Beside the Stream

Around here, grasslands and national forestlands are managed with fire.

For grasslands, spring fire kills weed seed, transforms last year’s thatch into available nutrients, and kills small trees.  It’s an integral part of the ecosystem.

This is George Catlin’s painting called “Prairie Fire”, from 1871, back when the Indians fired the prairie regularly.  Fire wasn’t used for forest management for nearly a century, and now it’s commonplace.  Have fields always been burned in the West? 

I never saw a prescribed burn growing up in Vermont, but I learned that the state agencies started using fire for forest management in New England in the late 1990s.  Now they’re burning there too.

And here, plumes of smoke are a regular occurrence; first the fields, and later the forest underbrush.

They say that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but when it comes to grassland, it doesn’t take much fire

to make a heck of a lot of smoke.