introduction
FIRE IN NATURE, A FIRE ACTIVIST’S GUIDE
Written and Compiled by Ed Komarek
Forward by Jack Rudloe
SHOESTRING PUBLISHING
Copyright by Ed Komarek
3301 Hwy 93 South, Cairo Georgia, 39828
ISBN: (13: 978-1499159226)
Library of Congress Number:
In this book a significant amount of the content is compiled by the author, but is not the property of the author. So the author and Shoestring Publishing can only claim copyright on the writings of Ed Komarek. Anyone wishing to use material from these other authors needs to contact these authors and seek permission, especially material that is under copyright protection. Shoestring Publishing and Ed Komarek have made a good faith attempt to find and seek permission to reprint material, especially information that does not fall under the fair use laws and is copyrighted by the authors.
Fire in Nature, a Fire Activist’s Guide [1] is the second in a series of books written by Ed Komarek to summarize the knowledge and wisdom gained during his lifetime so that others may build on his work as he has built on the good works of others during his lifetime. The first book UFOs Exopolitics and the
New World Disorder is available to be read for free on its website or downloaded as a PDF. [2]
The hard copy and the Kindle edition of Fire in Nature can be purchased from Amazon with wholesale copies available from Createspace Publishing. For at least a limited time Ed would like to offer print copies at cost, plus shipping and handling, to public and private public education organizations like Tall Timbers Inc., Gulf Specimen, Birdsong Nature Center, The Nature Conservancy, and the Prescribed Fire Training Center. Contact: [email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Clinton Bailey has created the excellent book design and cover for this book which is very much appreciated. www.theartistree.com.au I would like to thank my longtime friends, Thomas Reeves and Mack Kemp, for helping me edit this book. I wish to thank Tall Timbers Research Inc. for the use of their extensive fire library and other help, as well as other sources who wish to remain anonymous, who have been very helpful in helping me get up to speed on modern fire management practices.
NOTE TO READERS
The source material for this book is referenced using footnote links for those reading this book free on the Internet at its website URL. http://fireinnature.weebly.com/ For those not reading the book on the Internet, a list of all the footnoted sources with URLs are listed at the end of the book. Ed Komarek can be contacted on Facebook message or email at: [email protected]
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my ecological mentors and fellow fire activists. From the time I could walk, I was mentored in ecology and specifically fire ecology by my parents Ed and Betty Komarek, Herb Stoddard, and my Uncle Roy Komarek. The mentoring started on Birdsong Plantation, Tall Timbers and Greenwood Plantation. During early family travels, the mentoring continued onto the public lands of the United States, Canada and Mexico.
I offer thanks to the other founders of Tall Timbers Research Station that include Leon Neel and Henry Beadel. Tall Timbers was later expanded to be called Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy after the founders had died or had to leave. Thanks also to Robert Crawford and Wilson Baker, early loyal employees of Tall Timbers that have been supportive to this day working to keep the founder's vision of continued fire research and activism alive.
I must also include John Hay Whitney who owned Greenwood Plantation and who’s generosity allowed my father’s research to be part of his regular day job at Greenwood. The reason my Uncle and my Dad were able to devote so much free time and personal resources to build Tall Timbers in its early years, was because of John Whitney’s dedication to Ed, Roy, Herb, Leon and Henry’s struggle against fire exclusion in light fire ecosystems.
As the focus shifted at Tall Timbers away from its leading role in early fire research and activism and into land conservation, other popular writers like Stephen Pyne and organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Prescribed Fire Training Centers have taken on new leadership roles in the
continuing struggle to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Forward
Introduction
Chapter One - Fire in Geologic History
Chapter Two - Fire and Man
Chapter Three - Good Fire Management
Chapter Four - The Battle for Fire
Chapter Five - Fire Management in the 21 Century
Chapter Six - The Elephant in the Room
Footnotes
PREFACE
I was raised in a family of early ecologists who mentored me in ecology and fire ecology and hoped that I would follow in their footsteps. I went to college at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks majoring in wildlife management. I was disappointed that after a year in a local junior college and two years at the University of Alaska that I was still struggling under a load of classes with little do with wildlife management.
In three years I had taken not a single course on wildlife management. I had, however, been working for Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the summers and even co-authored the first scientific paper on the Fishes of the North Slope of Alaska in the early 1970s. I was mainly responsible for the field work for this paper.
Little did I realize when I first began college that my life’s direction would soon change and I would develop a lifelong interest in the paranormal. A chance encounter with a small metaphysical bookstore in downtown Fairbanks amongst the bars and shops led to an existential crisis in my life that resulted in me quitting college to try to understand myself and figure out what was life really about. I came out of this crisis a much different and wiser person several years later.
My first book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder is the first in a series of books on diverse subjects that I am writing and publishing. Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide is the second book in this series. I am writing these books and making them free on their websites so that others may profit from what I have learned, just as I have built my life on the good works of others. There may be some fire managers, scientists, and others who may think I wear a tinfoil hat for investigating and writing about UFOs. However, I believe both books should stand on their respective merits.
These books even while covering very different subject material are written in a style based on exhaustive, credible footnoted source material, as will be future books covering international politics and spiritual development. It would be a mistake to reject out of hand any one of these books simply because of a topic covered in another book. I am reminded of those respectable French “scientists” hundreds of years ago who refused to even look through a newly built telescope because, obviously it had to be some kind of a trick.
My parents and their ecological associates and friends were of course disappointed that I would not be following an ecological career, but they understood that each person must find their own way in life.
My mother and I ended up sharing many of the same interests over the years, with my Dad and Uncle not quite able to figure out just what we were about. :-)
However, I think my family would have been delighted that I have written this second book Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s guide to follow up on their unfinished business. The body of knowledge I have gained through a childhood apprenticeship on fire ecology is rare, and I would like this knowledge in the public domain.
I also share my parents and their associates distress and even outrage, that so much public and private light fire ecosystems are being devastated by man caused catastrophic fire. One would have thought that their lifetime of work would have at least caused the losses to wildfire to be on the decrease, but that has not been the case.
The reasons for the continued loss of millions of acres of light fire forest and grassland ecosystems to catastrophic wildfire is complex, and requires a book to put all the pieces together. While there are many others writing on the need for prescribed fire in fragmented light fire ecosystems to simulate natural ecosystems, there are few willing to really stand up and not pull their punches.
Many land managers cannot stand up and exercise their free speech within the public land management agencies for fear of loss of their jobs or being demoted. Part of my job in this
book is to charge in and break trail so to speak. I hope to give many of these good public bureaucrats and land managers pushing for fire management reform, some cover to maneuver within their
respective organizations.
Wildfire almost took out Yosemite National Park in 2013. The wildfire came into the Park.
The Giant Sequoias are part of a light fire ecosystem going back to the Cretaceous, but are no match for catastrophic fire undergrowth and debris build up over decades of man’s misguided light fire suppression.
Are we to devastate this park by wildfire and destroy these thousand year old trees, same as happened with Yellowstone National Park? Are we to consider the loss of our parks and national forests inevitable, blaming climate change, fire, arson, and lighting, anything but the real reason
this devastation caused by our own fire suppression culture?
FORWARD
I am very pleased to see that my longtime friend Ed Komarek Jr. (Eddie) decided to write a fire ecology book to pick up where his father Ed Komarek Sr. left off when he died. Ed Sr. played a profound and critical ecological role in my life and was critical to the survival of Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. in its early years. Without his encouragement, advice and financial support, the aquarium and marine lab that exists today in Panacea, Florida could easily have fallen into oblivion.
I have been an interested party watching mostly from the sidelines on this particular fight as the founders of Tall Timbers were able to educate the public and pressure government land management agencies to put fire back into its rightful place here in the Southeastern United States. As Ed Komarek Jr. points out in this book, the same can’t be said for the Western United States and Australia. I like other Americans see in the American media every summer that millions of acres of public and private lands are still being devastated by man caused catastrophic fire.
Despite warnings from fire ecologists both in the East and the West, Yellowstone National Park went up in smoke, as did large tracts near Los Alamos and Queensland Australia more recently. It is very upsetting to see continued mindless government bureaucratic fire suppression in the face of such unnecessary environmental disasters. It's so disturbing to watch these disasters repeat over and over again, year after year, in spite of the fact that research clearly shows that fire suppression itself is the main cause for the these unnatural fuel buildups. Natural, light, ecologically beneficial fires have been turned into huge unstoppable catastrophic fire monsters through improved and expanded fire suppression technologies.
I have spent most of my life fighting for local forests and wetlands in the Southeastern United States that are being destroyed by loggers, developers, corrupt politicians, incompetent bureaucrats and ivory tower academics. As I have fought my own often lonely battles against impossible odds, I can appreciate what Ed and Roy went through trying to put a stop to these man caused catastrophic fires worldwide with very limited success in the American West and in Australia. Due to global over-population and over consumption, the world is fast running out of resources to be exploited, and the best we can do is engineer a "fighting retreat" and try to protect what fragmented forests and wetlands we possibly can from continued needless destruction by man.
