Getting Rid of Dead Wood

There is something satisfying about burning brush piles.  Most of them on our place have been there for about a year.  That's about how long it takes for them to dry down to the point they will burn.  We also have to wait until the weather is "right" so the chances of a stray spark catching the woods or the pasture on fire are reduced to near zero.

With the recent rains we have had, the conditions are good.  Now, it is just a matter of catching a day with no wind, or only a slight breeze from the appropriate direction.  The winter grasses are short and the summer grasses have been grazed down so there is little to no excess fuel to worry about.

Why is it satisfying?  I suppose it is because it leaves the landscape cleaner, more open.  It gets rid of an eyesore -- a nuisance pile of decaying debris.  It's a little like spring cleaning except in the fall.

Some of the wood in the brush piles is from my clearing or, trimming trees and brush, but much of it is dead fallen branches from diseased trees that have died over the previous year.  This is a good time of year to drag it out of the woods and pile it for burning as well.  I have a long way to go to get our place in the kind of shape I want it, but each day I have the chance, I like to get out and work at it.  This is the best time of year because it is cool enough to put in a day of labor in the woods.  During the summer it is like an oven with high temperatures and high humidity.  During the spring it rains almost constantly and the humidity is so high you need scuba equipment in order to breathe.

Ideally, I would set a match to it and let the fire clear all the deadfall out of the woods.  That's the way it would naturally be kept in control.  That's how the natives and early Anglo settlers handled it.  They would clear the forest with fire.  It was efficient, it was fast and it left the basic nutrients on the soil to be absorbed by the grasses and other forbs that quickly followed in natural succession.  Today's attitude of leaving the forest detritus to decay in place has led to a dangerous situation in areas where dense forests cover the land.  It has caused an extreme accumulation of fuel to be available for any stray spark to create a conflagration that is unstoppable.  It is a primary reason for the devastating fires which so recently have ravaged large swaths of California.  Now they will have to deal with the erosion that will follow because of the loss of cover on the land.

We need to recognize that fire is a management tool.  Some environmentalist will argue that fire releases carbon into the atmosphere that should remain stored in that fallen debris.  They fail to recognize that the carbon is being released anyway through the decaying processes.  It just takes longer.

The carbon stored in that debris is part of the free carbon on our planet which is part of the carbon cycle.  It is constantly being released and then reincorporated into plants and animals.  It is part of how nature works.  Much of the carbon on this planet is in longer term storage in the form of coal and oil which is buried deep in the earth.  This is sequestered carbon -- carbon that has been set aside by natural processes.

The human-centric global warming alarmists need to distinguish between free carbon and sequestered carbon.  We certainly are releasing a lot of sequestered carbon through burning fossil fuels and need to explore ways to reduce that process, but it is the problem, not dead wood lying on the ground in a forest and certainly not agriculture which captures carbon continuously through the growth of crops which become food for a rapidly growing and hungry world population.

Sometimes getting rid of dead wood takes time.  In the case of my brush piles, it takes about a year for me to get rid of it.  In other cases it seems to take longer....

Sometimes I ramble....