Last year’s Indian
summer fires in Montana were so intense, so awesome in their fury,
that they even spooked veteran firefighters. Pilots dumping
retardant on the Jungle Fire southeast of Livingston, Mont.,
reported flames jumping 500 feet above the tree line. For
comparison, imagine a wall of flames leaping over the Washington
monument. Hotshots, those elite firefighters delivered to fire
lines from the air, dropped their shovels and gaped. What they were
seeing, as super-dry fuel morphed into explosive gas, was a
fundamental change now taking place in the chemistry of our
forests.
That was right about the time former Montana
Sen. Conrad Burns, R, called a group of exhausted firefighters
lazy, good-for-nothing layabouts. It turned out that the crew was
just catching some Zs on an airport tarmac after coming off a
36-hour stint on the fire line. This summer, Sen. Burns was gone;
Hotshots were busier than ever.
I have a clear memory of
that episode because I was working on a story about climate change,
and climate modelers at NASA’s Goddard Institute told me that
all of their predictions for climate change were accelerating. A
couple of years ago, the low end on the projected increase in
global temperature was 1.5 degrees centigrade. That window, a
best-case scenario in the climate models, is now closed. The bottom
limb of the arc is at now at 2 degrees centigrade. The physicists
who watch these models, as data pour in from reporting stations
around the world, have their fingers crossed. The consensus among
scientists is that if we hit 3 degrees centigrade hotter, we need
to start looking for another planet.
What the NASA people
were finding seemed to correlate with close observations of a
friend of mine, in Billings. Bob Ruble, a longtime resident of the
Yellowstone Valley, told me that timber on his property has been
tested, and it is now drier than kiln-dried lumber. “This
entire region seems to be readjusting to desert-like
conditions,” he says.
Rich Cronn, a research
geneticist based at the U.S. Forest Service lab in Corvallis, Ore.,
agrees. “Plant species across the West are under an enormous
amount of stress,” says Cronn. ”Conditions that once
made life possible for a lot of species in marginal areas are
changing very quickly. Fifty years from now, most of our forests
are going to look very different than they do today.”
How different? One answer is that they might be gone. For
a forest, climate change means two things — bigger fires, and lots
more of them. Meanwhile, Cronn says, “We’re all working
on the models that will give us a better understanding of
what’s coming next. It’s a fluid situation.”
Cronn and most of his colleagues believe that forests
will begin to die off, and first to go will be the forests of
Southern California, New Mexico, and Arizona. That’s because
very few species in those forests have developed fire tolerance.
Next, high-elevation conifer forests in the Southwest are virtually
certain to vanish. That means the sparsely wooded islands of trees
across the high country of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada
and California could be gone in a generation. When the last Ice Age
retreated thousand of years ago, the world it left behind allowed
those stands of white and limber pines to take root and flourish.
Today, say Cronn and his colleagues, those conditions are gone.
“High-elevation forests will have a tough time
coming back if they burn,” Cronn says. “The conditions
necessary for seedling survival just aren’t there.”
That means unless something unforeseen happens, the
entire high-country ecosystem in the West is going to undergo
radical change, including the dislocation of thousands of wildlife
species for whom these forests are home. If and when the island
forests of conifers are lost to fire, they’re not going to
reseed. Grasslands will quickly move up in elevation and take over.
Mature conifer forests that don’t burn in coming
decades will probably survive the initial change in conditions,
says Cronn, but they won’t form a beachhead against climate
change because those trees won’t reseed, either.
“Even if they survive, they won’t be able to replace
themselves, so when they die off — that’s pretty much the
end of the road. These forests won’t be coming back any time
soon,” Cronn says.
So if you happen to be looking
for a job with longtime security, say, for the next 50 years, you
might look into the Hotshots. They’re going to be busy.
Writers on the Range is a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org) Paul VanDevelder is a
writer in Corvallis, Oregon, where he is working on a new book,
Savages and Scoundrels, for Yale University
Press.
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