The Fire Next Time

The Park Fire near Chico, California is still raging.  

So far, it has consumed over 385,000 acres, or 155,000 hectares, or 1,558 square kilometers, or 601 square miles of forest.  We live in a diverse world, so I am providing diverse measurements.

Over 5,500 fire fighters and massive amounts of equipment have been deployed, but the fire remains almost entirely uncontained.

Western forests and Eastern forests are quite different.

Eastern forests are less likely to have massive uncontrolled burns, a function of a wetter environment and different trees, but still a worry if your house is surrounded by a few hundred acres of trees, as mine is.

In Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comeback Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds, Jim Sterba describes a major feature of American life:

Where do most people in the United States live? The answer is... counterintuitive: They live in the woods. We are essentially forest dwellers.

....[I]f you draw a line around the largest forested region in the contiguous United States — the one that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Plains — you will have drawn a line around nearly two-thirds of America’s forests (excluding Alaska’s) and two-thirds of the U.S. population...

If you got in an airplane and flew from Albany to Boston during the day... you could look down and see almost nothing but trees from one downtown to the other. Fly the same route at night, and you see lots of lights — lights of people living in a huge forest.

In the eastern United States over two and a half centuries, European settlers cleared away more than 250 million acres of forest. By the 1950s, depending on the region, nearly half to more than two-thirds of the landscape was reforested, and in the last half century, states in the Northeast and Midwest have added more than 11 million acres of forest. 

In the most heavily populated region of the United States, the urban corridor that runs from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, with eight of the ten most densely populated states, forest cover varied from a low of 30.6 percent in Delaware to a high of 63.2 percent in Massachusetts. The corridor runs straight through Connecticut, the fourth most densely populated state, and one that is more than 60 percent forested. Three out of four residents live in or near land under enough trees to be called forestland if they weren’t there.

John C. Gordon, the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry in New Haven, made a similar observation in speeches. “If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in the summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest,” he said. “If you did the same thing in late fall after the leaves have fallen from those trees, what you’d see was stockbrokers.

The title of this post is a nod to the great James Baldwin who was born 100 years ago tomorrow.

Baldwin wrote “Letter from a Region in My Mind” which concluded with a line from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the Rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time!”

If you’ve got a moment tomorrow, reading a little free James Baldwin is a good way to expand the mind. It’s nothing to do with dogs or forests, but it’s still a worthy read. And did I mention it’s FREE?  At New Yorker magazine.