Ed Komarek Sr. was one of my strongest mentors, the help he provided came at a critical time, and without it it's unlikely I would have been able to survive. In 1966, after returning from Madagascar on the International Indian Ocean Expedition, I moved into a leaky shack in Panacea and started collecting marine life for schools and research laboratories. I learned to collect, maintain and ship marine
specimens while trying to write books and articles to stay alive.
Ed was no ivory tower scientist, before starting Tall Timbers; he developed and directly sold seed corn to stores. He understood the difficulties I had at the time with Florida State University, the enmity some biology professors bore me because I was popularizing and commercializing science, and worse yet had no college degree. Against their advice, he used funds from the newly created Tall Timbers Research Foundation and gave me a small stipend. Much was demanded for little.
Even though I was cold, wet and tired after a day of slogging around tide flats collecting marine animals, Ed and Roy insisted that I go through my buckets and write down everything while it was fresh in my mind. I could rest later, they said, but they pressed me no harder than they pressed themselves. Ed, his wife Betty and his brother Roy worked tirelessly, building Tall Timbers Research Station, Greenwood Farms, and Bird Song Nature Center. Now that I think of it he helped my writing style enabling me to write books and articles for National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and Sports illustrated, etc.
In order to prepare museum specimens, I stayed up during the night narcotizing sea anemones and preserving them with their tentacles extended. Before long we had shelves filled with pickled sponges, sea squirts, fish and seaweed, all of which were thrown out when Ed died. Ed and Roy taught me discipline in keeping records, in preparing, cataloging and organizing museum specimens. Hopefully those records are buried somewhere in the Tall Timbers archives, they will be of use in reconstructing what the coast was like before the plague of development set in.
Long before I met Ed Komarek, I used to watch his "Rural Report" along with every farmer, fisherman or anyone else who wanted to know the weather. Charismatic is too weak a word to describe him, he just seemed to engulf you in his ideas and nonsense and sweep you along. Ed added humor and playfulness to his programming; he didn't know what it was to take his self seriously. By today's television standards, Rural Report would be considered hokey, but with a small rural based population of Thomasville-Tallahassee, it was the show to watch. Rural Report had playfulness about it.
Old timers still remember and joke about how he said he crossed corn with a pine tree. The local 4H Club built an ear of corn out of wood, a yard long, and plastered kernels on it and gave it to Ed. Ed joked about how it would help both forestry and agriculture if they could be grown on the same plant at the same time. He got people laughing and considering the possibilities. Back then, no one had heard of genetic engineering as the science was based on creating new plants by cross pollination. Gene manipulation came
later.
Like other television stations, Komarek got his information from the US Weather Service that fed a ticker tape into the studio at WCTV in Thomasville, Georgia. He liked to "cut the fool" as he called it, by cranking up his weather machine, an old Corn Sheller that cranked and rattled and turned a wheel mounted with a ridiculous grinning face of the sun. He had such charisma you almost expected to hear the patter of raindrops on the roof. Everyone was in on the joke, he got his viewers laughing.
That was in the Golden Age of television and anything went. Ed used his weather generator to teach. Standing there in his faded coveralls, flannel shirt and his hay-seed straw hat, he talked about the low pressures developing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the battle of fronts, and how they stalled and deluged rain and flooded the woods and swamps, all this before the age of satellites, doppler weather and computers.
His audience grew; people listened to his insights on the role of fire in the ecosystem, the interrelationships between rainfall, wildlife and fish. If anyone listened for more than a minute, it was clearly that behind this country bumpkin and his foolery, was a man with profound knowledge of nature, agriculture, forestry, geology and meteorology. He was ready to explore new fields, including marine biology, by having me come on television twice a month.
Viewers who were around in the sixties still break out into laughter, when they recall my first appearance, and how Ed panicked the camera man and terrorized Anna Johnson, who was WCTV's secretary, by turning my horseshoe crabs loose in the studio. You could hear her shrieks in the background as he chased her around the set with my alien monster. Later he shoved her on screen, got her to do the weather, and launched her career in television news casting.
He launched mine in promoting my books and environmental causes. I brought live sea horses, starfish, even a live sawfish. The experience enabled me to make appearances on the NBC Today Show, Good Morning America, on CBS's "To Tell the Truth", PBS documentaries and numerous other programs across the nation. Edwin Komarek was a true mentor, he empowered people. He was a generous wise man that should be remembered and given prominence for his central role in creating and directing Tall Timbers Research Station, backed up by his brother Roy, in its critical early years.
Ed brought the public into the battle against the United States Forest Service and Smokey the Bear. He lectured on fire ecology, talked about the Indians burning their land, and how fire grew quail. He fought against the stigma of burning, and how it was bad. Ed and Roy insisted that I attend their fire ecology conferences, and I spent many an evening standing around a fire, meeting scientists, listening at his symposiums, learning about birds. Here I met Herb Stoddard, a shy old gentleman, who worked with birds. Herb showed me his trays of stuffed birds, and explained how their differing beaks were adapted to eat seeds, bugs, or catch prey.
Ed gave both formal and informal lectures where the knowledge just flowed out and seeped into the people around him. He took me under his wing, explaining fire ecology, his vision for Tall Timbers to a twenty two year old kid, as we banged around the South Georgia and North Florida country dirt roads. He was also a showman, tossing a match onto the dry Wiregrass, starting a fire. I learned about Long Leaf pine and Wiregrass, at the time I didn't know one plant from another. I saw the dramatic differences between his burned plots, versus unburned plots of ground in the woods. He pointed to the lightning strikes on trees and the burned charcoal on the bark where fires had passed through. I learned about renewal, of competition, and cooperation in the forest.
As a marine ecologist and biologist I appreciate the powerful impact the flow of nutrients from the land into the ocean is having on our wetlands and marine life. Nutrients flow down from rotting vegetation and controlled burns in the uplands and marshlands, to nourish many of the species in the ocean that end up on the menu of our local restaurants supporting both the fishing industry and tourism.
It is essential that we try to protect not just the wetland and marine ecosystem, but create protective upland buffers from logging and development and use prescribed fire to simulate light natural fires in areas particularly sensitive as nurseries to marine life. Ed Komarek innately knew based on his ecological understanding, that something like this was going on, in that he expanded the reach of Tall Timbers right out into the Gulf of Mexico supporting my work in its early years. This is an area of research that that deserves much study in the years to come, because if it’s going on here on the Gulf Coast, is bound to be happening elsewhere in marine and land ecosystems around the world.
Note: Jack Rudloe is a marine biologist- ecologist, writer, author, and environmental activist residing
in Panacea Florida just south of Tallahassee Florida. Jack is also President of Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. and received in 2014 the National Wetlands Award for his and his wife Anne’s lifetime of work to save and preserve Gulf Coast wetlands. [3]
INTRODUCTION
Our universe began in a burst of cosmic fire. This catastrophic event was soon followed by the fiery ignition of burning suns that irradiated their planets with light and heat, giving rise to life on earth and most likely life elsewhere as well. Over time the earth cooled and formed a planetary crust and oceans. Scientists believe that life on earth evolved from already evolving chemical processes around fiery undersea volcanic vents, or perhaps even seeded from space. Life then spread to the surface of the oceans, where simple organisms began feeding on sunlight and ocean nutrients forming the basis of the food chain to this day.
As organisms became more complex evolving into plants and animals, they began to colonize shorelines creating microbial mats that soon spread inland diversifying into a great variety of fungi, lichens and mosses. The early moss built wetland bogs, creating a buildup of dead organic material known as peat. We can speculate that on occasion in times of drought, these bogs dried out on the early earth and burned, ignited by lighting just as they do today. In such a manner the bog, rejuvenated by fire, fills up with open water when the rains come, and the process of succession begins anew.
Over hundreds of millions of years the continental tectonic plates have
drifted all over the globe. This drift has created vast super continents like Pangaea where species mingled together for a time. Some species perished while others flourished as they competed and cooperated among themselves for life’s necessities. When the super continents inevitably broke apart, this sent different species on different evolutionary trajectories caused by changing environmental and genetic conditions in different locations and climate conditions.
Over thousands, millions and hundreds of millions of years the climate fluctuated extensively from very warm to very cold. The cause would be internal and external impacts like asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, continental drift and even massive global change caused by the evolution of life itself. For instance some scientists speculate that one global ice age was caused by the colonization of the land by mosses. The mosses caused atmospheric changes that plunged the whole earth into a deep freeze, causing the extinction of 90% of the animals and plants at that time.
