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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining us is Dr. Dick Hutto, Emeritus Professor in Biology and Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana, and the author of a new book, A Beautifully Burned Forest, Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire. Welcome to the Econews Report.

DICK HUTTO:

Well, thanks for the invitation.

WHEELER:

So this is going to be a hot topic. Ha, ha, ha, ha, pun intended, right? High-severity fire. So this is something that is often demonized in media. And you can kind of understand why. We've had a number of severe fire events that have burned communities, that have disrupted people. And so folks might be surprised that there is somebody coming to the defense of high-severity fire. But that fire that we're talking about there, the ones that took out Paradise, California, is different and distinct than the fire that your book is referencing. So what are we talking about here on this radio show when we're talking about high-severity fire? And how did you come to appreciate it?

HUTTO:

Right, right. Yeah, you're right. Before I tell you how I came to appreciate it, we do have to distinguish fire in the outback, away from communities. Distinguish that from fire that burns communities. I mean, there's nothing good about fires that burn down thousands of homes. And this isn't a book about, hey, you know, you got it all wrong. That was really great. No, no, that's not what this is about. This is about let's go out into the wildlands, you know, a mile out away from town is as close as that. And you and what you're going to see is something amazing.

And in fact, that's exactly what happened to me. I got this job in Missoula, Montana in 1977. And that summer before I arrived in July, there was a big fire just like one mile out of town, one or two miles in a place called Patty Canyon. And the place burned up. And I didn't think anything of it until it probably was it may have been the first winter, but probably the first spring after just went up to go poke around, right? Because, hey, it's right near town. There's roads, there's forest, there was a private road like a forest service road all the way up through. And anyway, when I got up there, I began to see things that were amazing to me. And I'd had through graduate school and all and undergraduate days, I'd had a lot of experience in the field looking at birds and doing things like that.

And I began to see things in this burn that I had never seen before. And so I thought, this is that's weird, like, like blackback woodpecker, woodpecker with a blackback that matches a tree trunk that is sitting on it's jet black because it's charcoal. There's these weirdo longhorn beetles. There's geranium that you don't see anywhere else. Morel mushrooms come up and everyone is up there grabbing these things for their salads only in one year. It's done after the second year. So there's some special stuff that happens right away. And, and I didn't really have time to spend more. I didn't have more time to spend there the first few years.

And, but sooner or later, the Yellowstone fires came in 1988. And that was an opportunity that I thought, wow, I hate to hate to miss this. Because when you looked at the Forest Service map of all the fires in region one, there was probably 45, 50 different fires and not just the million and a half acres in Yellowstone. And so I went to National Geographic and they funded me to get going on this. And I thought this is a great opportunity to look with sample size, independent replication, totally independent fires and see whether what I was seeing up Patty Canyon was a fluke or is this something that happens everywhere. And so what I found out with the first few years after the 88 fires was that this is something that's everywhere. And at least throughout Montana.

And what did I see? You know, I saw things like this blackback woodpecker, which is a woodpecker that is pretty restricted in its distribution to these burned forests. And so right away, I began to sense that. But how do you know if something's restricted to something if you haven't looked everywhere else? Well, through my birdwatching, I sort of had, but that's not really a scientific approach, you know, and I couldn't publish a study saying, hey, believe me, this is cool. And so what I did was went to the literature. And at that time, there were published reports from Audubon field notes, I think it was the name of the journal, and then a couple of other journals that published breeding bird survey data from people.

And they did different vegetation types throughout the West. So I looked at cottonwood forests, aspens, spruce fir, sagebrush, you know, grassland, you name it, I got bird data from each of these habitats through the literature, and then did my own surveys and burn forests, and just calculated the proportion of studies that said blackbacks, for example, are in there. And it turns out, the burn forest stuck out like a sore thumb, the blackbacks was like 80% of those are 85% of all the all the places that I went had them. They're in like 5% in outside burn forest. And that was pretty weird, I thought. And that wasn't the only species. There were a dozen species that were nowhere more common than in burned forest habitat. So it includes, you know, the American tree, the mountain bluebird, tree swallow, you know, there's a bunch, it's just that the blackback is just the more extreme example.

