Setting fire to the pristine wilderness

Tomorrow, I leave to play tour photographer for my friend, Chris Barron, through a four-city swing up the East Coast. So, the editorial here is about to take a sharp turn into all things tour life. I’m psyched about that… and also hopelessly behind in prepping for that, so this one will be quick and messy. I apologize in advance.

I have had this little follow-on to my two-parter, The Family Next Door, in mind for quite some time though and don’t want it to wait.

It is a tour de force of my ADHD brain and the ways it leads me down rabbit holes into a lot of random but interesting shit. Well, interesting to me at least.

In my little two-parter, I introduced y’all to a place I have come to love. The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.

It is beautiful and serene populated by countless resident and migratory species. That isn’t an accident. Its biodiversity is carefully protected and managed.

To me, it seems like a maintained wilderness. A place left to exist absent mankind’s intrusions. There are virtually no trails and only one or two roads. It is not a national park meant to be enjoyed by the public. It is a wildlife refuge meant to provide them habitat.

Occasionally, the staff undertakes some planned intervention and it always strikes me as a breach of sorts from just allowing nature to do its thing. A brief deer hunt. A one-day turkey hunt. Some roadwork. They all just seem like violations of the do-nothingness I assumed was how you maintain wilderness.

Then, one day last spring, I learned they were planning on burning the place down. Not all of it. But huge swaths. Entire meadows. Acres and acres of fields.

And then they did.

Reduced the fields I regularly spend hours looking out over to charred, dystopian wastelands.

Those fields are shoulder-height grasslands of green by mid-summer and then turn to an amber that lasts all winter… and now they were ashpits of scorched black.

For a few hours, a man-made Armageddon raged so hot, the ground temperature reached 500 degrees.

Suffice it to say, I did not love this.

So, I tracked down a federal fire guy and asked “Bro, what the fuck?” in a friendly, polite, intellectually curious way.

And that led me down a rabbit hole into a kind of stunning education. We, as it turns out, have been fed some startling fictions about nature and conservation and the history of this country of ours.

I don’t know about you but I was raised on the notion that North America was a “pristine wilderness” when settlers arrived and ultimately formed the first colonies.

Indigenous people were presented as having zero footprint… as if they engaged with the natural world and landscape so delicately and with such reverence for conservation, they left their own world unchanged, uncultivated.

Yeah, that’s… wrong to the point of having been a form of racist erasure.

Indigenous populations, you see, used fire extensively to shape and alter the landscape. They used controlled burns to create open spaces for farming and hunting. They set fire to understory in forests to clear fuel, open routes to travel, create habitat for deer, etc..

Those amber waves of grain of song? They existed because the land was cultivated specifically to see that they did.

And for the entirety of recorded time prior, fire events had been common. Lightning routinely set fire to accumulated fuel and burned vast swaths of land.

Fire, you see, is natural. It isn’t an exogenous event that halts a natural cycle and destroys a biosphere. It is part of the very cycle that allowed that biosphere to exist in the first place.

Those periodic fires - first set by natural phenomenon and then by indigenous populations - did all kinds of things to both the things already living there and their evolution.

Native species became resistant to fire. They became “fire tolerant”. Oak trees. Maples. Hardwoods of all kind developed the ability to withstand the apocalyptic heat of periodic fire events. Native grasses developed the ability to spring back from complete burns.

What didn’t adapt were invasive species. After all, they hadn’t lived through a fire and then learned to live among fire.

These controlled burns rid landscapes of detrimental growth.

And in their aftermath, the flora that proliferated was the kind that benefitted indigenous populations and other animals. Berrying bushes. Nut-bearing trees. The kinds of plants both people and animals like deer happen to rely on for food.

And those deer by the way… they proliferated specifically BECAUSE of mankind’s interventions. We have this kneejerk assumption that all animals have been harmed by mankind’s impact on the landscape. Deer exist in massive numbers specifically because of that intervention. There are more deer today than there were 100 years ago and vastly more than there were back when forests were choked with brambles and dead matter.

My beloved Great Swamp bore out what the fire person explained to me.

Within a week, it was regenerating.

Within a month, it had returned to grassland.

By that fall, with its density thinned and the grassland lower, it was an improved hunting ground for birds of prey, foxes, coyotes, etc..

And now, a year later, it is poised for another cycle of growth as a healthy ecosystem for native species.

Fire is natural.

Indigenous populations reshaped the entire continent by knowing how and when to use it to IMPROVE the natural balance.

And then along came white European settlers too obtuse to learn from populations they saw as unsophisticated.

Indigenous fire practices were banned… and with them went the ability for indigenous people to maintain their means of farming and hunting.

It was a form of ecological genocide. It was driven by racism and ignorance and greed. It added to the decimation of indigenous communities.

And it reduced a carefully cultivated landscape to a tinder box of mismanaged species choked by fuel for forest fires and invasive species.

And now, centuries after settlers entirely erased the artists from what they saw as a beautiful painting of a pristine wilderness, we now better understand how much fire matters to keeping an ecosystem healthy.

That much, a fire guy can tell you in a ten-minute convo on a gravel road through a wildlife reserve.

What neither that guy nor anyone us had ever told me though was that we have been fed a myth about America the Beautiful.

The beautiful, fruitful open forests of the northeast. The pastureland with its grasses to graze horses and cattle and sheep. The rolling, extensive prairies.

All of them were a product of cultivation - or management at least - by indigenous people who were here long before settlers arrived.

The myth we’ve been fed of the light-footed indigenous deer hunter moving silently through an open wood which they neither played a role in creating nor altered is a lie.

That open wood with its sparse dry, dead vegetation underfoot perfect for stealthy travel by man and deer, it was cultivated.

I don’t know how I have come to hear nothing about this in my entire life on this planet.

Then again, I actually do.

The myth served white colonial exploitation.

Entirely erasing indigenous populations and their role in shaping and cultivating the landscape removed them from having a claim to the place.

If colonists and settlers were arriving at a “pristine wilderness” created by no one but their Christian god, well, gosh, indigenous populations must be merely squatters on the glorious natural riches of God’s creation.

New Jersey’s indigenous populations were decimated by settler-introduced disease and then forced displacement.

Their practices were banned.

And now, over 100 years after the federal government actually banned the use of fire in controlled burns, it is the same federal government using it to maintain the tiny pockets of refuge we have left.

A fire guy can tell you why they use it now.

But no one will tell you that it was this continent’s original people who first used the practice right up until one invasive species pushed them off their land - a land they had shaped in ways European settlers whitewashed from the great fiction of our history.

And ain’t that some shit.

My little refuge is pristine wilderness. The true kind. An expanse in balance between man’s interventions and a natural cycle that reduces meadow to ash and then returns it to gold.

I never knew this. Now I do.

If interested in reading further, here are a couple links:

• https://www.sapiens.org/culture/pristine-wilderness-conservation/

• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1992.tb01965.x

• and the wiki for people of the TL;DR ilk… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems

On that note, I need to run along and get my gear together for an abrupt turn into rock and roll, photography, and a week of van life.