Fall 1998

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

Fire as a Friend

In the past two decades, scientific opinion has turned decidedly against the gospel according to Smokey. Scientists now understand that fire is, in fact, the norm.

By Alex Blumberg

Twenty years ago, Jo Ellen Siddens would have been locked up as an arsonist. Today I'm in the passenger seat as Siddens, an ecologist with the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, bumps her county-issue Dodge Caravan along a gravel access road in Waterfall Glen near the village of Lemont.

Abruptly, the scenery shifts. Siddens stops the van. A line runs at a right angle from the road into the woods, dividing one world from another. On the left side of the line, giant oaks form open chambers, with vaulted ceilings of arching boughs and lush carpets of woodland wildflowers. To the right of the line, eight- to twelve-foot buckthorn and honeysuckle trees lurch from the ground at asymmetric angles, knotting their branches into organic barbed wire. If the scene to the left calls to mind a cathedral, spacious and gently lit, the scene to the right seems more like a warren, dark and claustrophobic.

Twenty years ago the entire area looked like the tangle to the right. Two hundred years ago it resembled the grove to the left. These clashing versions of the same landscape now lie side by side. They offer testimony to how the land has changed in the 150 years since Europeans first settled here. Jo Ellen, her counterparts in other districts, and countless volunteers throughout the Chicago region are slowly undoing these changes, restoring the land to what they see as its healthy natural condition. Their main tool is fire. The snarl to the right of the dividing line hasn't felt flame in over half a century. The glade to the left is torched every couple of years. "Someday," Siddens says wistfully, "we'll be able to do a full landscape burn throughout the entire preserve."

Twenty years ago, Jo Ellen would have been branded a threat to society for even uttering such a sentiment, let alone taking steps to carry it out. Burning, went the conventional wisdom, didn't restore, it destroyed. So firmly did we believe our anti-fire credo that we anointed an anthropomorphized cartoon bear to preach it on TV. But in the past two decades, scientific opinion has turned decidedly against the gospel according to Smokey. We used to believe, mistakenly, that fire was an unnatural deviation, a calamity. Scientists now understand that fire is, in fact, the norm.

"[L]ife invented fire," writes natural historian Steven Pyne in his book Vestal Fire. "The plants that created fuel also created oxygen and thus closed the Earth's fire triangle." The prehuman landscape — bathed in flammable gas, stocked with plants grown alternately lush by rain and brittle by drought, and swept by electrical storms roiling perpetually across its surface — was a literally volatile mix. Given such an uncanny coincidence of fuel, oxygen and incendiary spark, how could the planet do anything but burn?

Throughout most of the world's environments, fire was a cyclic phenomenon, just like the shifting seasons, the daily tides, the summer monsoons, or periodic drought. Like them, fire helped define a region's natural rhythms and shape the evolution of the plants and animals living there. Different environments experience different fire regimes. Yellowstone's lodgepole pine forests burn rarely, once every 100 years or so. Yosemite's ponderosas burn more frequently, about once a decade.

The Midwestern tallgrass prairie might have burned as often as every year or two. No matter what the regime however, removing fire from a fire-dependent ecosystem is like removing rain from the rainforest. Without it, lodgepole seeds won't germinate, ponderosas grow crowded and susceptible to disease, prairie grasses succumb to fire-sensitive invaders. If fire were suppressed long enough, these ecosystems would disappear entirely. For millennia, fire swept through the woodlands, marshes, savannas, and prairies of Illinois every few years. Since the passage of the Homestead Act, the interval is a century and a half and counting.

To see how catastrophically fire suppression has disrupted the ecosystems of Illinois, there's no better vantage point than the dividing line at Waterfall Glen, which documents the process in vivid before and after snapshots. On the before side, the burned side, stretches an oak savanna that pre-biblical Native Americans would recognize. White oaks, bur oaks, and shagbark hickory form a loose, open canopy. A patchwork of woodland flowers and grasses blankets the ground. Butterflies flit, and sunlight dapples. It's open, inviting — literally a sylvan glade. And on the unburned side? "The darkness and dankness remind me of the stereotypical evil forest in a Disney movie," says Jo Ellen Siddens, "where branches reach out to grab you and trees trip you with their roots." All the open spaces are now clogged with an impenetrable understory of brushy buckthorn and honeysuckle, an occasional native cherry or dogwood thrown in for good measure.