And why is that interesting? Well, that's interesting, because how could something possibly be restricted to a particular condition, environmental condition, if that environmental condition weren't around for a long time, evolutionarily speaking, you don't you don't evolve in one year to depend on something, you evolve for hundreds or thousands of years to come to depend on something. Kingfisher depends on the presence of a river. Pygmy nuthatch depends on the presence of ponderosa pine, you can see you can put the map of a pygmy nuthatch on ponderosa and see they fit like a glove. That thing is evolved to somehow not come to depend on ponderosa pine at this point. You do the same thing for blackback. And it, its distribution is a horseshoe shape all the way up the Sierras into Oregon, eastern Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, down through Wyoming into Colorado.

And in all those places, basically, there isn't a vegetation type you can go look at and get a vegetation map and say, what corresponds with that? What you can do is say, show me maps of recently burned forests. And that then begins to superimpose perfectly basically on the blackback distribution. So even though a recently burned forest is there for only, say, four or five, six years, and that's not so recent anymore. So how does how would a blackback evolve to depend on something and it's only there for a handful of years? The answer is forest burn every year. If you go outside in August or September, spin around, you'll see a column of smoke. It's not that big a deal to go the next new one once this one's all done in terms of the beetle larvae that the woodpecker depends on and eats. And so it basically can move around and stay within this single vegetation type and evolve to depend then on it. And that's not the only species.

You know, there's a beetle called, it's a wood-boring beetle in the genus Melanophila, fire lover, black lover. And it has infrared sensor on its thorax, can detect heat for up to 50, 60, 70 miles away. These things are detecting burn forest as they're burning, coming in to lay their eggs because the trees are going to be killed. They'll be defenseless. The beetles then have a heyday and they chew, they're in there, you know, having a heyday. And that's why the woodpeckers come in to get those beetle larvae. And then, then there's seeds of a lot of plants, like Ceanothus, and they'll sit in the soil for 200 years, waiting for the opportunity to have the right heat needed to germinate to, for the seed coat to, to break and for the seed to germinate. Geranium, there's a Bicknell's geranium, totally restricted to severely burned forests and waiting, can wait for 150 years until it gets the right condition.

So, so the more I look, the more I realized this is something special. And it's not just the view. I mean, just to walk into a burn forest, if you've ever done it, it's just amazing. Artistically speaking, it's, there's nothing like it. It's fantastic.

WHEELER:

It's very different than what the media portrays, right? When we hear about burn forests, they're described as moonscapes. And that's never been my experience. I don't think I've ever heard more bird song than when I've been in a burn forest.

HUTTO:

Wildflower show, if you go in the fall, you know, look at the fireweed. Why is it called fireweed? You know, look at the, yeah. Anyway, it goes on and on, whether you're interested in mushrooms or mountain hollyhock or whatever. It's just a, it's a show unlike any other. It's better than Las Vegas. I'm telling you, this, these burn forests are amazing. Okay, so that's the story. I came to study them, to appreciate that, wow, these are special conditions. Things seem to require this condition now. That's a cool story. And I published that in like 1995. So 30 years, the story's been there.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So on burned forest, though, I think a lot of folks can recognize that maybe high severity fire was always a component of frequent fire forests in the West, but that now maybe something is out of whack, that a history of fire exclusion, a restriction on cultural burning, and climate change are supercharging fire conditions such that the percentage of forests that are being burned is much higher. What would you say to these folks that can recognize it? Yeah, high severity fire has its ecological role, but it's outside of its historic bounds and then therefore undesirable.

HUTTO:

There are a lot of published studies showing things are not outside historical bounds. Things are well within the historical range of natural variation, especially when you get into the mixed conifer forest zone. If you go down in elevation, lower elevation, or south toward outer Arizona, New Mexico, go around Flagstaff, okay, things are a little more out of whack down there, and that's where all the research came out of NAU originally showing things in the forest are out of whack. But not, if you take a map of all the conifer forests of the West, not 85% of the conifer forests, that doesn't apply. Things are well within the historic range of natural variation.

And if you look at fire severity maps, and you go into the monitoring trends in fire severity on that webpage, you can get maps, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of fires in the past, and get the maps, every single one is going to show about the same proportion of low, medium, and high severity if you go to the mixed conifer forest zone. Things haven't changed that much. So what proportion is high severity? What has it gone from 27% to 32% or something? Yeah, maybe it's gone up, but it's barely perceptible. Now the area burned, the forest area that's burning now is probably going up. But then there are papers showing that even that is not. If you look at the long-term trends, look at the size of Yellowstone fire, look at the 1910 fire, look at this, look at that, it's not all that crazy.

The climate change and global warming is certainly underneath it all, causing an average increase in fire size. However, when a fire burns, it's like it always has been. There's no evidence that the post-fire conditions are any different. And if you go in there and ask the birds, or look at the plants, ask the mushrooms, they tell you things are fine.

