Dante’s Peril

In Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ the protagonist travels through Hell following the poet Virgil on a journey that shows him experiencing the degradations of life, the deep loss of love, the shadow side to what is possible. His journey is an initiation, a trial by fire, coming to terms with love, God and empire, in which he transforms through his revelations that it is his love of a transcendent beauty, the “adoration of the stars” and the divine the place of the feminine that is what gives true happiness and well-being.

Noticeably we can contrast Dante’s journey with our own society’s journey, where language is considered a form, a tool of propaganda and amusement while our political culture resembles the degradations of Dante’s peril which revolves around money changing philistines’, vulgar journalistic punditry, kitsch materialism and purposeful distraction, as observed in Dante’s antiquary tales.

‘To this Dante would perhaps reply that if we ignore these standards at the peril of our own individual and collective salvation, and suggests that we are obligated to hope for more. As the Poet counsels the weary pilgrim in Purgatorio, "no soul is so lost that eternal love cannot return so long as hope shows something green."’ Dante Alighieri – the Divine Comedy

The Inferno: Firestorm

Forest fires play a significant role in forest health and revitalization. It is anticipated that forest fires will 50% increase in fire occurrence and double in the area burned due to climate change in parts of the circumboreal forest by the end of this century. Fire management agencies' ability to cope with these increases in fire activity is limited with a narrow margin between success and failure that will be much greater than the corresponding increase in fire weather severity. There may be only a decade or two before increased fire activity means fire management which will increase areas burned that agencies cannot maintain not even now under their current levels of effectiveness.

            According to the Canadian Forest Service an average of 5-15 million hectares burn annually in the boreal forest mostly in Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Climate change makes these areas highly vulnerable because of the altered climate modeled by General Circulation Models (GCM’s), which indicate a profound impact on fire activity in the circumboreal forest.

            Fire activity is influenced by four factors, weather/climate (Temperature and Precipitation), vegetation (fuels), ignition (natural and humans). Weather is extremely important because of the moisture levels that need to stay moderate to high is avoid fire over a very wide expanse that are usually caused by lightening ignitions and the fire growth is conditioned upon wind action.

            There are several variables that influence forest fires and the GCM’s suggest the many areas are going to experience exceptional increases in potential fire risks. It is estimated that burned in Canada will increase by 74%-118% by the end of this century. The Canadian Forest Service suggests that the significant increase that burn will have serious implications on forest, forestry activities, and community protection and carbon budgets. The direct burn of forest has contributes 20% to the CO2 emissions from transportation.  The Canadian Forest Service report suggests that “we may be reaching a tipping point where we will see dramatic and unexpected changes...”

South of San Francisco in the Santa Cruz Mountains Communities were plagued by fires. I recently caught up with thecommunity group members, Felton FLOW, of Felton, CA, which was a staging area for the fire fighters. Environmental analyst, Betsy Herbert who works for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District gave me an update on the aftermath and what residents can do, “The Martin fire, as it is called, did not enter the Felton Watershed. It stayed on the other side of the ridge, and burned approximately 500 acres, impacting the City of Santa Cruz in the Laguna Creek Watershed to some extent. The fire burned almost exclusively in the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve, consisting of the pine/chaparral and sandhills plant communities, which depend on fire to reproduce.

The pine/chaparral plant community differs in many respects from the mixed redwood forest that covers most of the Felton watershed. Pine/chaparral is very fire prone. Pine trees are quite flammable, and they thrive in hot, dry areas. On the otherhand, mature redwoods are very fire resistant, and they like to grow near creeks. Their fire resistance is due to several factors: 

1. Redwoods have thick, spongy bark; 

2. Mature redwoods provide a nearly closed canopy that shades and cools the forest 

3. The canopy of mature redwoods collects moisture from summer fog. The fog condenses and falls to the forest floor,

keeping it relatively moist. 

4. The soil in a redwood forest is deep and loamy, and is very good at retaining moisture.

“We were very lucky because as the fire was raging, the fog rolled in off the ocean, and undoubtedly the fog-soaked redwoods slowed the fire. That said, redwoods will burn if a fire gets hot enough, though they will usually recover. No doubt,the Martin fire was largely contained and extinguished by the immense firefighting effort. “I live within a half mile of the fire,and I had to evacuate. Huge old redwoods surround my house, and many have fire scars showing that they have survived fires in the past. While redwoods will usually survive even a big fire, houses in a redwood forest may not. There are many things that homeowners can do to make their homes more fire-safe, such as providing good access for fire fighters,clearing vegetation near the structure, and using fire-resistant building and roofing materials.” “The San Lorenzo Valley Water District owns approximately 2,000 acres of forest land, now that we have acquired the 252 acres in the Felton watershed. We are currently updating our watershed management plan to address fire issues, among other things.” Fire prevention, mitigation and adaptation was echoed at the 5th Annual California Climate Change Research Conference by Max Morris Bio-geographer who studies ecosystems spatial patterns and the roles of forest fires, at the UCB Lawrence Livermore Research Lab, he indicated in his presentation that forest carbon sequestering and the permanence in carbon sequestering depends on fluxes vs. stocks and a variety of drivers that effects outcomes of fire; including the type of fire, the habitat, air temperature, precipitation and soil moisture content and how fire flows over the landscape and how often. This depends how an ecosystem bounces back after a fire. Carbon releases can last up to 20 years or longer before the carbon sink starts to occur in the stand replacement and will sequester more carbon in 70 - 200 years. They are now examining how to quantify and track carbon in fire; where they consider the forest overstock, fuel treatment (prescribed burns), how fires spread, its behavior, emissions and the intervals of fires. They are also exploring how often fires occur through these models that demonstrate more forest fires as emissions rise caused by temperature, precipitation (lack of). Mitigation techniques being considered are fire treatments (prescribed burns) to manage fires now and in the future. By establishing a model for mitigation baseline that is suitable to surface burn they will try to control and manage fires; and how likely fire is to occur in specific areas based on received signals of precipitation and temperature; in the long-term fire mitigation that willgive data on actual carbon release. They discovered that what was missing from their analysis was a black carbon sink investigation, as it absorbs CO2 in the landscape from the burn. Fire is on a collision with mitigation and adaptation that is one of the core agents of climate change and also the regenerative aspect of forest health