i am convinced there is nothing as apocalyptic as a bad fire season. and now EVERYBODY is having bad fire seasons, not just the US mountain west. i am sorry for that.
i can also report real hope from the other side of having survived decades of bad fire seasons - we've been having "worst ever fires" roughly annually in this region since at least 2001 - the Horseshoe Fire in the Apache Sitegreaves NF in Arizona, which coated Albuquerque (~300 miles away) in ash for weeks - it was a terrible fire, and at the time the worst one Arizona had ever seen. i drive through that old burn scar almost every year when i visit my mom. and, it's forested again. it's not the same forest at all. the third- or fourth-growth post-logging ponderosa overstory will probably never come back, as climate change has made those hills too warm to comfortably accomodate a thick ponderosa forest. but - it's full of elder, gambol oak, locust, scrub oak, juniper, pinon and wildlife of so many kinds - it's green and growing, and more biodiverse than it was when it burned.
it takes a long time, and it hurts to watch. in the burn scar of the enormous 2013 Thompson Ridge fire in the Jemez Mountains here in NM, the aspen forest is simply gone; everything *but* aspens is returning. again with the too-warm now. but the *forest* as an entity is healing really well, strong and healthy and biodiverse and full of wildlife.
it took every one of those ten years for it to feel like that. i feel for your forests.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-07-14 06:00 pm (UTC)i can also report real hope from the other side of having survived decades of bad fire seasons - we've been having "worst ever fires" roughly annually in this region since at least 2001 - the Horseshoe Fire in the Apache Sitegreaves NF in Arizona, which coated Albuquerque (~300 miles away) in ash for weeks - it was a terrible fire, and at the time the worst one Arizona had ever seen. i drive through that old burn scar almost every year when i visit my mom. and, it's forested again. it's not the same forest at all. the third- or fourth-growth post-logging ponderosa overstory will probably never come back, as climate change has made those hills too warm to comfortably accomodate a thick ponderosa forest. but - it's full of elder, gambol oak, locust, scrub oak, juniper, pinon and wildlife of so many kinds - it's green and growing, and more biodiverse than it was when it burned.
it takes a long time, and it hurts to watch. in the burn scar of the enormous 2013 Thompson Ridge fire in the Jemez Mountains here in NM, the aspen forest is simply gone; everything *but* aspens is returning. again with the too-warm now. but the *forest* as an entity is healing really well, strong and healthy and biodiverse and full of wildlife.
it took every one of those ten years for it to feel like that. i feel for your forests.