Why Fire History Is Critical to Ecological Restoration
Let me begin this presentation with a little of my own history. My Father Ed Komarek Sr. had hoped that I would follow in his footsteps as a young man, but I had other ideas. In my early 20s I quit college in Fairbanks Alaska to follow my own path to self- understanding and enlightenment. However I never lost interest in the struggle to get fire back into nature. At a very early age, barely able to walk, I was helping my Father burn our 565 acre Birdsong Plantation on an annual basis and as I grew up began burning Birdsong on my own.
Growing up and spending so much time on the land I can appreciate the wisdom of the native peoples and the intimate bonding that takes place with the land over decades. Fire is a wonderful tool to manage a very diverse ever changing mosaic of micro-habitats and over time the act of using prescribed fire becomes second nature. All through my life I have used prescribed fire to help out friends and an occasional client. In a strange twist of fate I now find myself in my latter years working to follow up on the ecological works of my Father, my uncle Roy Komarek, Herb Stoddard, Leon Neel and others. I can do that because I accomplished what I needed to do in these other areas of endeavor in which I am knowledgeable. I wrote books and made them free to read on the internet in order to reach and mentor as many others as I can just as with my Fire in Nature book. The Fire in Nature book was a book my Father intended on writing, but old age caught up with him before he could do so. He had already begun collecting material for the Fire in Geologic Time chapter and the Fire and Man chapter. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to greatly elaborate on what he had collected from libraries, and due to the advances in the field of fire science and fire history to which he was a pioneer, I could fill in the concepts with verifiable material. I so much appreciate and understand that where I am today in my understanding of life, nature and human society is in a large part due to those that took the time and effort to either mentor me in person, or who mentored me through the literature. Now in old age it’s time to give back to human society and to nature. Young men and women generally have little interest in, or realize the importance of historical context until they get a little history under their belt. Today we use the term prescribed fire as a doctor would prescribe a remedy for a patient. Before a doctor will even see you, he requires you to fill out a form with your individual medical history. There is a good reason for this because the cause of your present illness may be found in your personal history and once understanding the cause, a remedy can be prescribed. In other words history helps give context, an overall perspective, a kind of map that allows one understand ones current position and plot a course to where one wants to go. In the same manner it’s not enough to simply learn to be a well- trained fire manager trying to rebuild and put on life support, an ecosystem fragment that has been catastrophically degraded, just by understanding the degraded condition it is in today. You have to intimately experience that parcel as it is today all the while studying that parcel’s history. How can one rebuild something if you don’t understand how it once existed? It’s very important that that one understands the fact that in the past this property you are managing was relinquished by the native peoples of prior generations. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of fire history let me give you a little more of my own ecological history so you can understand where I am coming from later in this talk and the discussion afterward. I have received no formal academic schooling in fire science or fire management, in fact when I was a boy there was very little if any formal fire training that I was aware of. However, I was born into a family of early ecologists and their associates who in my opinion were the best, even though some like Herb Stoddard had little formal schooling and were mostly self-taught like myself. In the 1920s Herb Stoddard who had left school in grade school was running the Cooperative Quail Association. This Association had been formed to help the local plantation owners in the Southeast figure out why their properties were suddenly growing up in brush along with the loss of their quail and other game species. I think they really knew that lack of fire was the problem, but they wanted scientific proof in order to fight back on a very heavy handed government fire suppression propaganda operation and movement. In fact my Father was even threatened with jail for burning a client’s property. Herb took on my Dad as an employee and apprentice on his Sherwood Plantation and my Mom and Dad were married on Sherwood where they lived for a time in the 1930s, then bought the adjoining Birdsong Plantation now Birdsong Nature Center. Not only did Herb mentor my father, he mentored me as well, and was like a grandfather to me. Herb was and is rightly considered one of the fathers of ecology along with Aldo Leopold and Dr. Alee. Dad had first been mentored by Dr. Alee at the University of Chicago before he had to quit college because of the Great Depression and go to work as a collector for the Chicago Field Museum. (He was later given an honorary PHD for his lifetime of work by FSU.) Both Dad and Herb were friends of Aldo Leopold and Herb like my Dad had been a field collector and taxidermist at the Field Museum. It’s very interesting how ecology evolved out of field collecting where in order to collect one has to learn the habits and relationships of the plants and creatures in order to catch them. On the other hand the taxonomists in the basement of the Field Museum could not understand ecology and Dad used to argue with them as they would say, “There is not such think as a relationship as you can’t touch it, feel it, hear it, or smell it and therefore ecology has no factual basis and is not a scientific discipline.” Herb taught me how to skin and mount my first bird as Dad had taught me how to skin and mount rats and mice that were being sent to the Field Museum. Another interesting historical fact is that many of these early ecologists had a deep appreciation for the great wisdom the native peoples had in working with nature for tens of thousands of years, now known as native cultural ecology and burning. Dad was mentored by a tribe of Indians living near Chicago for instance, and my Uncle who worked most of his life with my Dad was mentored by the Seminoles of Central and South Florida when he worked on the fever tick program. Herb was mentored by early settlers in Florida as a boy who in turn had learned to use fire management