The Fire This Time

So I promised (warned? threatened?) to have something to say about the Oregon story that's in y'all's news feeds this week; the wildfires (and attendant smoke-clouds crouching over Portland) that are still tearing up our Northwest forests.

As with everything in the United States today, the fires have several competing narratives. Viewed from the Left, it's all about climate change. From the Right, it's spotted owls and ecofreaks preventing Good Loggers from cleaning and raking Oregon forests.

The reality, as reality tends to do, has a definite liberal bias. But it's more complex than either side wants to admit, meaning that changing the reality we're facing today is complex and difficult and, as you probably know, humans aren't good at "complex and difficult".

But let's begin with the climate.

Baby, It's Warm Outside

Yes, the warming climate is a big part of the problem.

Oregon and the rest of us here in the Northwest have a rep as a misty hinterland of coffee and beer and Sasquatch and flannel shirts set amid the rainy forests. But in fact the north part of the Pacific Coast - from about Mendocino, California to the tip of Vancouver Island - has what's called a "xeric" climate. You might have heard it called "Mediterranean". 

It means cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers.

And our summers are dry. It's common to have little or no rain between the end of June and mid-October. Temperatures can run up into the nineties for weeks, with nasty days in the hundreds, and everything dries and bakes under the summer sun.

But we've been getting less rain (and, critically, less snow - because many of our rivers depend on Cascades snowmelt by late summer and early autumn) and that's definitely been a factor in the frequency and size of forest fires, including this year's.

But that's not all, or, in my opinion, even the biggest factor, in the Fire Story

Tall Timber

You probably know we throw a lot of timber. Still do. Aside from the plow, the axe and saw did more to make Oregon "Oregon" than perhaps anything else outside the fishwheel and gillnet. The earliest fortunes made here were made in timber - not that the people who were actually touching the trees - the toppers, fellers, yarders, choker-setters, the guys running the steam-donkeys or goading the ox-teams, poling the log rafts, the mill hands and sawyers, the cooks in the camp kitchen - were making bank, mind. 

Nah. Those poor bastards were just, y'know, "people", and who gave a shit about them? They weren't organized - the I.W.W. ran into lots of trouble trying to unionize the lumber camps back in the Nineteen-Oughts and Teens - they were usually those damn dirty immigrants (although more often Swedish and Finnish and Norwegian than the current browner versions doing the dirty, dangerous, low-paying work us nice people don't want to do...) and probably radicals and anarchists, anyway.

Nope. The money was made by the "timber barons" and their companies; the plutocrats who fronted the cash and reaped the big harvests of money from the harvesting of timber.

And, it should be said, gave about a micron of a picoshit about the timberlands they reaped.

Very, very few timber magnates, or timber companies, spent anything on trying to restore the lands they cut. They logged them flat and walked away. If the hillsides slid, if the rivers and streams choked with mud? Who cared? That just fucked over those "people", and there were lots more hills and streams and trees to cut and people to cut them.

Well...the free land did finally run out, and the timber outfits began to realize that there was nowhere left to log. And they'd pretty much logged out the rest of the nation already, so there was nowhere to run, either.

(If you want to read a sickening tale of corporate logging, read about Michigan. The logging companies moved in during the 1860s and started cutting. They cut like sonsofbitches until by 1900 the state was literally logged out. Not a single marketable stand of big trees remained. 

So the timber outfits ran like little bitches to the Northwest, and left the Michigan loggers to hit the road begging for work and the timber towns to die.)

So reluctantly Weyerhaeuser and Cavenham and Simpson began to "replant" their Oregon timberlands.

But these plantations weren't "forests". A mature Northwest forest looks like this:

The big trees screen out most of the light, so the forest floor is pretty open. There's some swordfern and maybe Oregon grape, a vinemaple or three...but not a lot of undergrowth. It's dotted with openings where a tree has died or fallen, but it's mostly just tall timber and a sparse understory.