Through it all there was always fire, just as much a force of nature effecting natural ecosystems as is climate, water, atmosphere and continental drift. It is obvious that when vegetation dies it either must eventually decompose or burn if not buried by geologic processes. In warm moist environments as in the tropics it can quickly decompose. In dryer climates where decomposition is much slower fire allows nutrients to quickly get back into the soil, reduces plant and animal diseases and pests and eliminates the mulching out of new growth.
Sometimes the vegetative fires during geologic times were diminished, as during ice ages and when oxygen levels were low. At other times the fires were very prominent and frequent when oxygen levels were high and the earth warm as in the Carboniferous and Cretaceous periods. During these periods of warm climate just about every kind of plant and animal developed adaptations to fire, becoming in one way or another fire dependent.
Most people today are unaware of the critical importance of fire in nature’s ecosystems and this has led to severe environmental consequences for all life on earth including man. It is imperative that environmentalists, politicians and land managers (both public and private) understand this critical role of fire in the environment in order to adequately preserve and protect the fragmented ecosystems still remaining on earth.
Most ecosystems around the globe are so fragmented by modern man that light natural fires can no longer be allowed to burn freely and frequently as they have for hundreds of millions of years. This has resulted in huge unnatural catastrophic accumulations of fuel in forests, savannas and grasslands. Sooner or later these fuel loads will be ignited by lightning or man, creating huge unstoppable catastrophic fires damaging to both nature and man.
According to the statistics in Wildfire Today, [4] the average number of acres devastated by wildfire in the United States lower 48, has risen steadily from above 2 million acres in 1990 to above 6 million acres in 2013. An article in Headwaters Economics [5] states that U.S. National wildfire fighting costs have averaged $1.8 billion annually for the past five years and costs are set to explode to between $2.3
and $4.3 billion. They compare this figure with the Forest Service’s average annual budget of $5.5 billion. Talk about creating one’s own worst nightmare.
So the remedy for fire in the environment is not more fire suppression, but controlled or prescribed fire to simulate natural fire. Plant and animal life adapted and used fire for competitive advantage for at least 420 million years as evidenced in the fossil record. This has created a wide spectrum of planetary diversity from very many plants with at least some fire resistance, to a very few fire tender plant species.
During the fiery Carboniferous period of geologic history oxygen levels were much higher than they are today. These higher oxygen levels allowed dead vegetation accumulating in early forests and savannas to burn much better than today. Many species of plants like the palms evolved very fire resistant trunks to protect against frequent ground fires. But these early forest plants went even further to use fire to their competitive advantage.
The palms evolved flammable fronds that when the individual fronds died and fell to the ground they burned out the competition. By becoming so fire adapted they thrived at the expense of their competitors and so became a fire dominant species spreading all across the supercontinent of Pangaea. Other palm species like the palmetto and the ferns closer to the ground formed the understory and adapted by developing flammable fronds and strong underground root systems. When frequent fires burned, killing everything close above ground, they quickly sprouted back using the energy reserves stored in their roots.
Later, pine trees evolving in the fiery Cretaceous when oxygen levels were again very high and evolved thick insulating bark and flammable needles following the example of the palms using fire to burn out the competition. Later the grasses evolved in these high fire environments and used the same fire adapted natural strategies as had the ferns, palms, pines and the palmetto to burn out the competition and to sprout back quickly after a fire and grazing.
In a short span of only a few days when it is warm and after a rain, a blackened burn will once again become green. The grasses sprout from their fire protected roots underground in the same manner following the example of the palmetto and the ferns. Additionally, the fresh ash with the first rain soaks into the soil giving this new growth even more vitality.
All this time while the plants were evolving in fire ecosystems in Pangaea and Gondwanaland the land animals were not standing still. They were also adapting to low intensity and occasional catastrophic fires. The best I can tell the ocean arthropods began moving onto land as they do today to colonize and feed on the detritus being washed up on beaches and in lagoons where early ocean plants were also taking root. These early arthropods evolved into the insects we have today and went from jumping, to gliding, to flying, to get around and to feed on fresh vegetation and other insects on land. In the Carboniferous the fishes followed the insects onto land and evolved into amphibians and reptiles.
I would speculate that one of the reasons that insects developed wings was to get out of the way of frequent ground fires as well as predators. They also could dig into the damp ground or crawl down in openings at the base of plants. The amphibians and reptiles had to use other strategies like fast flight, or diving into water to avoid getting burned. It was not until the dinosaurs developed wings that land animals were able to fly to avoid fire or to fly back into the blackened burn to forage for roasted insects, small reptiles and small mammals now openly exposed to view.
Most people all over the world know about the almost indestructible palmetto bug or cockroach. Well, it’s an example of a very well adapted fire species that evolved in the Carboniferous among the palm trees and the palmetto. Cockroaches are able to scurry down into the ground, or fly away to avoid
fire, only to quickly return to feed on the greening vegetation and any other insects that might have not been so well adapted.
I cannot help but be impressed when we simulate natural low intensity fires in fragmented ecosystems that we are burning through a mosaic of ancient and modern plant and animal species. In a layering process over hundreds of millions of years, newly evolving species of plants and animals enter the ecosystem forcing out less adaptable species. However, when new species evolve in the ecosystem, they often do not always destroy earlier plants and animals. The older species may simply be pressured into moving into new niches being created by the newer invading species.
Even the first land colonizers, bacteria, fungi, algae, lichens, and mosses, still have a place in modern ecosystems adapting to the ever changing environment. Once these early land species colonized and broke down the rocks on the early earth to create the soil for trees. We see these almost identical ancestors living in and on the soil and on the trunks and branches of the trees that displaced them where they are still exposed to fire. Even our own bodies, inside and out, have more microorganisms than cells. There are about two and a half pounds of bacteria in our gut that digest our food and turn the food into usable nutrients.
We now know that when man evolved in the grasslands and savannas of Africa, he too became fire
adapted, just as had other species of plants and animals living in these environments. Plants in a rudimentary way can manipulate fire, but Man went much further. He consciously learned to use fire as a tool (a paintbrush) to paint on the living canvas in which he lived in order to improve his livelihood.
This giant step made him an artist. Painting on cave walls or on canvas was simply a natural extension of his altering the landscape in which he lived. The landscapes we think of today as natural are only so in the context that man is part of the environment. Many of the plants and animals and even whole light fire ecosystems owe their continued existence to man’s fire activities.
Misguided global fire exclusion and suppression policies for the past 120+ years threaten the very light fire ecosystems that nature created over hundreds of millions of years and the ones that primitive man has been busy creating for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. The problem we have today all around the world is that as man moved into artificial environments and out of the natural world, he has lost the knowledge that he and fire are part of the natural order of things.
Our global catastrophic wildfire problems really started when the European colonists decimated the native fire managers through disease and war around the planet. It’s no accident that heavy unnatural fuel loads began to build around the globe increasing dramatically in the 1800s and continuing into the present. As the knowledgeable native frequent fire users were wiped out or displaced into reservations in the 1800s and 1900s, they have been replaced by less competent, citified, inexperienced government agents, scientists and bureaucrats who decided to unwisely and irrationally suppress fire.
Many of these early European bureaucrats were brought up in less fire prone areas of Europe or in cities ignorant of the role of fire in the environment. They were well meaning, but only knowledgeable of the devastating city fires and unnatural catastrophic of the time and thought if wildfire is bad for the city it must be bad for nature. In the early 1900s the rising unnatural heavy fuel loads caused by displacement of the native frequent fire managers, clear cutting and wanton economic development combined to create major catastrophic fires in forests and grasslands that even spread to cities.
With ignorance building upon ignorance, the early European land managers with public support used advanced technology to seriously suppress fire throughout the 1900s. This disastrous cultural legacy has been communicated down through generations of bureaucrats to today’s public and private land managers. These land managers are discovering that no amount of technology or resources can stop the catastrophic wildfires created by such huge buildups of fuel. Those interested in the catastrophic wildfire statistics for the United States can go to the National Interagency Fire Center website. [6]
Further adding insult to injury in trying to reduce these catastrophic fires, still inexperienced and underfunded fire managers have resorted to prescribed controlled fire with limited success, allowing controlled fires to get away and burn parks like Yellowstone to the ground. This only helps reinforce and supports the views of those who support fire suppression interests that compete for public money and resources with the fledgling government fire management units.
The recent and continuing catastrophic wildfires in the Western United States, Australia and in Europe, that erupt with the power and devastation of multiple atomic bombs, should provoke global public outrage. This should be especially true for those land managers who understand the nature, scope and causes for accumulating fuel loads the past 120+ years in nature’s global ecosystems. Many or most catastrophic wildfires can be directly traced to the fire suppression activities of man himself. Fire suppression goes against the natural order of things where light cool fires used to sweep the forest clean. Light intensity fires are the norm in most ecosystems with natural catastrophic fires limited mostly to cold climates like Alaska and Siberia.
