Prescribed Burning

The Forest Service is conducting prescribed burning in the mountains just southeast of my house. It’s a bit jarring to stand on my back deck and see huge arms of smoke reaching into the sky from the forests so near me. Such burns are a forest management tool intended to:

• Reduce hazardous fuels, protecting human communities from extreme fires.
• Minimize the spread of pest insects and disease.
• Remove unwanted species that threaten species native to an ecosystem.
• Provide forage for game.
• Improve habitat for threatened and endangered species.
• Recycle nutrients back to the soil.
• Promote the growth of trees, wildflowers, and other plants.

All good stuff, to be sure, but I still watch warily, thinking about some of my friends and how their “prescribed burns” ended up torching fences, adjacent fields, and a random shed now and then.

Smoke in the Mountains

—Mitchell Hegman