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My forest is burning!


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Viewing 12 posts - 26 through 37 (of 37 total)
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  • #2005654
    Jim Colten
    BPL Member

    @jcolten

    Locale: MN

    So the plains tribes burned more and more. Presumably that released countless tons of greenhouse gasses

    Indeed … I'm thinking that would be largely CO2.

    Consider the life history of that carbon … almost all of that would be carbon removed from the atmosphere during recent years, certainly within the lifetimes of the people starting the fire. Compare that with my motor vehicle burning petroleum products that contain carbon likely removed from the atmosphere before the first bipeds walked the earth.

    Big difference.

    #2006094
    Dan @ Durston Gear
    BPL Member

    @dandydan

    Locale: Canadian Rockies

    Rewilding North America by Dave Foreman is a good read on the damage native and modern peoples have had, and a possible way forward.

    I wish Canada still had the woolly rhinoceros.

    #2006264
    Christopher Chupka
    Member

    @fattexan

    Locale: NTX

    Pics from last week from the Sawtooths in Idaho. Up Lake Trail:

    Fire 1

    Fire Sign

    Fire and Growth

    More Fire

    #2006292
    David Thomas
    BPL Member

    @davidinkenai

    Locale: North Woods. Far North.

    Dan: "I wish Canada still had the woolly rhinoceros." It would quickly put all these grizzly-gun-vs-spray arguments into perspective!

    Christopher: Some of my most interesting trips have been to sections of Yellowstone and Yosemite shortly after and then years after a large fire. One of your shots makes it clear why the pinkish-purple flowered plants are called Fireweed!

    #2006296
    Bob Gross
    BPL Member

    @b-g-2-2

    Locale: Silicon Valley

    "One of your shots makes it clear why the pinkish-purple flowered plants are called Fireweed!"

    David, you ought to get some Fireweed started in Alaska.

    –B.G.–

    #2006307
    David Thomas
    BPL Member

    @davidinkenai

    Locale: North Woods. Far North.

    >"David, you ought to get some Fireweed started in Alaska."

    LOL

    SAT analogy question:

    Fireweed is to Alaska like

    A) Chevys are to Detroit
    B) Nipple rings are to San Francisco
    C) Kids are to Disneyland
    D) Corn is to Iowa

    #2008372
    Harald Hope
    Spectator

    @hhope

    Locale: East Bay

    "Those iconic heads on Easter Island?"

    Jared diamond does a lot of selective cherry picking of data, and relies way too much on his own experience in basically south pacific type island cultures, relying on these cultures to try to prove his point, and fringe ecological cultures, like greenland.

    This type of fairly major misreading is interesting in a sense, both Diamond's and here, I said 'here', I did not mean by 'here' an island culture that was at the very edge of the Polynesian expansion, so far off their traderoutes, and in a basically different ecological niche from most other polynesian cultures. Island cultures prove basically nothing in any larger sense because they are too ecologically limited. Do the same stuff in Venezuela and 5 years later the jungles have returned, with a vengeance, because it's a different ecological system.

    Here means where we live, the Northern United States/Canada.

    I have grown so disgusted with Diamond's agenda that I won't any more of his trash, reading Guns,Germs,Steel was the last straw for me, one of the most intellectually biased pieces of work I've ever come across. However, there's a lot of great work being done now, 1491 has been mentioned, and rightly so, that's an excellent piece of work, that highlights just how well the ecosystem was maintained in most areas, focusing on various forms of permaculture practiced here, and in South America in many locations. When we arrived here we didn't find what we have now, I realize this is a hard point to accept, because it suggests that maybe, just maybe, we are ourselves at fault, as is our way of life and consumption / production patterns, which are directly altering the very fabric of our global climate system, which leads to worsening fire issues. You'll note that everyone who deals directly with these issues is fully aware of cause of the increased fire, the only people who pretend it's a question are fans of various rightwing formats that push industry agendas that have nothing to do with science or firefighting issues.