WHEELER:

So we've made the distinction already in this show between fires have burned near structures or in communities being different and wanting to suppress those versus fires are burning out in wildlands, which we want to perhaps see these continue in a natural state so that we can allow fire to have an ecological role in our forest. There is a significant push right now, as you know, to try to reduce the amount of high severity fire through human intervention, through mechanical thinning of forest, through the application of prescribed fire, which often also includes some sort of thinning component before fire is applied. Is this misguided? What is your take on where and when should we try to adjust fuel loading to have an influence on fire behavior or can we even have a meaningful influence on fire behavior?

HUTTO:

And I think the research that's shown the greatest support for it having an influence comes from the lowest elevation open dry forest types, not mixed conifers, okay? So if we're talking about New Mexico and Arizona and the very southern part and the very lowest elevations of forest in the Sierras or whatever, there's certainly some merit to that argument and data showing that, yeah, yeah, you thin it out and you prescribe burn, whatever, maybe the fire severity is gonna decrease a little bit. There's a couple of problems. One is when fires tend to burn most of the land, like the fires that burn 98% of the land are less than 2% of the fires. And those are when the conditions are windy, dry, and hot.

And so all the treatments don't seem to do a heck of a lot. So I can walk through seed tree cuts, shelter wood cuts, groups like, you name it, and they're toast when a severe fire year comes along. So yes, they're effective during an average year, but the years that we care about that burn most of the land, they are less effective. Okay, that's one thing. Two, should we be wanting to do this? That was a question you posed. Perhaps, again, in the very southwest where it looks like things could be more out of whack than they used to be and it used to be more frequent, understory and pea pines were always there and none of them got, you know, relatively rarely got killed and that kind of thing. But not mixed conifer zone. It's not at all ecologically appropriate. So if you, okay, there's some interesting stuff here.

One is if the prescribed burning part of it, it's generally always done during the wrong time of year, wrong severity. Plants and animals evolve to deal with fire at the right time of year. And we're always doing it at a time of year when it's the least dangerous. And that's ecologically inappropriate.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are talking about beautiful burned forest with Dick Hutto, Professor Emeritus of Wildlife at University of Montana.

HUTTO:

The thinning, this is what gets me, got me really, was the fact that when you thin a forest and then it burns, because it's going to, right, during a bad year, we're not going to stop these fires. Well, you might say, well, at least you get your burned forest sometimes, right, even if we thin them. And I'll say, yep, and I've gone out there and done surveys in those places, and they're not anything close to a mature forest, a uncut forest that burns. So a forest that's been thinned and then burned does not give the same response by the most fire-dependent species, the ones that need it most, that's always a negative response. And that's been published, a lot of, several people published on that. And so we shouldn't probably even be trying to do this. However, when you get close to town, eh, you know, maybe there's some merit to that. Let's, for anything, just for defensible space, but it's not an ecological argument I would use.

And I, you know, I wish the Forest Service would quit trying to use these ecological arguments because they don't apply. They're wrong. I'm sorry. Use another argument. Tell us we need a little wood. That's fine. Sure. It's okay to get a little wood and get it nearer town. Maybe that's good. Maybe open up the interface nearer places, the urban interface, so it looks more like a parkland. Okay, that's probably a good idea to get some wood there. But don't tell me out in the outback, five miles away, 10 miles, 20, 50, that the forest is out of whack and you need to thin it and burn it. It's like, what? That's not what the plants and animals are telling me. It's not my opinion. This is the opinion of the birds and plants that live in mixed conifer forests. I'm just the messenger. I'm just trying to let people hear the message.

WHEELER:

So back though to climate change, if we're thinking, if we're planning for the forest of the next hundred years, and we're thinking about, let's say, a fairly unconstrained warming scenario, because look, we have Donald Trump as president, and that's, I think, the place that we're heading. Is this still true, that the conifer forests of the West are going to, should we use the past hundred years, 200 years, 300 years, however, to think about the forest of the future? Is there any change that should be made within expectation that things are going to be warmer, that we're going to have drier summers or drier years? Yeah, sorry, go for it.