I think it is about time to summon the ghost of Ed Komarek Sr. my father and ecological mentor as a young boy and his fire ecologist friends and colleagues. Ed Komarek Sr. has been considered by many to be the most prominent global fire ecologist of the 20th century. He, backed up by his brother Roy Komarek, organized other fire ecologists from around the world through fire conferences north of Tallahassee, Florida. They were instrumental in the creation and operation of Tall Timbers Research Inc. in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. [7] Tall Timbers was organized to be a scientific, educational and activist pro-fire bulwark against the powerful misguided propaganda and fire suppression operations of the US Forest Service and other government agencies in the United States and elsewhere around the world.
Ed had been raised in Chicago where he had been taught that fire was bad for the environment. His father had gone bankrupt in the Great Depression and he had to quit college to go to work collecting mammals in the Great Smokey Mountains. When he traveled south and met and worked for Herb Stoddard his ecological mentor, he realized that fire was an intrinsic part of the natural order and to suppress fire was a crime against nature!
Herb was one of the founders of the emerging field of ecology at the time and was a good friend of another founder Aldo Leopold. Like many of the early ecologists Ed, Roy and Herb were museum collectors who because of their collecting experience realized that plants and animals were in dynamic relationship with each other.
Ed soon realized along with Herb and a few others, who Dad fondly called mavericks (cattle who would not run with the thundering herd), that suppressing light natural fires over decades created huge fuel loads in both private and public forests and grasslands. This resulted in turning small harmless and nourishing cycles of regeneration into large catastrophic cycles of catastrophic regeneration in light fire forests, savannas and grasslands.
I think that my father would have been appalled today to see the problems, while changing for the better in the Eastern United States, have been still building in the Western United States and other parts of the world like Australia. This has happened despite a lifetime of effort at the grass roots to educate and train a new generation of pro-fire land managers on public and private land.
He would surely have been disappointed that entrenched bureaucracy, public ignorance, special interests and corrupt politics at the highest levels were still responsible for continuing and amplifying these crimes against nature and man! I would say it has certainly been the case for me as a bystander in this drama, because I can see that these catastrophic wildfires are so unnecessary.
Many catastrophic and devastating fires in the United States and around the world are the result of continuing incompetence and lack of funding at the highest levels of governments. This lack of competence, excellence and funding by national and global leadership, is in part due to inadequate oversight and accountability by the public and is caused by a general public ignorance of fire’s role in nature.
In turn, this failure to hold leaders accountable has been brought about in part by the dark legacy of 120+ years of misguided fire suppression, fear and propaganda by governments, an assault on public consciousness. This even throws into question the feasibility of centralized bureaucratic control over
management of public lands. Surely the public deserves better that this from their public servants and managers of the public lands in America and around the world.
All this environmental destruction and loss of lives and property is just too much for me to stand by and not try to follow up on my father’s unfinished business. Ed had intended to write a popular fire book before he died, but it was not to be. So in appreciation of my father and the public need, I thought I would write this fire book.
It is my desire that once the readers have read this book that it will add to a comprehensive understanding of the role of fire in nature. I hope the citizen will understand the need to reform and decentralize the dysfunctional bureaucratic system now in place. It is my hope that citizens and leaders of all stripes and persuasions, armed with fire knowledge and native wisdom, will be able to take constructive action to better preserve and protect nature’s ecosystems, man and the earth
itself.
It is imperative that we better educate and inform the layperson as well as the scientist, bureaucrat and politician. We can’t just study and debate fire and deteriorating fragmenting ecosystems to death, we have to become involved activists and change the culture. Good science can support culture, but it is culture that drives action and consequently reform. We the people have a damaging and dysfunctional culture of fire exclusion and suppression in global land management agencies. The current systematic deplorable situation is comprised of a mix of bad science, bad economics, bad politics and a 120 year assault on public consciousness.
It is obvious that we are dealing with an entrenched culture of failure the past 120 years in these over centralized and unwieldy government land management bureaucracies. There is a failure to adequately acknowledge past misdeeds, a failure to remedy those misdeeds and a general failure to protect nature and the public interest.
When a business is failing, hired guns are sent in to observe and then to make things right when current management can’t reform itself. It’s a painful process for the organizations, as people responsible for failure and excuses are fired, or repositioned in a management shakeup. Still, this is not nearly as painful as bankruptcy or the catastrophic consequences to the public and nature as is now
the case.
Some will be sure to argue, well what about our successes? My answer to that question is success as measured against what? I measure our very limited success in fire management against the continued increase in fuel loads globally, resulting in massive catastrophic fire catastrophes destroying many lives, property and whole fire global ecosystems. Let’s not get lost in the details and forget about the big picture!
There have been great strides made in the past 60 years in both scientific fire research and management that has greatly increased the understanding of light fire burning and the importance of native people’s use of fire in nature. Problem is, we now have an ever growing multibillion dollar firefighting industrial complex that incompetently throws money and resources at the problem with no overall reduction of fuel loads. This firefighting complex is not going to roll over and play dead while its funds are diverted away in order to give it only a supporting role for general fire management operations.
Making things even worse is that there is evolving a huge national security threat due to the buildup of fuel in the western United States. The terrorists have already been urging their people to use these high accumulations of forest debris to attack our Western forests and urban centers perhaps to kill thousands, maybe millions of people with just small amounts of resources.
I don’t think Homeland Security has any idea what a couple of people in one or more small planes could do to very quickly under the right drought and wind conditions. I believe terrorists in a couple of hours could create firestorms with the power of multiple atomic bombs blown into, or encircling Western cities. It could be like the firebombing of Tokyo.
My father and his associates warned that unless something was done, parks like Yellowstone would burn to the ground by catastrophic fire and that is exactly what happened. I in turn warn that there is a very high probability of terrorist wildfire attacks in the United States and around the globe in the next few years, but is anybody listening? Homeland security is already informed as to the threat as expressed in the article Homeland Security Warns of Terrorist Wildfire Attacks. [8] The article states:
"The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security and fusion centers around the country are warning that terrorists are interested in using fire as a weapon, particularly in the form of large-scale wildfires near densely populated areas. A newly released DHS report states that for more than a decade “international terrorist groups and associated individuals have expressed interest in using fire as a tactic against the Homeland to cause economic loss, fear, resource depletion, and humanitarian hardship.” The report notes that the tactical use of fire as a weapon is “inexpensive and requires limited technical expertise” and “materials needed to use fire as a weapon are common and easily obtainable, making preoperational activities difficult to detect and plot disruption and apprehension challenging for law enforcement.”
"Though law enforcement has been warning of fire as a weapon for years, the recent fervor over wildfires as a potential terrorist tactic is largely due to Inspire Magazine, a slick online publication that is reportedly produced by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The most recent issue of Inspire featured multiple articles on the use of wildfire as a weapon in jihad, including a complete guide on creating an “ember bomb” that would likely have a “high failure rate when manufactured and utilized by untrained or inexperienced personnel” according to the DHS report. The FBI also has warned about the latest issue of Inspire, which “instructs the audience to look for two necessary factors for a successful wildfire, which are dryness and high winds to help spread the fire. Specific fire conditions that are likely to spread fire quickly are Pinewood, crown-fires (where the trees and branches are close together), and steep slope fires (fire spreads faster going up a slope).” California and Montana are specifically
listed in Inspire as potential targets."
Pain and suffering are necessary factors that drive cultural reform and we certainly have had enough of this pain already. The question really is: how much more pain is required before the
necessary changes are made? Our collective job is to change the culture of fire suppression to one of good fire management. Ultimately, it will not be public officials, scientists and business that protect and constructively manage global fire environments and the multitudes of plant and animal species dependent on fire. It’s going to take an informed, aware and activist public demanding and forcing change to do the job.
In order to begin to improve our fire management practices and reform the global land management bureaucracies, we must first understand the history of fire in vegetation that started hundreds of millions of years ago. I cover this in depth in the first chapter of this book. The second chapter is on man and fire, because the understanding of the history of fire in nature by itself is not enough. This is because starting hundreds of thousands of years ago, man’s ancestors and then man himself, arose out of the natural fire environment as a fire species. He even began to alter natural landscapes with fire for a livelihood.
Once we get a grasp on this history in the first two chapters of this book, then the following chapters of the book carry the reader into the arena of present fire practices and the desperate immediate need for global land management reform. Toward the end of the book I present suggestions as to how to improve and decentralize our present centralized dysfunctional fire and land management bureaucracies.
Key to this process of reform and transformation I believe will be the integration of past human understanding regarding the land manager’s long lasting close intimate relationship to specific parcels of land. Instead of centralized bureaucratic central planning, what is needed is a franchise organizational structure. In this manner local fire managers are wed to manageable parcels of land to make the everyday decisions, while under the supervision of clear, defined rules of competent land management practice.
