[Sca-cooks] forest fires, Iceland and the Middle Ages

[Mark S. Harris]

> El Hermoso Dormido, who feels better now :-)
>
> P.S. In regards to the trees - what would YOU do about the fire danger?  Make
> it illegal for lightning to strike in heavily wooded areas? :-)
> (The proposed solution may very well be highly questionable and subject to
> gross abuses by logging corporations, but I've not SEEN questions, only "Bush
> is stupid and hates trees" comments...and I don't just mean in these posts
> here...)


The big problem is that it is mankind that has created these monstrous

forest fires. For sixty? eighty? years we have taken great pains to
stomp out any forest fire what-so-ever, where-ever. The end result is
that the underbrush and deadfall have built up in our forests. This
means that when a fire does occur it burns hotter and longer than it
would have under normal conditions. Rather than being a brief fire
burning through the underbrush, leaving most of the large trees alone,
these fires get hot enough to burn the trees as well. The extra heat
also steralizes the forest floor, killing the seeds that would have
sprouted to rebuild the forest floor or the forest.

The policy of stopping all forest fires has gradually been changing
in the last decade but it takes time for the problems that have been
allowed to build up over years to abate. It is likely that some
controlled burning, done during the moister parts of the year when
the wind conditions are favorable will need to be done. In the short
run, there are risks and it looks bad from a PR standpoint but in
the long run this will result in better forest management.

If we allow the forests to be over harvested, which can often happen

when greed takes over for good forest management, afterall the lumber
companies don't own the forest they have no vested interest in
protecting the forest, we could find ourselves repeating the errors
of our ancestors.

During the Middle Ages large segments of Europe and the British Isles

were cleared of their forests. In Iceland it was worse because the
area was so much more confined. The clearing of the Icelandic forests
had a big impact upon even the food the Icelanders had to eat. You can
see it in the records. Pork was common early on. As the forests disappeared,
so did the pigs. You can read some of this in the Florilegium fd-Iceland-msg
and Iceland-msg files. Easter Island and Haiti are also extreme examples
of this. Today Haiti is almost treeless. When the Europeans arrived it
was heavily forested.


Bush may or may not know what he is doing. I note however, that he
almost always sides with moneyed interests. I just hope we won't be
making parallels between him and Herbert Hoover in ten years.
--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****