* In New Mexico, 4,000 trees will help reforest urban and rural areas
burned in Los Alamos during the 2000 fires.
"At our current [prescribed burning] pace, I feel we're treating about one-tenth the acres that were
burned in 1900 through the natural process," says Dave Bunnell, who coordinates the Forest Service's prescribed-fire program from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
So far, workers in these parks have
burned about 25,000 acres.
The upshot: By the mid-1970s, courtesy of Smokey Bear and the publicists who helped keep the money rolling in from Congress to finance impressive new firefighting technologies, the number of forest fires was cut in half and the number of acres
burned reduced to one-eighth of the wartime average.
With their tops
burned, new trees and plants sprout with vigor from roots that survive below ground, Varley says.
Before the days of chemical pesticides, tobacco farmers
burned their crop beds every year to kill weeds and insects; a fire in a field abutting the forest could easily spread.
Conflagrations erupted all across the rain-starved West last summer, but Yellowstone's flames
burned brightest in the media, in part because of the monumental war waged against the uncontrollable infernos.
According to Levine, microbes living in the
burned soil produce these two gases.
Bonnicksen uses that statement to prove" that the acreage
burned could have been substantially reduced by prescribed burning in the years before 1988.
Unless it is periodically
burned, such a shrubby forest will develop into acres of natural kindling, awaiting only the first errant spark, lit match or lightning bolt to blaze out of control.
At several places along the route, I parked and stepped out into some heavily
burned areas.
And when smoke churns around inside a stove, it's more likely to get
burned.
Brown had stated earlier, "To manage for a natural role of fire, planned ignitions, in my view, are necessary to deal with fuels and topography that have high potential for fire to escape established boundaries." Thus, if only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars used to fight the Yellowstone wildfires had been spent on scientific management that utilized prescribed burning, it is likely that the wildfires would not have
burned 1.4 million acres, especially if vigorous suppression efforts had been undertaken by the Park Service when each of the conflagrations began.
It can also soothe
burned skin, easing some of the pain.
Body parts generally
burned in a tandoor injury are the head and upper extremities.