Left: Ragged-looking ponderosa pine forest on the fire-scarred Mogollon Rim.
Left: Forest fire plume located just west of Heber, AZ, on August 1st.
Left: Politicized billboard blaming environmentalists for the forest problems there. There's blame for everyone, though.Boy, the forest really looks beat up on the Rim these days! So many people up there at the height of summer, dry as hell too, and ripped up by fires (particularly the colossal June 2002 fire that permanently scarred the area).
The ponderosa pine forests of the Rim and northern Arizona suffer from a strange constitutional defect. Bare soil (resulting from extensive 19th-Century cattle grazing), combined with perfect moisture and temperature conditions in the spring of 1919 meant that every seed dispersed from every dropping pine cone that bountiful year managed to sprout and grow into a tree. But each tree faced fierce competition from all the neighboring seedlings. The result is clusters of tiny, 90-year-old spindly trees everywhere in the forests that serve as perfect kindling for fires. The area cries out for these clusters to be thinned, but its back-breaking work that will never, ever be profitable. Billions of tons of trees need to be ground into chips! Now!
Truth is, better forest management is something that partisan politics is very ill-equipped to address. Conservatives would prefer to finance tree-thinning operations by allowing logging of the bigger trees. That completely defeats the purpose of better forest management. Liberals would prefer to avoid tree-thinning altogether rather than allow logging of the bigger trees. The resulting fuel build-up is a menace to the forest, however, defeating the purpose of better forest management. What is needed is the surgical removal of billions of tons of dead trees and tree limbs, cost be damned. But will that be done?
I look around the Rim and think not.
Sigh. It may be that extensive ponderosa pine forest is ultimately incompatible with modern civilization.
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