A very interesting article from today’s Bee about the level of smoke in the air today—when forest fires are suppressed—related to what was common in the past—when they weren’t—and it was a whole lot smokier then, with the terrible air perhaps helping to account for the much shorter life-span in the 18th and 19th century.
A marvelous book: Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Changed Since 1849, clearly shows this to be the case, as it is a comparison of photos taken in the forests from the same vantage points—though 100 years apart—revealing a much deeper and richer forest today than then.
An excerpt from the Bee article:
“Wildland firefighting didn't occur until the turn of the 20th century, after the federal government set aside land as parks and created the Forest Service.
"Fire suppression became its reason for being," Yosemite-based U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jan W. van Wagentdonk wrote of the Forest Service in an article last year for the journal Fire Ecology.
"It was the only policy for all federal land managers until the late 1960s when (National Park Service) officials recognized fire as a natural process."
“The amount of land burned in today's far more urbanized and farmed California pales against the acreage consumed historically, before Euro-American settlements, according to University of California, Berkeley, environmental researchers.
“The scientists estimated that an average 4.4 million acres burned annually in California before 1800, compared with an average 250,000 acres a year in the last five decades, 1950 through 2000.”
