Restoring Forests With Fire - A Permaculture Approach
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- čas přidán 9. 07. 2022
- A history of fire suppression and the impacts of climate change has led to a severely increased risk of catastrophic wildfire. The Fire Ecology Restoration Project aims to shift the paradigm of fire management to include proactive strategies like ecological thinning and the creation of biochar.
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I love this!! It's so interesting to see all the conscious and complex introspection that goes into these decisions to stewart the land! And -- I love hearing and seeing my eloquent nephew, Ryder!
Beautifully done the way you created the movie with the info coming from watching and listening to those doing the resoration. thank you.
Thank you. This movie was a labor of love
wonderful
That was an exceptional presentation. Sometimes looking back to see what people knew and what they did and the results is a giant step forward. Unfortunately when Europeans came to this land they did not care what the First Nations people did or knew they automatically suppressed those things and the result was a great loss for all of us. Environmentalism letting the forests in grasslands grow free is not proper management. It is obvious the problems that that is creating.
If you are trying to encourage Sylvan grassland can you save firewood sized material? In order to create biochar how large does the material in the bottom of the fire container need to be? Can you separate out firewood size material and still be successful making biochar? Thank you.
Hey Dave, you definitely can save larger diameter material for firewood. In the method of biochar burning we were using (ring of fire kiln) we were only processing material up to ~4" diameter. A percentage of the bigger material can then be put on contour for water retention and decomposition, or can be used for firewood or milling.
@20:25 Hazel Ward: Once a flow starts happening, I think we create a kind of a fractal pattern of tending to that place. It takes a culture."
Fire is only appropriate if it's in the use of creating biochar.
I'd add that installing swales wherever possible will fireproof the land. Build the humus.
Truly old untouched forests had water holding humus more than a meter thick, with the ability to hold a billion liters of water per hectare. Forests with thick humus and swales on contour do not burn.
Did you even watch the video?
@@Nala15-Artist Yes. I'm agreeing with the creation of biochar. I'm not agreeing with prescribed burning.
This subject is a bit complicated and I think the video does a good job explaining why making the charcol is better than composting the brush and trees you cut down. Thanks for teaching me.
Glad it was helpful! If we all manage our forests better we can make a difference
@14:38 : how-to create biochar with portable kilns... essentially making the equivalent of fossil fuel and putting it back in the ground!
Well said! The process can also be described as moving carbon from the active cycle (biosphere/atmosphere) into the inactive cycle (lithosphere)!
You need to make the biochar kilns available with a link please.
Is there an important ratio twixt the outer and inner walls of the kiln?
Also, are there any papers I could read to compare CO2 creation by weight creating charcoal and biological consumption?
I can't give you a precise answer to that. Sufficient for a good draft but not so large that too much oxygen reaching the burn. ~2 - 2.5" seems to work well on this Ring of Fire kiln and other similar models.
Look into DEW as a possibility.
It is a resource that gets overlooked, that's for sure
i was actually curious about the practice of controlled burns, especially how indigenous handled that practice. i guess that's not something you can do with laws and private property, very unfortunate
You can get permits for controlled burns in many places in the west
Theres too much jargon in the video. I want to know what’s happening. What are the methods, what plants are invasive, how much thinning is happening, how did the land manage itself before indigenous tribes, how crowded is too crowded? A lot of these questions were answered but many arnt. I feel like this video could be 10 times shorter and keep the same message. I don’t care about how these people feel about the forest I want answers
Thanks for your comment and questions. Many are too complex to cover in a documentary because the answers differ by site, region, and habitat type. I think you're looking for another type of documentary. You might find more answers by checking with your local conservation district or NRCS office in their landowner assistance programs or through their Forest Stewardship Training programs. Because it's getting hotter and drier, trees are competing with each other and the understory for food and water, making them weaker and more susceptible to drying out, starving, insects, or disease. To reduce the chances of fire ignition and spread, you need to break up the continuity, vertically and horizontally, of the fuel (anything that will burn ) so you want to thin enough that fire doesn't easily burn from one piece of fuel to the next. Thinning depends on habitat and land owner objectives. A tight spacing would be trees, of mixed diameters greater than 8", 15' apart, which would typically leave the tree branches touching. The more common spacing for wildfire resilience is 25-30' which opens the stand up quite a bit more and usually allows for gaps in the canopy (the whole of the tree tops together). Thinning is done with saws (hand and chain) and the small trees and branches are dragged to a pile or thrown in the active kiln. Invasive plants vary by region and habitat. The issue is less about invasive plants and more about the number and density of plants, even native plants. Before indigenous people, forests renewed themselves through natural events - what we sometimes call disasters - like wildfire, hurricanes, disease, and insects. These are natural forms of thinning and renewal. But with people and buildings in the mix, we don't find those acceptable because of our value system (we want to protect people, property, economic value and what we see in front of us).
