这里的山是美丽的,滚动,绿色局域网dscape of grasses and shrubs under a late-summer sky. But it is starkly different from what was here before: vast forests of ponderosa pine. The repeated blazes that devastated the trees were caused by simple things: an improperly extinguished campfire in 1996, a tree falling on a power line in 2011, reports The New York Times
What happened after the fire, however — or, more accurately, what has not happened — was a departure from the normal course of events.
“We are in the middle of this 30,000-acre, near-treeless hole,” said Craig D. Allen, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. If historical patterns had held, the remaining pines would by now be preparing seeds to drop and start the cycle of regrowth.
But the mother pines are nowhere in sight. Nature’s script has been disrupted by a series of unusually intense, unusually large fires — a product of many factors that include government firefighting policies, climate change and bad luck.
The result is bad news for forests here, in the West and around the world. A planet with fewer trees is less able to fight climate change, because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis. “The future in a lot of places,” Dr. Allen said, “is looking shrubbier.”
The fire season of 2015 in the American West is shaping up as one of the worst in the nation’s history, with more than eight million acres burned nationwide — more thanfive million acres in Alaskaalone. Fierce wildfires this monthhave destroyed hundreds of homes in California.
TheForest Servicestruggles under an increasingly costly mission: According toa reportreleased last month, firefighting takes up more than 50 percent of its annual budget, up from 16 percent a decade ago. In 10 years, it could consume three quarters of its budget. Climate change has lengthened fire seasons, which are, on average, 78 days longer than they were in 1970, and the six worst fire seasons since 1960 have come since 2000.
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