood is because such collaboration between seemingly divergent perspectives as between Dad and Jack is rare. I think Tall Timbers dropped the ball in this situation with the destruction of Jack’s marine specimens held by Tall Timbers post Ed Komarek. I think Tall Timbers and FSU ought to revisit this promising early work and take a leading role in researching healthy upland fire ecosystem effects on marine ecosystems.
Of course there is a lot of work being done studying the interface between uplands and wetlands. While searching the Internet unsuccessfully for references as to fire’s effects on marine life, I did run into this study that discusses some interchanges between the New Jersey Pine Barrens maintained by fire being lost to other type ecosystems and effects on marine life. At this point, I expect this is about the best I can do is find indirect references as to fires role in marine ecosystems. [86]
I hope the reader can now better appreciate the importance of fire in nature and also man’s past and present role in maintaining these fire environments. Things certainly have come a long way since my father’s time, but this developing knowledge of the role of fire and man in global environments did not come easy.