water. Fires foster
increasing water run off. The excess vegetation competes with the more
hardy plants. Fires help clear this unwanted vegetation.
Consider the following statistics that have been filed for the last
eighty years. Each year, more than a million and half acres of American
land is burned. This average naturally fluctuates depending on complexity
of climatic conditions and amount of precipitation. In the year 2000,
122,827 fires of varying magnitudes burned throughout the USA. Whether out
of necessity or forethought, a little less than one billion dollars was
spent on suppressing these fires. Sixty percent of the acres burned were on
rangelands. This information was provided by the Bureau of Land Management
which oversees the suppression of these fires. (Fire.BLM.gov, 2003)
It is only after significant research and empirical observations of the
results of fires that humans have begun to realize the benefits of forest
fires. In fact, the horror stories of the loss of lives of humans are
really not the fault of fires any more than people who have encroached on
forested land. Some disasters are caused by carelessness and it lends
credibility to the exhortations of characters like Smokey the Bear, who
opined: "Only you can prevent Forest Fires," fires are beneficial.
Historically, Native American tribes have set fires for several reasons. In
1833, Warren Angus Ferris, a trapper who was employed by the American Fur
company and who cataloged his travels, wrote: "The Flathead Indians with
us announced our arrival in this country by firing the prairies. The flames
ran over the neighboring hills with great violence, sweeping all before
them, above the surface of the ground except in the rocks, and filling the
sky with clouds of smoke." (Ferris, Hafen and Phillips, 1983) Even the
...