Our perfect summer days, such as I wrote about two weeks ago, have come to an end. Now our skies are white with smoke. Visibility is diminished to my closest trees, and Humpy Mountain is obscured behind a veil of smoke. 

Humpy Mountain yesterday afternoon

Humpy Mountain in the idyllic days of summer

    But smoke is not as bad as fire. Although we suffer the lung-stifling effects of the fires in other places, the Applegate itself is not on fire. At least, not yet.

    It would help if we would roll back climate change. Get busy, damn it, all you politicians and lawmakers and industry CEOs who could be making a difference! 

    According to some thinking we should be thinning the forests of their century of fuel build-up. But there are problems there. One is that BLM, at least around here, seems to be taking advantage of "thinning for fire" to do some pretty damaging logging, taking large trees that are both carbon storers and fire resistors. Another problem is that logged-over land, often the result of "thinned" forests, is seemingly more susceptible to fire than our old-growth and large-tree forests. A third problem is that even if forests thinned of small trees (leaving big trees) would create slower and cooler fires, who's to say that those areas would be the ones to get the fire, so was that a good use of money? I'm no expert on fire or on forests, but I do see that if an agency says "for fire protection," the public falls right into line with whatever the proposal is and that not all such proposals are either especially for fire protection or actually protective against fire or, even, good for the forest.

    A couple of years ago the Devil Fire burned not too far my house. It was a ground fire, burning low and slow, doing the good work of forest health that fire does. So why didn't the Forest Service let it burn? If this is a fire-dependent ecology and if a century of fire suppression has put us in this quandary, then why put out fires that pose no danger? 

    Experts speaking in the documentary film Elemental (see if if you can) and elsewhere are advocating defensible space around structures as the only sensible way to approach fire preparedness. Fire prevention, of course, is preposterous, and fire suppression has been disastrous, but protecting homes and other structures from fire seems sensible. I love my trees, but I am ready to do what I have to do to defend my house from the fire that is as likely to be here as in Lahaina or in Paradise, California. I can only hope that the fire that is sure to come will hold off till I get that work done.