Historic burns of 100,000 acres can no longer be allowed in the Canoe Area

Evidence

One necessary compromise with the natural regime would be burn size. Burning units could still vary greatly in size as they did in nature, but the occasional very large burns of 100,000 acres or more that occurred in the past could not be tolerated because the Canoe Area is now only a miniature of the primeval wilderness. An upper limit on burn size must be arbitrarily set. Several years’ quota might still occasionally be burned in a single fire, if this seemed ecologically desirable, safe, and within tolerable size limits. We do not fully understand the effects of burn size, but it probably is a factor in wildlife habitat, seed sources, and other matters. — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the environmental-justice thread: the ‘wilderness’ boundary that makes burn size unmanageable is itself a legal/institutional artifact of the BWCA Wilderness Act. — connects to: Man-controlled burning can still yield a natural ecosystem — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 477; Letting all lightning fires run is unsafe in flat Canoe Area terrain — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 455; Restoring the natural regime means burning roughly 4,200 Canoe Area acres yearly — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 466 (+1 more)

Related

• Restoring the natural regime means burning roughly 4,200 Canoe Area acres yearly (similarity 0.90)
• The Canoe Area burned and regenerated on about a 100-year rotation. (similarity 0.87)
• Letting all lightning fires run is unsafe in flat Canoe Area terrain (similarity 0.87)
• Fire is an intrinsic ecosystem component, not an unnatural disturbance, in the Canoe Area. (similarity 0.86)
• Man-controlled burning can still yield a natural ecosystem (similarity 0.86)
• The BWCA still has a roughly 60-year window before fire exclusion makes restoration impossible. (similarity 0.83)
• No large BWCA burns since 1936 already eliminated early postfire communities. (similarity 0.82)
• The entire BWCA ecosystem was fire-dependent (similarity 0.81)
• BWCA management excluded fire despite its dominant ecological role (similarity 0.80)
• Natural fire rotation quantifies fire’s role and grounds fire-management targets. (similarity 0.80)
• Natural fire rotation in the BWCA was about 100 years (similarity 0.79)
• Virtually every BWCA virgin forest stand burned since 1595. (similarity 0.78)
• The landscape mosaic remains fire-created even after sixty years of suppression. (similarity 0.78)