Written and Compiled by Ed Komarek
Forward by Jack Rudloe
SHOESTRING PUBLISHING
Copyright by Ed Komarek
3301 Hwy 93 South, Cairo Georgia, 39828
ISBN: (13: 978-1499159226)
Library of Congress Number:
In this book a significant amount of the content is compiled by the author, but is not the property of the author. So the author and Shoestring Publishing can only claim copyright on the writings of Ed Komarek. Anyone wishing to use material from these other authors needs to contact these authors and seek permission, especially material that is under copyright protection. Shoestring Publishing and Ed Komarek have made a good faith attempt to find and seek permission to reprint material, especially information that does not fall under the fair use laws and is copyrighted by the authors.
Fire in Nature, a Fire Activist’s Guide [1] is the second in a series of books written by Ed Komarek to summarize the knowledge and wisdom gained during his lifetime so that others may build on his work as he has built on the good works of others during his lifetime. The first book UFOs Exopolitics and the
New World Disorder is available to be read for free on its website or downloaded as a PDF. [2]
The hard copy and the Kindle edition of Fire in Nature can be purchased from Amazon with wholesale copies available from Createspace Publishing. For at least a limited time Ed would like to offer print copies at cost, plus shipping and handling, to public and private public education organizations like Tall Timbers Inc., Gulf Specimen, Birdsong Nature Center, The Nature Conservancy, and the Prescribed Fire Training Center. Contact: [email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Clinton Bailey has created the excellent book design and cover for this book which is very much appreciated. www.theartistree.com.au I would like to thank my longtime friends, Thomas Reeves and Mack Kemp, for helping me edit this book. I wish to thank Tall Timbers Research Inc. for the use of their extensive fire library and other help, as well as other sources who wish to remain anonymous, who have been very helpful in helping me get up to speed on modern fire management practices.
NOTE TO READERS
The source material for this book is referenced using footnote links for those reading this book free on the Internet at its website URL. http://fireinnature.weebly.com/ For those not reading the book on the Internet, a list of all the footnoted sources with URLs are listed at the end of the book. Ed Komarek can be contacted on Facebook message or email at: [email protected]
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my ecological mentors and fellow fire activists. From the time I could walk, I was mentored in ecology and specifically fire ecology by my parents Ed and Betty Komarek, Herb Stoddard, and my Uncle Roy Komarek. The mentoring started on Birdsong Plantation, Tall Timbers and Greenwood Plantation. During early family travels, the mentoring continued onto the public lands of the United States, Canada and Mexico.
I offer thanks to the other founders of Tall Timbers Research Station that include Leon Neel and Henry Beadel. Tall Timbers was later expanded to be called Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy after the founders had died or had to leave. Thanks also to Robert Crawford and Wilson Baker, early loyal employees of Tall Timbers that have been supportive to this day working to keep the founder's vision of continued fire research and activism alive.
I must also include John Hay Whitney who owned Greenwood Plantation and who’s generosity allowed my father’s research to be part of his regular day job at Greenwood. The reason my Uncle and my Dad were able to devote so much free time and personal resources to build Tall Timbers in its early years, was because of John Whitney’s dedication to Ed, Roy, Herb, Leon and Henry’s struggle against fire exclusion in light fire ecosystems.
As the focus shifted at Tall Timbers away from its leading role in early fire research and activism and into land conservation, other popular writers like Stephen Pyne and organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Prescribed Fire Training Centers have taken on new leadership roles in the
continuing struggle to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Forward
Introduction
Chapter One - Fire in Geologic History
Chapter Two - Fire and Man
Chapter Three - Good Fire Management
Chapter Four - The Battle for Fire
Chapter Five - Fire Management in the 21 Century
Chapter Six - The Elephant in the Room
Footnotes
PREFACE
I was raised in a family of early ecologists who mentored me in ecology and fire ecology and hoped that I would follow in their footsteps. I went to college at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks majoring in wildlife management. I was disappointed that after a year in a local junior college and two years at the University of Alaska that I was still struggling under a load of classes with little do with wildlife management.
In three years I had taken not a single course on wildlife management. I had, however, been working for Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the summers and even co-authored the first scientific paper on the Fishes of the North Slope of Alaska in the early 1970s. I was mainly responsible for the field work for this paper.
Little did I realize when I first began college that my life’s direction would soon change and I would develop a lifelong interest in the paranormal. A chance encounter with a small metaphysical bookstore in downtown Fairbanks amongst the bars and shops led to an existential crisis in my life that resulted in me quitting college to try to understand myself and figure out what was life really about. I came out of this crisis a much different and wiser person several years later.
My first book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder is the first in a series of books on diverse subjects that I am writing and publishing. Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide is the second book in this series. I am writing these books and making them free on their websites so that others may profit from what I have learned, just as I have built my life on the good works of others. There may be some fire managers, scientists, and others who may think I wear a tinfoil hat for investigating and writing about UFOs. However, I believe both books should stand on their respective merits.
These books even while covering very different subject material are written in a style based on exhaustive, credible footnoted source material, as will be future books covering international politics and spiritual development. It would be a mistake to reject out of hand any one of these books simply because of a topic covered in another book. I am reminded of those respectable French “scientists” hundreds of years ago who refused to even look through a newly built telescope because, obviously it had to be some kind of a trick.
My parents and their ecological associates and friends were of course disappointed that I would not be following an ecological career, but they understood that each person must find their own way in life.
My mother and I ended up sharing many of the same interests over the years, with my Dad and Uncle not quite able to figure out just what we were about. :-)
However, I think my family would have been delighted that I have written this second book Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s guide to follow up on their unfinished business. The body of knowledge I have gained through a childhood apprenticeship on fire ecology is rare, and I would like this knowledge in the public domain.
I also share my parents and their associates distress and even outrage, that so much public and private light fire ecosystems are being devastated by man caused catastrophic fire. One would have thought that their lifetime of work would have at least caused the losses to wildfire to be on the decrease, but that has not been the case.
The reasons for the continued loss of millions of acres of light fire forest and grassland ecosystems to catastrophic wildfire is complex, and requires a book to put all the pieces together. While there are many others writing on the need for prescribed fire in fragmented light fire ecosystems to simulate natural ecosystems, there are few willing to really stand up and not pull their punches.
Many land managers cannot stand up and exercise their free speech within the public land management agencies for fear of loss of their jobs or being demoted. Part of my job in this
book is to charge in and break trail so to speak. I hope to give many of these good public bureaucrats and land managers pushing for fire management reform, some cover to maneuver within their
respective organizations.
Wildfire almost took out Yosemite National Park in 2013. The wildfire came into the Park.
The Giant Sequoias are part of a light fire ecosystem going back to the Cretaceous, but are no match for catastrophic fire undergrowth and debris build up over decades of man’s misguided light fire suppression.
Are we to devastate this park by wildfire and destroy these thousand year old trees, same as happened with Yellowstone National Park? Are we to consider the loss of our parks and national forests inevitable, blaming climate change, fire, arson, and lighting, anything but the real reason
this devastation caused by our own fire suppression culture?
FORWARD
I am very pleased to see that my longtime friend Ed Komarek Jr. (Eddie) decided to write a fire ecology book to pick up where his father Ed Komarek Sr. left off when he died. Ed Sr. played a profound and critical ecological role in my life and was critical to the survival of Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. in its early years. Without his encouragement, advice and financial support, the aquarium and marine lab that exists today in Panacea, Florida could easily have fallen into oblivion.
I have been an interested party watching mostly from the sidelines on this particular fight as the founders of Tall Timbers were able to educate the public and pressure government land management agencies to put fire back into its rightful place here in the Southeastern United States. As Ed Komarek Jr. points out in this book, the same can’t be said for the Western United States and Australia. I like other Americans see in the American media every summer that millions of acres of public and private lands are still being devastated by man caused catastrophic fire.
Despite warnings from fire ecologists both in the East and the West, Yellowstone National Park went up in smoke, as did large tracts near Los Alamos and Queensland Australia more recently. It is very upsetting to see continued mindless government bureaucratic fire suppression in the face of such unnecessary environmental disasters. It's so disturbing to watch these disasters repeat over and over again, year after year, in spite of the fact that research clearly shows that fire suppression itself is the main cause for the these unnatural fuel buildups. Natural, light, ecologically beneficial fires have been turned into huge unstoppable catastrophic fire monsters through improved and expanded fire suppression technologies.
I have spent most of my life fighting for local forests and wetlands in the Southeastern United States that are being destroyed by loggers, developers, corrupt politicians, incompetent bureaucrats and ivory tower academics. As I have fought my own often lonely battles against impossible odds, I can appreciate what Ed and Roy went through trying to put a stop to these man caused catastrophic fires worldwide with very limited success in the American West and in Australia. Due to global over-population and over consumption, the world is fast running out of resources to be exploited, and the best we can do is engineer a "fighting retreat" and try to protect what fragmented forests and wetlands we possibly can from continued needless destruction by man.
