by Janet A. Ginsburg

“Temperatures hit 108 degrees as 2,500 firefighters attacked flames devouring greasewood, Joshua trees, piñon pines and brush in hills and canyons of the high desert about 100 miles

east of Los Angeles.”   

– AP report 7/13/06

The fire grew from 30 acres to 37,000 in a couple of days. That’s an area the size of Boston, with a few sacrificial suburbs thrown in for kindling. To call such a fire voracious doesn’t even begin to describe it. Scorched earth? The scar left on the landscape will take centuries to conceal. Joshua trees, those improbably spiky, serenely green yuccas that give this patch of orange rocky desert not far from Palm Springs its sci-fi book-cover look, grow about a half-inch per year, maybe. This is a place of slow, palpable time, where the occasional earthquake topples boulders like pebbles, but mostly nothing much happens. The sun comes up. The sun goes down.

Make that “nothing much seems to happen.” Sit still for a while and you begin to notice signs of life in a somewhat faster lane: lizards, snakes, birds, rodents, insects, disturbingly well-armed scorpions. There is no shortage of drama. A little bit of rain, the desert blooms and everybody imaginable comes to the party. Frogs splash in Brigadoon puddles. Coyotes grin at the good times.

The Sawtooth Complex fire, as it is now officially called, has merged with another blaze, the Millard fire, with the combined potential to become a 100,000-acre mega-inferno. Up in northern California, another 24,000 acres are burning. And in Montana, smoke blackens the skies of still another 140,000 acres. Look at a map of global wildfires and you'll see flames everywhere. It is a feverish planet.

Decades of wildfire suppression in the nation's forests, especially near the cul-de-sac’ed suburban frontier, have created dangerous build-ups of ready-to-burn grasses, pine needles and forest undergrowth. That's just the tindery frosting on an extremely combustible cake, say scientists. The bigger threat comes from a changing climate: Spring now comes earlier. Temperatures are running hotter. Snow packs are melting faster. And streams are simply giving up in exhausted evaporation. Forests and grasslands are left parched and vulnerable to lightning strikes, flicked cigarettes, smoldering campfires, whatever. Look at a forest or a prairie cross-eyed these days and it’ll burst into flames.

A warming climate also extends the range of bark beetles, whose taste and talent for killing pine trees literally outstrips that of even the most rapacious clear-cut loggers. The only way to kill a bark beetle is to freeze it to death and if it’s not cold enough for long enough that’s not happening. Stands of dead trees, of course, are that much more susceptible to burning.

A warming climate changes weather patterns. Droughts last longer. Deserts grow faster. Last December, dozens of grass fires consumed tens of thousands of achingly dry acres in Texas and Oklahoma. Footage of ground-hugging flames crackling and creeping across the nighttime horizon became a nightly news regular. Just a few inches high, the fire stretched in a thin orange line for miles, leaving a blackened beleaguered landscape in its wake.

“The 53,000-acre wildfire, which had destroyed more than 150 homes and buildings in

– AP report, 7/14/06

Although nobody newsworthy, meaning nobody human, has died yet,* plenty have died. Even in the unlikely event the region’s long-term drought should end, those 95 square miles (so far) of smoldering remains won’t be bounding back to health any time soon. From the tiniest of soil bacteria and fungal mycelium, to the plants that depend on them, and the insects and animals that depend on them, it is a new world order out there. A stable comfy complexity formed over millennia has been ripped to shreds, reduced to ash, turned into a great big natural do-over. There is no telling what will come back, only that the higher up the food chain, the longer it will take. Some species may never return.

*******

A couple of years ago, a small band of wild horses came within a ridge or two of extinction when a wildfire tore through a mountain range on the Wyoming / Montana border. The Pryor Mountain mustangs, descendants of horses brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadors four centuries ago, have managed to thrive in the remoteness of a beautiful and harsh wilderness. A shift in the wind is all that saved them from oblivion.

Herd numbers have been kept low – fewer than 200 horses -- through periodic culls and birth control. The Bureau of Land Management would like to see the number even lower: about 100 animals. A wildfire could take it to zero in an afternoon.

Even if such a small herd were to survive, it would face a bleak future. There would be little left for the horses to eat or drink (by late summer, they rely on patches of snow preserved in the shadows of rocks from the previous winter). Disease would take a toll. Predators would feast. The very old and the very young wouldn’t stand a chance. And with most of the prime breeding-age mares on birth control, there would be no next generation. (Read filmmaker Ginger Kathren's e-newsletter about The Cloud Foundation's lawsuit against the BLM.)

Is this a sort of “déjà vu all over again”? Could a cascade of climate-related catastrophes have set dozens of North American species, including horses, on an inevitable path toward extinction 10,000 to 12,000 years ago? Glaciers were melting, weather patterns changing, and habitats shifting. An old order was giving way to a new one. Was it all just too much too fast?

(see The Mystery of the Ancient Horses).

* 7/16/06: Within a few hours of posting this blog, the body of Gerald Guthrie was discovered in a charred

area less than a mile from his home in Pioneertown. Other fire losses reported in the news: 45 houses,

118 other buildings, 89 vehicles, two RV's, and a just-completed manuscript for a book on the 1960s

British band, The Zombies.