Fire!

This evening Daniel and I attended Dr. Stephen Pyne's lecture entitled "History with Fire in its Eye," at Monsanto Auditorium on the Mizzou Campus. His powerpoint consisted mainly of pictures and paintings of fire, taken from various history books. He took us on a "planetary flyby" through fire history.

He opened by showing maps of the US, the first was historical large wildfire patterns showing most fires occurred in the eastern US with sparse wildfire in the west, contrasted by a map of current wildfire trends that showed most large wildfires occur in the western US. Historically, large fires burned private lands, now they mostly occur on public lands. Not surprising, these fires aren't environmentally caused, but caused by changing human habitation.

Much of Pyne's philosophy on fire management stems from human beings' ecological significance as wielders of fire. He said some animals shred and decompose detritus, others graze, and humans use fire. This is something I hadn't really spent much time thinking about. We're the only animal to be able to make fire, and that IS our ecological significance. Prior to considering this, I had mostly considered our mucking of the planet our only ecological significance.

The overarching message of his lecture seemed to be how we must overcome our natural and instilled fear of fire and stop suppressing fires. People need to start discussing the role of fire as a sower, pruner and harvester of trees - fires ecological/biological role. He also noted that fire management policy has been controlled by the political arena - when it was the government's or Army's responsibility to fight the fires. Now it's back with the US Forest Service to fight fires, but it's still politically involved because the USFS is a governmentally funded agency.

This whole discussion of how to control wildfires must be done at a state level due to the high variation in landscapes across the US - fires in hot, arid southern California are different from those in Florida as are those in the Rockies. So then, should it be the state or federal government that is responsible for adopting wildfire management policy?

These were a few of the points Dr. Pyne hit in his lecture. In fisheries and wildlife courses at Mizzou, we never discussed fire much except in Ecology as it is used to burn prairies to manage grasses. I think that fire plays a much larger role in conservation and thus should be taught not just in forestry classes. Another thing to think about it, how does the fire retardant used to fight wildfires impact wildlife, soil biota, and even water quality? Surely it has some impact...

After the lecture we went for late dinner at India's House on Broadway at Hitt St. I had Chicken Korma and Dan had Chicken Vindaloo. Exquisite... It was almost as if I had warped to India or maybe Thailand. I can't wait to try the lunch buffet so that I may sample many more dishes.

On the drive home, we noticed the moon shining through the crisp, clear sky. We set up the scope and spied on the man in the moon for awhile. The moon is a cool place, it seems.

Here is what we saw:

In this photo, you can see Tycho and Copernicus craters. Tycho crater is 93 km in diameter and Copernicus crater is ~85 km. Pretty neat, ya?