Ed Komarek Sr. was one of my strongest mentors, the help he provided came at a critical time, and without it it's unlikely I would have been able to survive. In 1966, after returning from Madagascar on the International Indian Ocean Expedition, I moved into a leaky shack in Panacea and started collecting marine life for schools and research laboratories. I learned to collect, maintain and ship marine
specimens while trying to write books and articles to stay alive.
Ed was no ivory tower scientist, before starting Tall Timbers; he developed and directly sold seed corn to stores. He understood the difficulties I had at the time with Florida State University, the enmity some biology professors bore me because I was popularizing and commercializing science, and worse yet had no college degree. Against their advice, he used funds from the newly created Tall Timbers Research Foundation and gave me a small stipend. Much was demanded for little.
Even though I was cold, wet and tired after a day of slogging around tide flats collecting marine animals, Ed and Roy insisted that I go through my buckets and write down everything while it was fresh in my mind. I could rest later, they said, but they pressed me no harder than they pressed themselves. Ed, his wife Betty and his brother Roy worked tirelessly, building Tall Timbers Research Station, Greenwood Farms, and Bird Song Nature Center. Now that I think of it he helped my writing style enabling me to write books and articles for National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and Sports illustrated, etc.
In order to prepare museum specimens, I stayed up during the night narcotizing sea anemones and preserving them with their tentacles extended. Before long we had shelves filled with pickled sponges, sea squirts, fish and seaweed, all of which were thrown out when Ed died. Ed and Roy taught me discipline in keeping records, in preparing, cataloging and organizing museum specimens. Hopefully those records are buried somewhere in the Tall Timbers archives, they will be of use in reconstructing what the coast was like before the plague of development set in.
Long before I met Ed Komarek, I used to watch his "Rural Report" along with every farmer, fisherman or anyone else who wanted to know the weather. Charismatic is too weak a word to describe him, he just seemed to engulf you in his ideas and nonsense and sweep you along. Ed added humor and playfulness to his programming; he didn't know what it was to take his self seriously. By today's television standards, Rural Report would be considered hokey, but with a small rural based population of Thomasville-Tallahassee, it was the show to watch. Rural Report had playfulness about it.
Old timers still remember and joke about how he said he crossed corn with a pine tree. The local 4H Club built an ear of corn out of wood, a yard long, and plastered kernels on it and gave it to Ed. Ed joked about how it would help both forestry and agriculture if they could be grown on the same plant at the same time. He got people laughing and considering the possibilities. Back then, no one had heard of genetic engineering as the science was based on creating new plants by cross pollination. Gene manipulation came
later.
Like other television stations, Komarek got his information from the US Weather Service that fed a ticker tape into the studio at WCTV in Thomasville, Georgia. He liked to "cut the fool" as he called it, by cranking up his weather machine, an old Corn Sheller that cranked and rattled and turned a wheel mounted with a ridiculous grinning face of the sun. He had such charisma you almost expected to hear the patter of raindrops on the roof. Everyone was in on the joke, he got his viewers laughing.
That was in the Golden Age of television and anything went. Ed used his weather generator to teach. Standing there in his faded coveralls, flannel shirt and his hay-seed straw hat, he talked about the low pressures developing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the battle of fronts, and how they stalled and deluged rain and flooded the woods and swamps, all this before the age of satellites, doppler weather and computers.
His audience grew; people listened to his insights on the role of fire in the ecosystem, the interrelationships between rainfall, wildlife and fish. If anyone listened for more than a minute, it was clearly that behind this country bumpkin and his foolery, was a man with profound knowledge of nature, agriculture, forestry, geology and meteorology. He was ready to explore new fields, including marine biology, by having me come on television twice a month.
Viewers who were around in the sixties still break out into laughter, when they recall my first appearance, and how Ed panicked the camera man and terrorized Anna Johnson, who was WCTV's secretary, by turning my horseshoe crabs loose in the studio. You could hear her shrieks in the background as he chased her around the set with my alien monster. Later he shoved her on screen, got her to do the weather, and launched her career in television news casting.
He launched mine in promoting my books and environmental causes. I brought live sea horses, starfish, even a live sawfish. The experience enabled me to make appearances on the NBC Today Show, Good Morning America, on CBS's "To Tell the Truth", PBS documentaries and numerous other programs across the nation. Edwin Komarek was a true mentor, he empowered people. He was a generous wise man that should be remembered and given prominence for his central role in creating and directing Tall Timbers Research Station, backed up by his brother Roy, in its critical early years.
Ed brought the public into the battle against the United States Forest Service and Smokey the Bear. He lectured on fire ecology, talked about the Indians burning their land, and how fire grew quail. He fought against the stigma of burning, and how it was bad. Ed and Roy insisted that I attend their fire ecology conferences, and I spent many an evening standing around a fire, meeting scientists, listening at his symposiums, learning about birds. Here I met Herb Stoddard, a shy old gentleman, who worked with birds. Herb showed me his trays of stuffed birds, and explained how their differing beaks were adapted to eat seeds, bugs, or catch prey.
Ed gave both formal and informal lectures where the knowledge just flowed out and seeped into the people around him. He took me under his wing, explaining fire ecology, his vision for Tall Timbers to a twenty two year old kid, as we banged around the South Georgia and North Florida country dirt roads. He was also a showman, tossing a match onto the dry Wiregrass, starting a fire. I learned about Long Leaf pine and Wiregrass, at the time I didn't know one plant from another. I saw the dramatic differences between his burned plots, versus unburned plots of ground in the woods. He pointed to the lightning strikes on trees and the burned charcoal on the bark where fires had passed through. I learned about renewal, of competition, and cooperation in the forest.
As a marine ecologist and biologist I appreciate the powerful impact the flow of nutrients from the land into the ocean is having on our wetlands and marine life. Nutrients flow down from rotting vegetation and controlled burns in the uplands and marshlands, to nourish many of the species in the ocean that end up on the menu of our local restaurants supporting both the fishing industry and tourism.
It is essential that we try to protect not just the wetland and marine ecosystem, but create protective upland buffers from logging and development and use prescribed fire to simulate light natural fires in areas particularly sensitive as nurseries to marine life. Ed Komarek innately knew based on his ecological understanding, that something like this was going on, in that he expanded the reach of Tall Timbers right out into the Gulf of Mexico supporting my work in its early years. This is an area of research that that deserves much study in the years to come, because if it’s going on here on the Gulf Coast, is bound to be happening elsewhere in marine and land ecosystems around the world.
Note: Jack Rudloe is a marine biologist- ecologist, writer, author, and environmental activist residing
in Panacea Florida just south of Tallahassee Florida. Jack is also President of Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. and received in 2014 the National Wetlands Award for his and his wife Anne’s lifetime of work to save and preserve Gulf Coast wetlands. [3]
INTRODUCTION
Our universe began in a burst of cosmic fire. This catastrophic event was soon followed by the fiery ignition of burning suns that irradiated their planets with light and heat, giving rise to life on earth and most likely life elsewhere as well. Over time the earth cooled and formed a planetary crust and oceans. Scientists believe that life on earth evolved from already evolving chemical processes around fiery undersea volcanic vents, or perhaps even seeded from space. Life then spread to the surface of the oceans, where simple organisms began feeding on sunlight and ocean nutrients forming the basis of the food chain to this day.
As organisms became more complex evolving into plants and animals, they began to colonize shorelines creating microbial mats that soon spread inland diversifying into a great variety of fungi, lichens and mosses. The early moss built wetland bogs, creating a buildup of dead organic material known as peat. We can speculate that on occasion in times of drought, these bogs dried out on the early earth and burned, ignited by lighting just as they do today. In such a manner the bog, rejuvenated by fire, fills up with open water when the rains come, and the process of succession begins anew.
Over hundreds of millions of years the continental tectonic plates have
drifted all over the globe. This drift has created vast super continents like Pangaea where species mingled together for a time. Some species perished while others flourished as they competed and cooperated among themselves for life’s necessities. When the super continents inevitably broke apart, this sent different species on different evolutionary trajectories caused by changing environmental and genetic conditions in different locations and climate conditions.
Over thousands, millions and hundreds of millions of years the climate fluctuated extensively from very warm to very cold. The cause would be internal and external impacts like asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, continental drift and even massive global change caused by the evolution of life itself. For instance some scientists speculate that one global ice age was caused by the colonization of the land by mosses. The mosses caused atmospheric changes that plunged the whole earth into a deep freeze, causing the extinction of 90% of the animals and plants at that time.