If you kneel and peer below the branches, your gaze might encounter the thick trunk of an oak. These trunks once spread the kind of massive lower boughs which supported sunlit maidens on garden swings in 19th-century Impressionist paintings. As the overgrown thorn scrub rose up to envelope them in shadow, these lower branches rotted and dropped. But to witness the most chilling evidence of the landscape's decline, one has only to look down. The ground on the burned side, suffused with light trickling through the open canopy, is blanketed by a living tapestry — the fabric woven of over a hundred species of native grasses and wildflowers, the design formed by an intricate jumble of leaf, petal, pattern, and color. Butterflies flit, birds sing. By contrast, in the gloom beneath the buckthorn on the unburned side, nothing grows, flits, or sings. The snake's eye view reveals the odd eruption of spindly trunks, the occasional lonely buckthorn seedling, and huge stretches of barren dirt.

This is the lesson of the dividing line. On the simple theme of life, evolution composes eternal fugues and variations. From the randomness of natural selection emerges a mosaic of complex interrelationships and precise ecological niches. Fire is the grout which holds it all together. When we stop the land from burning, this mosaic, this jigsaw puzzle that evolution has been assembling for the last 10 million years, is swept away. A substitute ecosystem replaces it, one which is simplified to the lowest common denominator plants and animals — the generalists that can survive in as dirty and disrupted an environment as we can. The process is akin to emptying a zoo of all its animals and replacing them with pigeons, rats, and roaches. Without fire, says Ed Collins, an ecologist with the McHenry County Conservation District, we're heading for "a world of starlings and dandelions."

In many parts of the Chicago region, by the time the nature of this eventual destination finally dawned on us, we were halfway there already. "We got used to thinking of a woods as a place you couldn't walk through," says Wayne Lampa, retired chief ecologist of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. "The only thing you ever saw was buckthorn, Virginia creeper, and poison ivyŠwe thought that was the way it was supposed to look." Evidence to the contrary gradually revealed itself in various ways. First clue — the species composition of the region's natural communities was changing. In almost all the woods and savannas, the oldest and largest trees were oaks, but among the swirl of young maple, cherry, honeysuckle, and buckthorn growing below, oak saplings were absent. Second clue — periodic inventories revealed a steady decline in rare plant and insect species, even in the protected forest preserves.

And then there was the occasional mysterious plant name. "Until we started burning," recalls Lampa, "I could never figure out why they called it the 'woodland sunflower.' It just didn't grow in the woods." Identifying the problem, however, isn't the same as fixing it. Ed Collins explains, "The crucial role that fire had in Midwestern wooded communities is probably something we've come to understand better in the last decade to 15 years." The realization came partly from revisiting archival materials. "There were always references in the literature to the openness of the woods," says Wayne Lampa, "but we just ignored them." Settler diaries, surveyor's notes, and early newspapers corroborate what we now know to be true: Illinois burned and it burned often.

The flora also tell the story of fire's importance. Nature could not have designed a better tree for ensuring that the area around it burns than the bur oak — a strange hybrid of flame-retardant trunk and incendiary leaves. Then there were the data that emerged by accident. When Wayne Lampa was conducting his prairie burns for DuPage County, rather than dig a fire break at the point where the prairie ended, he let the fire burn through to the small creek, which flowed several hundred yards back in the adjacent woods. The woodland flora that came up after a burning, he discovered, "were a thousand times rarer and more diverse than the garlic mustard that was there before. Things we had never seen in the area began cropping up."

In today's forest preserve districts, the woods are no longer burned by accident. In fact, so firmly has the idea of burning taken root in the orthodoxy of ecological restoration, it's been translated into jargon. Lighting a fire is now called burn management. And listening to a bunch of ecologists talk about burn management, one gets a sense of what it must have been like to hang out in medical circles right after the discovery of penicillin. "It's night and day in the forest preserves," says Wayne Lampa enthusiastically. "Take the Indian plantain. Back in early 70s we used to get real excited when we saw them; they were so rare. For a while they disappeared entirely. Now they're everywhere."

Lampa's confidence in prescribed fire is shared by wildlands managers throughout the Chicago Wilderness region. Perhaps the most common comment I heard was this: "We thought ______ (fill in the rare species) was gone, but since we've started burning it's come back." This enthusiasm speaks to another benefit of burn management. In every claim of miraculous resurrection, every breathless comparison of before to after, lurks another resource that fire has restored — hope.