In defense of severe fires
My review of Hutto’s book “A Beautifully Burned Forest” is now on BioScience: doi | PDF
Here are some quotes by Hutto that I mentioned in my commentary:
Severely burned forests are “magical places that seem to harbor plant & animal species & visual experiences found under no other forest conditions.”
“The only way a species could be restricted to burned forests is if it evolved in the presence of that forest condition for a very long time and concurrently evolved a behavior that limited its habitat breadth to that specific forest condition.”
“If the black-backed woodpecker story can’t convince you that blackened conifer forests represent perfectly natural and historically important environmental conditions that have always occurred within the bird’s geographic range, then there is nothing in biology that can do so.”
“Except for a small fraction of western forests that include low-elevation, ponderosa pine forest types (mostly in the Southwest), the idea that years of [fire] suppression and timber harvest and grazing have created out-of-whack [atypical high fuel] conditions is simply untrue” (my square brackets, for clarification).
“Some places are in and of themselves too special to be altered by logging operations, an old-growth forest is one, and a severely burned forest is another.”