Through it all there was always fire, just as much a force of nature effecting natural ecosystems as is climate, water, atmosphere and continental drift. It is obvious that when vegetation dies it either must eventually decompose or burn if not buried by geologic processes. In warm moist environments as in the tropics it can quickly decompose. In dryer climates where decomposition is much slower fire allows nutrients to quickly get back into the soil, reduces plant and animal diseases and pests and eliminates the mulching out of new growth.
Sometimes the vegetative fires during geologic times were diminished, as during ice ages and when oxygen levels were low. At other times the fires were very prominent and frequent when oxygen levels were high and the earth warm as in the Carboniferous and Cretaceous periods. During these periods of warm climate just about every kind of plant and animal developed adaptations to fire, becoming in one way or another fire dependent.
Most people today are unaware of the critical importance of fire in nature’s ecosystems and this has led to severe environmental consequences for all life on earth including man. It is imperative that environmentalists, politicians and land managers (both public and private) understand this critical role of fire in the environment in order to adequately preserve and protect the fragmented ecosystems still remaining on earth.
Most ecosystems around the globe are so fragmented by modern man that light natural fires can no longer be allowed to burn freely and frequently as they have for hundreds of millions of years. This has resulted in huge unnatural catastrophic accumulations of fuel in forests, savannas and grasslands. Sooner or later these fuel loads will be ignited by lightning or man, creating huge unstoppable catastrophic fires damaging to both nature and man.
According to the statistics in Wildfire Today, [4] the average number of acres devastated by wildfire in the United States lower 48, has risen steadily from above 2 million acres in 1990 to above 6 million acres in 2013. An article in Headwaters Economics [5] states that U.S. National wildfire fighting costs have averaged $1.8 billion annually for the past five years and costs are set to explode to between $2.3
and $4.3 billion. They compare this figure with the Forest Service’s average annual budget of $5.5 billion. Talk about creating one’s own worst nightmare.
So the remedy for fire in the environment is not more fire suppression, but controlled or prescribed fire to simulate natural fire. Plant and animal life adapted and used fire for competitive advantage for at least 420 million years as evidenced in the fossil record. This has created a wide spectrum of planetary diversity from very many plants with at least some fire resistance, to a very few fire tender plant species.
During the fiery Carboniferous period of geologic history oxygen levels were much higher than they are today. These higher oxygen levels allowed dead vegetation accumulating in early forests and savannas to burn much better than today. Many species of plants like the palms evolved very fire resistant trunks to protect against frequent ground fires. But these early forest plants went even further to use fire to their competitive advantage.
The palms evolved flammable fronds that when the individual fronds died and fell to the ground they burned out the competition. By becoming so fire adapted they thrived at the expense of their competitors and so became a fire dominant species spreading all across the supercontinent of Pangaea. Other palm species like the palmetto and the ferns closer to the ground formed the understory and adapted by developing flammable fronds and strong underground root systems. When frequent fires burned, killing everything close above ground, they quickly sprouted back using the energy reserves stored in their roots.
Later, pine trees evolving in the fiery Cretaceous when oxygen levels were again very high and evolved thick insulating bark and flammable needles following the example of the palms using fire to burn out the competition. Later the grasses evolved in these high fire environments and used the same fire adapted natural strategies as had the ferns, palms, pines and the palmetto to burn out the competition and to sprout back quickly after a fire and grazing.
In a short span of only a few days when it is warm and after a rain, a blackened burn will once again become green. The grasses sprout from their fire protected roots underground in the same manner following the example of the palmetto and the ferns. Additionally, the fresh ash with the first rain soaks into the soil giving this new growth even more vitality.
All this time while the plants were evolving in fire ecosystems in Pangaea and Gondwanaland the land animals were not standing still. They were also adapting to low intensity and occasional catastrophic fires. The best I can tell the ocean arthropods began moving onto land as they do today to colonize and feed on the detritus being washed up on beaches and in lagoons where early ocean plants were also taking root. These early arthropods evolved into the insects we have today and went from jumping, to gliding, to flying, to get around and to feed on fresh vegetation and other insects on land. In the Carboniferous the fishes followed the insects onto land and evolved into amphibians and reptiles.
I would speculate that one of the reasons that insects developed wings was to get out of the way of frequent ground fires as well as predators. They also could dig into the damp ground or crawl down in openings at the base of plants. The amphibians and reptiles had to use other strategies like fast flight, or diving into water to avoid getting burned. It was not until the dinosaurs developed wings that land animals were able to fly to avoid fire or to fly back into the blackened burn to forage for roasted insects, small reptiles and small mammals now openly exposed to view.
Most people all over the world know about the almost indestructible palmetto bug or cockroach. Well, it’s an example of a very well adapted fire species that evolved in the Carboniferous among the palm trees and the palmetto. Cockroaches are able to scurry down into the ground, or fly away to avoid
fire, only to quickly return to feed on the greening vegetation and any other insects that might have not been so well adapted.
I cannot help but be impressed when we simulate natural low intensity fires in fragmented ecosystems that we are burning through a mosaic of ancient and modern plant and animal species. In a layering process over hundreds of millions of years, newly evolving species of plants and animals enter the ecosystem forcing out less adaptable species. However, when new species evolve in the ecosystem, they often do not always destroy earlier plants and animals. The older species may simply be pressured into moving into new niches being created by the newer invading species.
Even the first land colonizers, bacteria, fungi, algae, lichens, and mosses, still have a place in modern ecosystems adapting to the ever changing environment. Once these early land species colonized and broke down the rocks on the early earth to create the soil for trees. We see these almost identical ancestors living in and on the soil and on the trunks and branches of the trees that displaced them where they are still exposed to fire. Even our own bodies, inside and out, have more microorganisms than cells. There are about two and a half pounds of bacteria in our gut that digest our food and turn the food into usable nutrients.
We now know that when man evolved in the grasslands and savannas of Africa, he too became fire
adapted, just as had other species of plants and animals living in these environments. Plants in a rudimentary way can manipulate fire, but Man went much further. He consciously learned to use fire as a tool (a paintbrush) to paint on the living canvas in which he lived in order to improve his livelihood.
This giant step made him an artist. Painting on cave walls or on canvas was simply a natural extension of his altering the landscape in which he lived. The landscapes we think of today as natural are only so in the context that man is part of the environment. Many of the plants and animals and even whole light fire ecosystems owe their continued existence to man’s fire activities.
Misguided global fire exclusion and suppression policies for the past 120+ years threaten the very light fire ecosystems that nature created over hundreds of millions of years and the ones that primitive man has been busy creating for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. The problem we have today all around the world is that as man moved into artificial environments and out of the natural world, he has lost the knowledge that he and fire are part of the natural order of things.
Our global catastrophic wildfire problems really started when the European colonists decimated the native fire managers through disease and war around the planet. It’s no accident that heavy unnatural fuel loads began to build around the globe increasing dramatically in the 1800s and continuing into the present. As the knowledgeable native frequent fire users were wiped out or displaced into reservations in the 1800s and 1900s, they have been replaced by less competent, citified, inexperienced government agents, scientists and bureaucrats who decided to unwisely and irrationally suppress fire.
Many of these early European bureaucrats were brought up in less fire prone areas of Europe or in cities ignorant of the role of fire in the environment. They were well meaning, but only knowledgeable of the devastating city fires and unnatural catastrophic of the time and thought if wildfire is bad for the city it must be bad for nature. In the early 1900s the rising unnatural heavy fuel loads caused by displacement of the native frequent fire managers, clear cutting and wanton economic development combined to create major catastrophic fires in forests and grasslands that even spread to cities.
With ignorance building upon ignorance, the early European land managers with public support used advanced technology to seriously suppress fire throughout the 1900s. This disastrous cultural legacy has been communicated down through generations of bureaucrats to today’s public and private land managers. These land managers are discovering that no amount of technology or resources can stop the catastrophic wildfires created by such huge buildups of fuel. Those interested in the catastrophic wildfire statistics for the United States can go to the National Interagency Fire Center website. [6]
Further adding insult to injury in trying to reduce these catastrophic fires, still inexperienced and underfunded fire managers have resorted to prescribed controlled fire with limited success, allowing controlled fires to get away and burn parks like Yellowstone to the ground. This only helps reinforce and supports the views of those who support fire suppression interests that compete for public money and resources with the fledgling government fire management units.
The recent and continuing catastrophic wildfires in the Western United States, Australia and in Europe, that erupt with the power and devastation of multiple atomic bombs, should provoke global public outrage. This should be especially true for those land managers who understand the nature, scope and causes for accumulating fuel loads the past 120+ years in nature’s global ecosystems. Many or most catastrophic wildfires can be directly traced to the fire suppression activities of man himself. Fire suppression goes against the natural order of things where light cool fires used to sweep the forest clean. Light intensity fires are the norm in most ecosystems with natural catastrophic fires limited mostly to cold climates like Alaska and Siberia.