from the Indians. Our whole family was later mentored by the Hopi and other Indian tribes on our annual trips by car to the West in the 1950s and 1960s. The reason I am telling you all this is because you and I are the last link in a chain of fractured but unbroken mentoring by apprenticeship that goes back tens of thousands of years in North America and even longer elsewhere. It was these Indian land managers engaged in what is now called permaculture that educated early white settlers and their black slaves, who also had a fire cultural history that came from Africa. Modern forestry methods such as the Stoddard-Neel Method derive from Indian land management principles for economic gain, ecological diversity and aesthetics. What the Stoddard-Neel Method does is to simulate natural processes and work with nature not against nature to recreate something quite similar to what the native peoples created all over the world prior to the European invasions. One person in a Facebook group said how could native peoples possibly organize such a massive fire management effort all over the world? My answer was that being part and close to nature the necessities of everyday life required and organized the development of an advanced permaculture techniques everywhere, especially the use of fire as a tool. All over our Nation early settlers reported seeing Forests and grasslands with an open park like appearance including a grass, legume, herb understory with large magnificent trees spaced just enough apart to allow a significant amount of sunlight to the forest floor for plants and wildlife, but not so much space as to not be able to carry a fire between the trees. In this Method as compared to strip cutting which is like mining, the beautiful well managed forest is constantly being rejuvenated and to an inexperienced eye seems to be in a permanent state of existence. If you study fire science history in depth you will see that now there is really little land around the globe that has not been significantly altered from its pre-human state by man for thousands even hundreds of thousands of years by man’s ancestors. The Europeans dominated and pretty much wiped out native peoples and their culture by warfare and disease. With the native land managers gone, the land began to grow up and debris began to pile up on the forest floor of once well managed light fire ecosystems. This excessive fuel buildup created fires that moved into the canopy making for catastrophic unstoppable fires even with today’s fire suppression abilities. Along with continued neglect these light fire ecosystems began to turn into dangerous catastrophic fire ecosystems made even worse by increasing fire suppression through much of the 1900’s and to this day as in the West. The point is that man is and always was a part of nature and until recent times working with nature rather than against nature. As If this is not enough fire history to get your bearings and conceptualize your place in the current scheme of things we have to go further back into geological time. Writing this first chapter in my Fire in Nature book forever changed my perception of the living canvas upon which I was painting ecological diversity. If you walk into a forest and really start to looking around and studying your surroundings you may notice those lichens living on the bark of that tree. Those lichens were among the first settlers on land about 500 million years ago. Look over there to you right in the wetter areas and you will see moss growing on the ground their ancestors covered the land about 475 million years ago and may have even caused a mass extinction by increasing oxygen levels on earth to a point where peat fires could begin to burn. Over to your left you may notice a well-managed grove of Cabbage Palm trees along with Palmetto and fern understory and the notorious Palmetto bugs know as roaches if you are at the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge just south of Tallahassee Florida. Those plants and creatures evolved during the Carboniferous Period about 300 million years ago when fires were driven by even higher oxygen levels than today. Back over there you can see the cypress in a swamp that evolved during the Cretaceous maybe 150 million years ago and finally the Pines and grasses that evolved rather recently by geologic standards. So you see you are control burning a forest and grassland that is a layered mosaic, a living history of life evolving on the land including humans the past few hundreds of thousands of years. Now that you are positioned in the scheme of things just was is it you want to achieve? The first step is not too hard to understand you got to get the fuel loads down and bring back the light fire ecosystems that native peoples and nature actively managed. Once you do that then you really need to think and study about just what is it you want to create or recreate as both a scientist and as an artist on that living canvas? One thing that is generally accepted is that the more diversity one develops the better, and how and when you use fire can in a large part determine if you want to slam the fire into that field of high fire Gamma Grass, that was once fire managed by Indians as a food source to push back the brush in that area, while a little further on allowing the fire to back quietly through young regenerating pines. The healthy forest is full of diverse micro-ecological habitats for plants and animals. At the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge they are even using periodic fire to bring back an endangered salamander which traces its roots back to the Age of Amphibians. We are in a transition phase from a disastrous fire suppression culture to a good fire management culture and the stakes go way beyond forestry to good fire science applied to the living canvas. Firefighting is simple as compared to being a good ecological fire manager, so the more you learn about nature and how to work with nature the better. As you can see one of the reasons we still have such poor land management on private and public lands is that nature is so darn complex and difficult to understand that only by living on a piece of land all your life as the native peoples did, can you really begin to appreciate what is going on in your own neck of the woods and are able to do the right thing for both man and nature. Note - Copy and Distribute Freely - On our Facebook group Association of Fire Management Activists we post on a regular basis articles relating to fire for reading, discussion and sharing. Folks are welcome to join and keep up with the fire news. On this website you can also read this, my fire book, for free starting with the introduction at the top and then to the MORE button for the rest of the chapters and other recent articles. Welcome on board. |