Fall 1998

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: FALL 1998.]

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

For generations of us inculcated with the gospel according to Smokey, setting fire to woods and prairies on purpose amounts to blasphemy. Yet those who love the land have been wrestling with some new ideas about fire — new ideas that are very old.

It turns out that our native landscape was bathed by fire, evolved under fire, thrived on fire. Only when we denied fire, through our civilizing intercession, did plants and animals living in fire-dependent ecosystems themselves begin disappearing wholesale from the land. As Alex Blumberg so ably points out in "Fire As a Friend", prairies without fire are like rainforests without rain: an aberration, a sick and dying thing.

Pages 4 and 8 in the Fall 1998 print issue are graced with the noble paintings of George Catlin (for which we are deeply indebted to the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, Oklahoma). Catlin was an artist and hero. A young lawyer in 1832, he one day disposed of all his worldly attachments, stocked up on artist's supplies, and embarked on a life beyond the frontier, painting Native Americans and their landscape, often as the first Euro-American to visit a given tribe or watershed.

"The prairies burning form some of the most beautiful scenes that are to be witnessed in this country," Catlin wrote, "and also some of the most sublime. Every acre of these vast prairies (being covered for hundred and hundreds of miles, with a crop of grass, which dies and dries in the fall) burns over during the fall or early in the spring, leaving the ground of a black and doleful color.

"There are many modes by which fire is communicated to them, both by white men and by Indians — par accident; and yet many more where it is voluntarily done for the purpose of getting a fresh crop of grass, for the grazing of their horses, and also for easier travelling during the next summer."

Ancient Chicagua and the ancestral lands throughout the Midwest burned — and burned often.

And now we burn again to save the nature that was and remains the heritage of this region. Even in the city we burn — carefully, under highly prescribed conditions, to be sure — yet whoever would restore them must torch our ancient grasses and oak woodlands.

The prospect confounds. Burning today is counter-intuitive. Then the scientists produce the data, and we learn the need to burn a prairie to keep it healthy. Yes, I say to fire as a friend, yes.

Chicago Wilderness itself is confounding. We humans have trammeled the landscape for eons, shaping — and being shaped by — the living land.

The abiding, affirming vision of Chicago Wilderness is neither to trash humans as abusers, nor to revere nature as something somehow untouched by the hand of man. The abiding, affirming vision of Chicago Wilderness is a middle course, namely, that humans and other species share a home, that we can shape and be shaped by each other in mutually beneficial ways. Our adventure, like Catlin's, is one of discovery and change. And what we learn may mean the difference between life and death for much of local nature.We learn and we reach out to friends and neighbors with this welcoming message of restoration and renewal. Yes, I say to Chicago Wilderness, yes.

Debra Shore may be reached at editor@chicagowildernessmag.org.