|
Buttercup: That’s the fire swamp! We’ll never survive.
Wesley: Nonsense! You’re only saying that because no one ever has. — The Princess Bride
8. Smokey Bear: Fire and the Savannah
Known as the heart of the Black Hills of South Dakota, Hill City is a small town 26 miles Southwest of Rapid City on State Highway 16. On July 10, 1939, a fire started ten miles outside of Hill City, and students and teachers from the local high school came to the rescue, including the entire basketball team. One of the players was recognized for his heroic efforts and became an honorary forest ranger. As a result, the team became the Hill City Rangers and the school became the only one in the Country to be allowed to use Smokey Bear as its official mascot.
Smokey Bear/
US Forest Service
The goal of the US Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters and the Ad Council in creating Smokey was to prevent forest fires in the country, as the loss of forest products was thought to undermine the country’s war efforts.
Smokey Bear attracted so much attention and commercial interest that the US Congress passed the Smokey Bear Act in 1952 to assure that all of the royalties from the sale of Smokey Bear products would go toward on-going forest fire prevention.
More recently, Smokey’s message was changed from “only you can prevent forest fires, to “only you can prevent wildfires” to help people distinguish between wild uncontrolled fire, and controlled fire that benefits wildlife. Even so, many people today consider fire in forests always bad, and videos of mega fires and burning houses are a staple of television news.
In fact, whether started by lightning strikes or people, fire has always been part of the North Carolina landscape. Before the arrival of Europeans in the state, Native Americans used fire for a variety of purposes. Fire was used to drive animals into areas where they could be easily hunted. Land was burned to clear for crops and to manage crops, and to make the landscape more open so that people could see enemies and travel more easily through the landscape. Fire was even used to fireproof special plants. By using fire to clear areas around plants that were used as medicine, Native Americans protected their “drugstores.”
The Ghost Savannah Controlled Burn/NCCLT
When Europeans arrived they found great open areas, charred trees, and charcoal in the soils; evidence of regular fire in the landscape, and they themselves used fire to clear land and improve access. For thousands of years North Carolina has burned routinely whether by accident or design. As an example of the change in our forested land, North Carolina’s coastal plain was covered by fire-dependent longleaf pine trees (our state tree,) with wiregrass below, and an understory of small hardwoods controlled by fire. The longleaf pines towering over 100 feet, the wind blowing through their canopies, and the open rolling land below is something you can see and hear today in less than 3% of the forests remaining in the Southeast.
The early part of the 20th century, the age of Smokey Bear, was the time of the clearing of the Southeast’s longleaf pine forest and other natural areas including oak savannahs and piedmont prairies, and as the forest was considered more valuable as product than habitat, it was also a time of fire suppression. If fire was eliminated from the environment, then more forest products could be taken to market and more money made from their sale. Here’s how B. W. Wells described the longleaf communities of the North Carolina Sandhills in 1932 in the Natural Gardens of North Carolina.
And now this noble original forest, one of nature’s most unique products of the ages in North America, is gone—rooted out by hogs, mutilated to death by turpentining, cut down in lumbering, burned up through negligence. No “Save the Pines League” was ever formed to rescue any of it. Not a part of this great natural wonder, worthy of the name forest, remains intact within the state’s borders…. “civilization,” just as it has in the North and the West, has triumphed over nature in the interest of “human welfare.”
Long Leaf Pine Cone/Niche
Today, our thinking about the use of fire as a management tool has become more complex, and fire is used to encourage a variety of plants and animals. We’ve come to understand the dependence of certain species on fire. In fact without routine fire, some plants and animals may be eliminated from the landscape, altogether. In addition to keeping the landscape open, fires help some plants to release their seed. Fires release nutrients into the soil and encourage a greater diversity of plants and therefore animals. Frequent controlled burning also reduces the chance of uncontrolled wildfires that can destroy plants, animals, and people.
In the B. W. Wells Savannah, the unique plants have survived in part because of mowing to maintain the power line right-of-way, and they will benefit from a new management regime that includes periodic fires. Fires will help to keep the area open of mid-story shrubs and trees which in turn will encourage the growth of flowering plants that like full sun. The seed from those plants will spread to newly opened areas adjacent to the right-of-way. Venus' fly traps were found in an adjacent site, and perhaps fire will encourage them to one day take root in the Savannah. Fire will also reduce the likelihood of wildfire occurring, and will improve the area for wildlife.
Because of Smokey, and the on-going resistance by many to the use of fire in the landscape, an important part of the future success at the B. W. Wells Savannah and elsewhere will be education. As people become educated about the benefits of routine controlled burning, they will be more likely to support it rather than fear it.
Dig Deeper
|