    Again, this is not a complicated point, we are destroying our ecosystem, in the very short time span of about 400 years or so, major increases going right along with tranformation of complex ecologies to monoculture agriculture, fueled by fossil fuel burning. The more people this new food creates and enables, the more quickly the process occurs, that's why they are getting increasingly worried in the more rational sectors of our culture, including those that have to pay some of the costs, the insurance industry. The people who lived here before us lived here for possibly up to 40,000 years, up to 100 times longer than us, that is, and when we got here, the planet was fine, give or take, still. Now it is not fine. I understand that it's difficult to actually accept that your way of life is crushing the planet's systems, rapidly, but 20 to 40,000 years vs what will probably end up to be around 500 years for us before the failures grown totally out of control, is just not that complicated to grasp. That's the difference between cherry picked Easter Island, which was I believe occupied for only about 500 years as well, and a vibrant complex and diverse continental ecosystem, which can easily recover from basic attacks on it over time as long as they aren't occurring at the scale we do them.

    By the way, one way, if you read critically and pay attention, that you can see how badly Diamond cherry picks and excludes data is his attempt to suggest that large mammals were made extinct by human hunting practices when we arrived here 10-12k years ago, when in fact, and as 1491, and other newer research, show that we clearly were here much longer, which means Diamond's attempt to exclude the data that suggested he was wrong to suggest that all humans hunt out all large game quickly when they arrive in a new ecosystem. For those interested in science, latest research suggests the large mammals here, like the mammoth, actually went extinct because of climate change some 10-12k years ago, not because of human hunting.

    This is worth considering, because when the question grows to be: how can humans live sustainably, it's useful to look at people who did just that, for a long, long, long time. For what it's worth, neanderthals occupied the planet for about 250k years or so and also did no real damage, they were stronger than us and had larger brains, which I find very interesting, but it's a different topic.

    #2008374
    BlackHatGuy
    Spectator

    @sleeping

    Locale: The Cascades

    "Fireweed is to Alaska like "

    Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong.

    #2008398
    HkNewman
    BPL Member

    @hknewman

    Locale: The West is (still) the Best

    As is everybody's in the inner West. Join the crowd.

    A good friend of mine just returned from a family trip to Vermont. It's rumored they have green things out there called "trees" ..

    #2008406
    Nico .
    BPL Member

    @nickb

    Locale: Los Padres National Forest

    Trees?

    I sorta' remember those…

    Sespe Tree Skeleton
    Post 2006 Day Fire in the Sespe Wilderness

    #2008450
    Jennifer Mitol
    Spectator

    @jenmitol

    Locale: In my dreams....

    About three weeks before I left for Torres del Paine last year the entire park was closed down because of a nasty fire they couldn't control (some idiot trying to burn TP in a place with flush toilets all over the place). They were able to open the place literally days before we left on our trek, but they kept telling us to watch for burns cropping up while you walked and at the entrance they gave us a little tutorial on how to put them out. It was crazy!!
    Tdp
    Fire

    And looking down the Valle Francais you can see the stark lines between green and brown…the fire even jumped across the lakes!!!Burned

    #2009388
    Eric Blumensaadt
    BPL Member

    @danepacker

    Locale: Mojave Desert

    The fire near 'Vegas is now 95% contained. There is talk by USFS of doing underbrush removal in the rest of the forest. Hope it happens.

    As for American Indians "taking much better care of the land" than we do I say HA! Mainly the hunting,fishing, gathering N. American Indian cultures COULD NOT abuse the land too much because they didn't have the means to do so.
    And, yes, Indians did Kaingin farming ("slash and burn") all over the east coast.

    C'mon, really now, archaeology has shown over and over that as civilizations became settled they ABUSED the land over time.
    To wit:

    -> Mesopotamian salinization of the fields around city states. (desertification through over irrigation)
    -> Levant area deforestation in the neolithic and bronze ages for charcoal.
    -> Roman extinction od African elephants and lions in N. Africa for their circuses.
    -> Meso-American cities and pyramid temples abandoned due to over use of the land for corn crops.
    -> British Isles largely deforested by the beginning of the Middle Ages.
    -> European lions extincted during the Bronze Age.

    And on and on…

    The more technology man has developed the more man "develops the natural world.

    "We have met the enemy and he is us." (Pogo the possum)

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