(In fact, the local tribes used fire to open the canopy to get browse for the elk and deer they hunted; there just wasn't much huntable meat inside the big trees.)

Now...this is a plantation - what the #Timberunity people like to call a "working forest". This is what happens when a timber outfit "replants" a "forest":

This is a bit exaggerated; this stand has never been thinned, but it's still pretty close to typical for a 10-year old stand. We call it "twig" or "doghair" timber, and it's nasty to work in - close, hot in the summer, and full of things that poke and tear the shit out of you when you try and push through it - and as explosive as a match-head when it dries out in the summer.

The big trees and the wet forest floor tend to hold water, even in the driest months. This stuff? Dries like flashpaper. Even relatively mature second-growth stands, like this one - 

are much drier and the flammable load is much higher. 

An old forest burn tends to smoulder. The undergrowth burns, but the fires tend to be lower and cooler; most of the trees themselves may char but don't burn. In an old stand you often see big redcedars or douglas-firs with blackened bark telling how they've lived through (presumably) several fires.

Those second-growth, "plantation" trees?

They candle.

So you have thousands of acres of these matchbox stands of second-growth, and when you throw in generations of fire suppression that has removed the natural regime of regular fires that remove the forest floor litter and combustible brush with these unnatural "forests"?

And you've got perfect tinder for big fires.

Hell is Other People

And, then, of course, you add fucking people.

Forests have always burned. Before people, it was just a thing that happened. Dry lightning, usually, and the woods would burn. Some of the creatures in it would die, the rest would have to run for it, and then the reforestation would begin.

Add low-tech humans and, as I've noted, you get human-caused fires; untended campfires, deliberate clearing, but pretty much the same effect. Most native tribes here in the Northwest would have been smart enough not to set fires where they were camped or their houses were built.

And - barring the occasional freakish windstorm, say, that spun the longhouse fire out into the trees - their limited means of firemaking meant that those fires almost had to be deliberately set.

But now?

Christ, what don't we industrial civilization-types have that causes things to light up?

Powerlines, obviously, are the big offenders. Many of the current fires were lit off by the big windstorm that blew through here at the end of the first week of September; falling limbs and trees hit or knocked down powerlines, and the dry East wind whipped up the sparks into a firestorm.

But you got your exhaust pipes, your brush- and trash-burning, your cigarette butts, your fireworks, your gender reveal parties...fuck, as my old drill sergeant used to say; "People, enh? They could fuck up a wet dream."

And, of course, you have your woods dwellers.

Here in Oregon we have two main varieties.

Our well-to-do love to live in the woodlands. They plant their communities thick with trees, they push their homes deep into the forests, because...well, it's Oregon, and we're timber people, right? Never mind the Tesla in the driveway, we're just flannel-shirted loggers at heart.

And there's also a bunch of genuine flannel-shirted poor people who hang on in the woods at the fringes of the cities, out in the scabby second-growth, because they need to live cheap and a shotgun shack in Clackamas County is goddamn cheap.

Both sorts usually don't bother to clear the undergrowth far enough away from the walls. Hell, the richies have lot of lovely flammable landscaping planted to make the place pretty. 

The houses of both the scraggly poor and the manicured rich burn like sonsofbitches, though, when the fire rips through the place, forcing people to run, sometimes killing the ones who don't, or who can't, and forcing the firefighting teams to try and dig in and defend these damn firetraps to let the people inside escape.

So here we are.

Climate + Logging + People?

And there you have it. Years of fucking up the woods and then moving into them set the table, then the changes in the climate cooked the hell-feast, and we're here, huddling indoors because the smoke from the Santiam Fire...

...spread across our state in a choking blanket of eye-searing, throat-tightening misery for which we have only ourselves to blame.

And the notion that we will do anything sensible to change this?

That We the People will rein in industrial logging? That we will stop people from building in harm's way? That we will do any damn thing to reverse the inevitable slide back into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?

Ha.

Thanks. I needed a laugh right now. 

Because otherwise my throat is full of nothing but rage and smoke.