A Bit About the Pyros: The National Park Service

Sorry for the interruption for the public service announcement – but I thought you should be informed that the National Park Service (NPS) are a bunch of pyromaniacs!  Almost every park that we have accessed has had some of what the NPS calls prescriptive burns.  Their goal is to manage the forest so that any fuel for a fire is burned prior to any non-manmade fire starting and going out of control.   Wildfires are a major concern in the West.  However, I am a dog, and even I know that the forest has been managing itself for millions of years.  So, what gall it takes for the NPS to believe that they will do a better job than nature?!

From what we saw – everywhere that prescriptive burns had occurred one of two things happened.  First, the fuel that was removed was quickly replaced by more fuel from all the dead limbs and trees the NPS had created with their burns.  Or second, the NPS had lost control of their prescriptive burns and caused a wildfire that burned far more than they intended and they caused the very thing that they were trying to prevent.  But, as a consolation – the NPS did put up some nice signs trying to explain what can happen with prescriptive burns…and oh yeah sometimes we lose control.  Not an apology in site though.

Now, in Sequoia National Park, they claimed that fire was a natural part of the needs of the giant sequoias.  Excuse me, but I must return back to my argument before that the forest has been managing itself for millions of years.  These trees are thousands of years old.  They seem to have been doing awfully well before the NPS came along and started creating fires for them.

The results are ugly.  Almost every where we have hiked or driven there is some portion of the forest that is burned out.  It leaves an ugly site:  fallen, burned and blackened trees.  And where there have been active prescriptive burns, like this one in Sequoia National Park

it creates an unbelievable amount of air pollution.  We could not only smell but often would cough going through areas of this smoke.  The smog created by these fires was worse than we saw hanging over Los Angeles.  That’s pretty bad – Dave said that LA’s smog was worse than he had seen in Mexico City and that is some of the worst in the world.

So, doing a cost benefit analysis on the work that the NPS is doing it seems like the costs of doing these prescriptive burns far outweigh the benefits.  But then again that is just the opinion of one dog….

Big wet kisses, Mookie, “The Bloggin’ Dog”