HUTTO:

Yeah, we're heading in that direction. Climate change is causing changes, okay? And so there's two components. One is, what do we want? Do we like living in a world with a lot of the critters and plants and animals that we've grown up with? If so, this is what the Endangered Species Act and other things are about. It's recognizing that, yeah, we do like to have the earth pretty much with all the components. If that's our goal, then we need to be thinking about how to stop this one-way change towards something that doesn't support a lot of these plants and animals anymore. And the way you do that is how? Address climate change. Okay, so you don't address this problem by thinning and burning. That's not gonna address the problem. So yes, climate change is happening. Yes, it probably is producing something none of us want. Yes, we better get working on the issue, which is climate change.

Now, there's always multiple causes for anything, and global warming plays a role, and so does, I don't know, what else might be happening that caused the forest to change, but it plays probably 98% of the role in changes in the forest. So yeah, we need to address climate change if we want the world to be looking pretty much like it does today. Yeah, I don't know any way around that.

WHEELER:

So right now in Northern California, there are some forest burning. This has been a fairly light fire year though for us. It's certainly not like a couple of years ago, like the August complex, which was over a million acres here. We're seeing some spot burning and we have fire crews out sopping up these fires, cutting down trees, putting in dozer lines in response. So there's also a, a, a, a fire response that has an ecological costs. And I was hoping that you could perhaps talk about what would an enlightened fire response be if we are trying to think about managing for ecosystems.

HUTTO:

I think some of the things we're doing like dropping retardant and the bulldozer lines and this and that and the rest, I mean, if there's really evidence that we're saving the community right next door, I suppose that's what we need to do. But I see these things being applied well away from any urban interface. That I think is a mistake. There's no reason why. I think our honest forest, our tree-loving self thinks that we're saving the forest. We're helping the forest. But the forest needs these severe fires. Most of these trees, the reproductive success of Pond Rosa pine and Lodgepole pine and things depend on these severe events when their cones open and the seeds disperse and Clark's Nutcracker comes in and disperses them. I mean, so why are we trying to put out something that's a natural phenomenon?

And you could say it's a lot like trying to put out the sun. Why? It's got danger. It's got danger, inherent danger, and the way you deal with it is put on sunscreen for the sun. And with fire, you know, the way you deal with it is harden your homes and the communities and make them safe, relatively safe. You don't want to wipe out something that's a natural process, that's part of the whole system. This is what a disturbance-dependent forest system is. What that means is it depends on that disturbance for its essence. And so you can't be fighting it out in the middle of nowhere. That seems to me ridiculous. And you have to restore these early stages of succession all the time. So is the Forest Service or any other public land management agency plotting maps of where early disturbed, post-disturbed conditions are so they're always maintaining a certain number of acres of zero to five-year-old post-fire, undisturbed post-fire habitat?

You know, I'm not so sure we're doing that yet. We need to get to this landscape-level management where we're maintaining every single stage of succession after fire, making sure we have zero to five, five to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 40, 40. And that means undisturbed patches of those ages and making sure, because that's where there's different critters in each one of those ages. So yeah, you got to celebrate disturbance events and realize that that's part of what we like with our forest systems in Western U.S.

WHEELER:

So what happens after a fire is also critically important. And if I were to try to summarize the areas of controversy, this is maybe the least controversial among fire ecologists, which is that post-fire logging is bad. You and Jerry Franklin would disagree about how we should manage forests before a fire comes. But you and Jerry Franklin, Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Washington, for folks who are not aware. I'm wearing my University of Washington hat while recording this podcast. Go Dawgs. He and you agree, or would agree, that post-fire logging is bad, what is often euphemistically called salvage logging. So why is post-fire logging bad in case folks aren't aware of it already?

HUTTO:

Right, I think it's, you know, the most obvious thing is that a lot of the most special critters that are restricted to burn forest conditions require the trees. And if you take the trees out, there go the special critters. So once again, it's like, what do you want? Do you want an earth that's interesting or not? If you want all the elements that we love to have around to make a diverse system, then you got to be thinking about the fact that burned up forests are, I'll put them as more special than old growth, and probably should be higher on the list of not to touch.

Why? Because there's a lot of places to get wood. It's not, it's not like we don't have green forests out there. It grows. What's the big deal? And now, I'm not saying this to do this in excess. I think we can do everything in moderation and be perfectly happy. Firefighting should be done much more moderately. There's no reason to be dumping people out in the middle of nowhere to fight a fire. I mean, I think, and before fire cutting out in the middle of nowhere, how much, you know, moderation, moderation. Think more about maybe the urban interface and other places to get some wood. And after fire, no reason, no reason. And people will say, if you look at every justification for post-fire salvage logging, it's we're going to help the local community. Well, I'm not so sure the local community is benefiting that much from cutting that timber. A, I'd like to see the dollar flow diagram. B, there's other ways to help the local community. One is eco-tourism.