Kind of a weird logic to claim native americans forest burns were good, but also advocating a burn method that is not the way native americans did it.
Kind of weird logic to think we can use the same methods our ancestors did when we have neglected the land for so long...
Hi Charles, thanks for sharing your thoughts! When forests are not managed, they become too overburdened with flammable material to perform a controlled burn. First, restoration efforts like those described in the video must be undertaken, then controlled burns can safely be used again!
The horrible marketing using in the video of other wise generally good ideas of applying permaculture approaches to forestry and landscape management is disappointing. When you blame everything on "the colonizers" and "genocide" and elevate "the indigenous" on a pedestal over any people who value and want to be and/or are already stewards and caretakers is loosing the message in the forest of woke.
And the hubris of replacing one mismanagement of the landscape -- monoculture forests and stopping all wildfires -- with "THE solution" -- taking the clearings/cuttings and turning all that into biochar because of evil 'carbon' instead of leaving the debris and nutrients contained within in a manner usable by the forest landscape -- will very likely result in another mismanagement our future generations will have to try to repair.
@@NPzed this biochar was spread on the forest floor, which increases nutrient availability in the soil and improves the health of the forest
The perspectives of the people in the video are just that - their perspectives and opinions. It's OK if you don't share them. Every presentation and paper I've seen from the Forest Service and other land management agencies specifically list "past management activities" as a key reason for the current conditions of the the forests - departed from the historical range of variability.
@@floglo3687 why not build a mechanical, fire, breathing dragon or something
This is not appropriate AT ALL. Stop burning valuable carbon deposits and start using them appropriately
Knee jerk environmentalism can be very destructive. Ignoring the results of what you are demanding is not real environmentalism. The First Nations people took care of the forests and the grasslands for Generations, very successfully. On the other hand today no management let the forest and grasslands be free is the mantra. The result is the accumulation of brush in the forests and grasslands. Leaving huge numbers of beetle dying and killed trees, spreading beetles throughout the forest. The results are Giant uncontrollable Forest burn-offs. Having the land completely covered by pine trees and Douglas fir trees is like having weeds in your garden they choke out a whole ecology based on deciduous trees and the plants and animals that live there. All that carbon that is sequestered in those trees rather than being used to build things eventually escapes into the atmosphere because of poor judgment. Properly managed grasslands will also sequester carbon in the Great Plains there was 3 ft of sod under the grass. That sequestered carbon and managed the rainfall less violent flooding and more moisture in the ground. That land was actually managed properly. Now we have barely enough vegetation to protect those lands from erosion by water and wind.
These people are actually living on the land observing what is happening to the land and looking at past sustainable practices that worked in a complicated interwoven ecology.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling I won't listen, I won't listen, I won't listen is foolish.
What is the appropriate use of the valuable carbon deposits in brush? And is that appropriate use of, better than the forest fire that may be prevented and the biochar that is definitely beneficial to the forest?
If you listen closely to the film you will learn that a high percentage of the carbon is transformed into a stable form, graphing, that remains in the soil for centuries.