Fire in the northwest is complex. It’s important to realize that fire is not inherently bad here: the ecosystem is adapted to it in facts wants it. There will be amazing renewal in most of the places that burn. The real problem is in patch size and fire frequency.

In Natural or anthropogenic fire here there is a mosaic of patches of trees and clearing at different phases in a cycle of burning and renewal. After a fire of reasonable size the surrounding area is able to help seed the area.

In that context post fire Has the highest biodiversity of any system here. The ability for renewal is so powerful that mount Saint Helens was able to recover incredibly fast. But as patches link up the Entire forest begins to act more and more in its collapse stage

Frequency is also an issue because fire is timed for structuring forests in their transition to old growth or for resetting the system. As things get more brittle the renewal is disrupted.

The alpha phase Of the adaptive cycle is a precarious stage because it is a billion experiments but nothing is holding onto nutrients. Usually it happens infrequently so It does it’s job and quickly the system starts down its renewal.

But with increased frequency of fire the forest get reset too often and can get stuck in that precarious stage. This is the door that if opened too wide turns rain forest into scrub and desert

It also means increased unpredictability. Which is why Homes and Towns are bring hot so hard. We have had a recent history of people moving in to landscapes that traditionally have fire so that’s at play. But most communities bet that they will not all burn at once

The misunderstanding I often see is that people are afraid that after a single fire the ecosystem will never recover. If you go in most places 2 yrs after the fire you are surprised by the volume of new life.

Sometimes that feeling is utilized to rationalize salvage logging; The removal of standing or dead wood. But actually that material is essential for the recovery process. Its removal is as damaging as the fire

It’s also important for people on the East Coast to understand that ecosystems are fundamentally different in brittle or Mediterranean climates. We have a lot of growth in the wet season but then we have a third of the year completely dry with no decomposition.

Which is why one of the dominant strategies for our trees is to become giant columns of water and to rise above fire. Why large redwoods survive the recent fires in California without problem.

The pulse of wet dry wet dry is actually part of what makes this place so green and alive. But it is a dance on a very rocky terrain and it has not fared well from exploitation.

Temperate rainforest are a unique ecosystem. Volcanoes capture water and hold clouds, tiny salmon go out to ocean Bring back massive amounts of nutrients. Bears eagles osprey convert that to fertilize trees. trees act like storage of carbon; sponges of moisture they build clouds.

And yet the world overfishes and eats the salmon, When San Francisco burned in 1906 entire city was rebuilt from wood shipped down from Oregon and Washington. Huge whole trees are purchased and then placed at the bottom of the ocean in Japan for long-term storage.

Renewing capacity of our forest is exploited by pairing fast growing monocultures of our dug for trees with a rapid Rotation of clear cut.

What we consider ancient old growth here is also the result of extremely adept land-use management by first peoples. Off-season Burns to clear Berryfields &maintain sensitive meadow habitats. Trees selectively logged and salmon runs smartly managed; all products back to the land

The fires were ensured the minute that management was removed through genocide. This history was only a few generations ago: it’s recent history here even the mayor of portland is the 3 generation of one of the first timber company owning families.

They used to Build dams on rivers fill the pond behind the dam with trees and then blast the dam to deliver all of the trees at once down river. This means that almost every stream and river in the Pacific Northwest has been blasted far down Leading to Accelerating erosion

As rivers in size they hold more water and that energy allows them to dig deeper and deeper and this brings down the entire water table. dries out the land stresses trees. Without repairing the moderating power of flood plains this will continue until the whole thing dies.

That can be done through a combination of focused river restoration and re-introduction of beavers.

After their seven year journey of becoming giants salmon struggle upstream to find the place of their birth where they dig deep nests in the rock clearing out fines so that oxygen bubbles through them. With increased erosion and narrowing streams their nests don’t function

Salmon biomass has a readable level of increase in the size of tree rings. They provide the limiting factors needed for much larger and healthier forests. The weight we put on the salmon runs is also at play in these fires

This is why I say over and over again that at least half of our societies energy and resources needs to be devoted towards restoring this base systems that everything else depends on.

This is not just abstract climate change causing this it is specific land-use, agriculture, development decisions both causing release of CO2 into the air and utterly destroying the ability of landscapes to handle change. It has direct on the ground causes we could do different

This was done to most rivers in former and currently forested areas. The processes they started are still accelerating.

Like this propaganda piece says, it was replaced by massive road building which also runs erosion processes.

More on river processes. https://twitter.com/buildsoil/status/1084178006128480256