Nowhere, I've made this point before, nowhere is more special to visit than a burn forest with the wildflowers and the birds and this and that. I mean, after Yellowstone fire, they had, I think, the year after, 1.5 million visitors. And the economy is booming. There's lots of ways to make money for the local community. If you celebrated this event that was very near town. We were really lucky in Missoula to have one that I studied for 15 years about five miles out of town. And we were so lucky that we had one so close. The high schools and grade schools, everybody visited this thing. There were over 4,000 school kids in Montana Natural History Center tipped through that fire. The whole, there's a trail through the burn that was totally rewritten by the forest biologists to talk about the benefits of fire and stuff.

So we were really lucky to have something like that and lucky to have a forest supervisor and district ranger that said, we're not cutting this. And so it was, we really lucked out. In our lifetime, we're never going to get that lucky sort of hit again.

WHEELER:

So you've mentioned the ephemeral state of post-fire forests, that these high-severity areas will serve as habitat for things like blackback woodpeckers for a short period of time. There's also the effect of forest succession and legacy components that post-fire forests offer. So please take it away.

HUTTO:

You mentioned Jerry Franklin, he's one of the ones that introduced the idea of legacy after disturbance in reference to Mount St. Helens, I think was the paper that he wrote. What's really cool about his idea is that any disturbance is an editing process. Something's left behind, and the things that are left behind influence heavily how the forest develops in the future. You've got to be very careful what you're doing because you're going to influence the successional pathway.

One of the stories is that because no two disturbance events are alike, and no two editing events are alike, no two succession pathways are exactly alike. That gives for diversity, diversity of life on earth. You have to celebrate these kinds of events when they happen and realize that succession is going to occur. Succession itself means a change from one community of plants and animals to a slightly different one over time to a slightly different one over time to a slightly different one, taking 150, 200, 300 years to get back to what you'd call a mature forest condition. What's cool is each of those stages has special elements. If we go to five to 10 years, all the trees now, after about year six or so, begin to break and blow, windstorms, things. Now the snags are all snapping and to some people it looks really cruddy, but it's actually really beautiful. One species that comes moving in is Lewis's woodpecker. They just explode. It's like, where was Lewis's woodpecker before? They're waiting for these huge snags to break off and then they dig their holes in relatively weak wood. Same with Williamson's sapsucker. Same with the white-breasted nuthatch. Same with pygmy nuthatch. Other things come in in year five to 10, go down 20 to 40, they're not there.

You've got a special group of things year one to two to three to four, special group of things five to six to seven to eight to nine, special group of things 20 to 40 years. Where's the lazuli bunting? Where's the orange-crowned warbler? Where's the mcgillivray's warbler? They're all there in that 20 to 40 range. Where's the calliope hummingbird doing these weird displays? Whoa, they're in there in the 10 range, but they're not there in the 50 range. So all these stages need to be supported and you mess them up if you take out these important elements which are the trees. So a succession, a series of succession of change through time is not the same if you have trees versus not have trees. You don't get the same animal response and that's why we kind of want to leave these things alone, these burned up forests. Our timber side of us, of the timber side of us, we want to grow timber, we want to rush in and plant. So now, so there's a big emphasis in most, 99% of humans in the United States support planting. They think it's the most wonderful thing. Well, nothing could be worse. The forest comes back on its own terms, in its own timeline.

The worst thing we could do is try to speed up the process and squish out all this interesting stuff I've been talking about. Let's get trees in there by year 10. What? You mean destroy everything that would have been there from year zero to year 10? Anyway, that's the problem with trying to manipulate things after fire. I think we should be staying out of these burned up forest conditions and let the forest do its own sort of succession.

WHEELER:

Well, Dick, I think that that's a lovely place to leave it. And I appreciate you being an evangelist for burned forests. These are some of our most maligned, most misspoken of forests. And so to have a passionate defender of them is a wonderful thing. So thank you. And check out Dick's new book, A Beautifully Burned Forest, Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire. There will be a link on the show notes, which are at the Lost Coast Outpost, to purchase a copy of this book. So Dick Hutto, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

HUTTO:

Yeah, thanks for the invitation. And if you get a chance, walk out into one of these burn forests and enjoy it. You'll be amazed.

WHEELER:

think I think that have after the show, people see a lot more than they would have before without the sort of same ecological education. So thank you so much. All right. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North coast of California.