I think it is about time to summon the ghost of Ed Komarek Sr. my father and ecological mentor as a young boy and his fire ecologist friends and colleagues. Ed Komarek Sr. has been considered by many to be the most prominent global fire ecologist of the 20th century. He, backed up by his brother Roy Komarek, organized other fire ecologists from around the world through fire conferences north of Tallahassee, Florida. They were instrumental in the creation and operation of Tall Timbers Research Inc. in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. [7] Tall Timbers was organized to be a scientific, educational and activist pro-fire bulwark against the powerful misguided propaganda and fire suppression operations of the US Forest Service and other government agencies in the United States and elsewhere around the world.
Ed had been raised in Chicago where he had been taught that fire was bad for the environment. His father had gone bankrupt in the Great Depression and he had to quit college to go to work collecting mammals in the Great Smokey Mountains. When he traveled south and met and worked for Herb Stoddard his ecological mentor, he realized that fire was an intrinsic part of the natural order and to suppress fire was a crime against nature!
Herb was one of the founders of the emerging field of ecology at the time and was a good friend of another founder Aldo Leopold. Like many of the early ecologists Ed, Roy and Herb were museum collectors who because of their collecting experience realized that plants and animals were in dynamic relationship with each other.
Ed soon realized along with Herb and a few others, who Dad fondly called mavericks (cattle who would not run with the thundering herd), that suppressing light natural fires over decades created huge fuel loads in both private and public forests and grasslands. This resulted in turning small harmless and nourishing cycles of regeneration into large catastrophic cycles of catastrophic regeneration in light fire forests, savannas and grasslands.
I think that my father would have been appalled today to see the problems, while changing for the better in the Eastern United States, have been still building in the Western United States and other parts of the world like Australia. This has happened despite a lifetime of effort at the grass roots to educate and train a new generation of pro-fire land managers on public and private land.
He would surely have been disappointed that entrenched bureaucracy, public ignorance, special interests and corrupt politics at the highest levels were still responsible for continuing and amplifying these crimes against nature and man! I would say it has certainly been the case for me as a bystander in this drama, because I can see that these catastrophic wildfires are so unnecessary.
Many catastrophic and devastating fires in the United States and around the world are the result of continuing incompetence and lack of funding at the highest levels of governments. This lack of competence, excellence and funding by national and global leadership, is in part due to inadequate oversight and accountability by the public and is caused by a general public ignorance of fire’s role in nature.
In turn, this failure to hold leaders accountable has been brought about in part by the dark legacy of 120+ years of misguided fire suppression, fear and propaganda by governments, an assault on public consciousness. This even throws into question the feasibility of centralized bureaucratic control over
management of public lands. Surely the public deserves better that this from their public servants and managers of the public lands in America and around the world.
All this environmental destruction and loss of lives and property is just too much for me to stand by and not try to follow up on my father’s unfinished business. Ed had intended to write a popular fire book before he died, but it was not to be. So in appreciation of my father and the public need, I thought I would write this fire book.
It is my desire that once the readers have read this book that it will add to a comprehensive understanding of the role of fire in nature. I hope the citizen will understand the need to reform and decentralize the dysfunctional bureaucratic system now in place. It is my hope that citizens and leaders of all stripes and persuasions, armed with fire knowledge and native wisdom, will be able to take constructive action to better preserve and protect nature’s ecosystems, man and the earth
itself.
It is imperative that we better educate and inform the layperson as well as the scientist, bureaucrat and politician. We can’t just study and debate fire and deteriorating fragmenting ecosystems to death, we have to become involved activists and change the culture. Good science can support culture, but it is culture that drives action and consequently reform. We the people have a damaging and dysfunctional culture of fire exclusion and suppression in global land management agencies. The current systematic deplorable situation is comprised of a mix of bad science, bad economics, bad politics and a 120 year assault on public consciousness.
It is obvious that we are dealing with an entrenched culture of failure the past 120 years in these over centralized and unwieldy government land management bureaucracies. There is a failure to adequately acknowledge past misdeeds, a failure to remedy those misdeeds and a general failure to protect nature and the public interest.
When a business is failing, hired guns are sent in to observe and then to make things right when current management can’t reform itself. It’s a painful process for the organizations, as people responsible for failure and excuses are fired, or repositioned in a management shakeup. Still, this is not nearly as painful as bankruptcy or the catastrophic consequences to the public and nature as is now
the case.
Some will be sure to argue, well what about our successes? My answer to that question is success as measured against what? I measure our very limited success in fire management against the continued increase in fuel loads globally, resulting in massive catastrophic fire catastrophes destroying many lives, property and whole fire global ecosystems. Let’s not get lost in the details and forget about the big picture!
There have been great strides made in the past 60 years in both scientific fire research and management that has greatly increased the understanding of light fire burning and the importance of native people’s use of fire in nature. Problem is, we now have an ever growing multibillion dollar firefighting industrial complex that incompetently throws money and resources at the problem with no overall reduction of fuel loads. This firefighting complex is not going to roll over and play dead while its funds are diverted away in order to give it only a supporting role for general fire management operations.
Making things even worse is that there is evolving a huge national security threat due to the buildup of fuel in the western United States. The terrorists have already been urging their people to use these high accumulations of forest debris to attack our Western forests and urban centers perhaps to kill thousands, maybe millions of people with just small amounts of resources.
I don’t think Homeland Security has any idea what a couple of people in one or more small planes could do to very quickly under the right drought and wind conditions. I believe terrorists in a couple of hours could create firestorms with the power of multiple atomic bombs blown into, or encircling Western cities. It could be like the firebombing of Tokyo.
My father and his associates warned that unless something was done, parks like Yellowstone would burn to the ground by catastrophic fire and that is exactly what happened. I in turn warn that there is a very high probability of terrorist wildfire attacks in the United States and around the globe in the next few years, but is anybody listening? Homeland security is already informed as to the threat as expressed in the article Homeland Security Warns of Terrorist Wildfire Attacks. [8] The article states:
"The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security and fusion centers around the country are warning that terrorists are interested in using fire as a weapon, particularly in the form of large-scale wildfires near densely populated areas. A newly released DHS report states that for more than a decade “international terrorist groups and associated individuals have expressed interest in using fire as a tactic against the Homeland to cause economic loss, fear, resource depletion, and humanitarian hardship.” The report notes that the tactical use of fire as a weapon is “inexpensive and requires limited technical expertise” and “materials needed to use fire as a weapon are common and easily obtainable, making preoperational activities difficult to detect and plot disruption and apprehension challenging for law enforcement.”
"Though law enforcement has been warning of fire as a weapon for years, the recent fervor over wildfires as a potential terrorist tactic is largely due to Inspire Magazine, a slick online publication that is reportedly produced by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The most recent issue of Inspire featured multiple articles on the use of wildfire as a weapon in jihad, including a complete guide on creating an “ember bomb” that would likely have a “high failure rate when manufactured and utilized by untrained or inexperienced personnel” according to the DHS report. The FBI also has warned about the latest issue of Inspire, which “instructs the audience to look for two necessary factors for a successful wildfire, which are dryness and high winds to help spread the fire. Specific fire conditions that are likely to spread fire quickly are Pinewood, crown-fires (where the trees and branches are close together), and steep slope fires (fire spreads faster going up a slope).” California and Montana are specifically
listed in Inspire as potential targets."
Pain and suffering are necessary factors that drive cultural reform and we certainly have had enough of this pain already. The question really is: how much more pain is required before the
necessary changes are made? Our collective job is to change the culture of fire suppression to one of good fire management. Ultimately, it will not be public officials, scientists and business that protect and constructively manage global fire environments and the multitudes of plant and animal species dependent on fire. It’s going to take an informed, aware and activist public demanding and forcing change to do the job.
In order to begin to improve our fire management practices and reform the global land management bureaucracies, we must first understand the history of fire in vegetation that started hundreds of millions of years ago. I cover this in depth in the first chapter of this book. The second chapter is on man and fire, because the understanding of the history of fire in nature by itself is not enough. This is because starting hundreds of thousands of years ago, man’s ancestors and then man himself, arose out of the natural fire environment as a fire species. He even began to alter natural landscapes with fire for a livelihood.
Once we get a grasp on this history in the first two chapters of this book, then the following chapters of the book carry the reader into the arena of present fire practices and the desperate immediate need for global land management reform. Toward the end of the book I present suggestions as to how to improve and decentralize our present centralized dysfunctional fire and land management bureaucracies.
Key to this process of reform and transformation I believe will be the integration of past human understanding regarding the land manager’s long lasting close intimate relationship to specific parcels of land. Instead of centralized bureaucratic central planning, what is needed is a franchise organizational structure. In this manner local fire managers are wed to manageable parcels of land to make the everyday decisions, while under the supervision of clear, defined rules of competent land management practice.