Tag Archives: trees
Gary Paul Nabhan: Rescuing Fruit Diversity
As mentioned in last week’s post, Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), of which I am founder, learned that at least seventy of the heirloom apples unique to New England that remain are so infrequently featured in nurseries, farmers markets and roadside stands that they can be considered threatened or endangered.
One additional source of heirloom fruits is often overlooked—the abandoned orchards lost amongst the underbrush on old homesteads, in national parks and historic farms. Perhaps as many as half of all the trees surviving in remnants of historic orchards and hedgerows are what we call “forgotten fruits”—heirloom apples that have been orphaned, losing their original names, as well as the horticultural and culinary traditions which went with them. And yet they have genetic, historic and perhaps gastronomic significance, just as much as Johnny Appleseed’s original plantings in the Ohio River Valley, or as the ancient apple forests of Kazakhstan first explored by Nikolay Vavilov and Aimak Dzangaliev, and recently heralded by Frank Browning and Michael Pollan.
This autumn, folks from the RAFT partnership are teaming up with the staff at Old Sturbridge Village outside 
Worcester, Mass. to explore what can tangibly be done with the forgotten fruits of such abandoned orchards and hedgerows. The oldest trees out on the landscape may be well over a century old, and the last of their kinds that have not perished. We are also sponsoring a similar forum in the Grand Traverse foodshed of northern Michigan, where cherries as well as apples also abound. We are hoping to form local workgroups in each of these foodsheds to inventory, protect and share “scion”-wood cuttings from these neglected reservoirs of food diversity.
But such rescues of old-timey varieties form only the first of many steps needed to bring the diverse fruits unique to American landscapes back into our kitchens, public festivals and community feasts. We also need to taste them when fresh, to document their keeping qualities, to bake with them, to press their juices and to ferment them. We need to see which are best used in blends to make hard ciders, and which are best savored as alone distinctive flavors.
If you love apples like we love apples, we need your help. Millions of people in this country need our guidance and encouragement to experience the simple fact that apple encompasses more than what Jonathan or Granny Smith can offer. We need to bring back a wider range of fruit diversity into American landscapes, and return their forgotten flavors to our tables.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.
About Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called “the father of the local food movement” by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. He is author or editor of twenty-four books, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Croation, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology. He works as most of the year as a research scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and the rest as co-founder-facilitator of several food and farming alliances, including Renewing America’s Food Traditions and Flavors Without Borders.
Steve Pyne: Rx Fire
If we can’t trust nature to do what we want, and if we can’t suppress fire, then it seems we ought to do the 
burning ourselves. This in fact is what humanity has done since we seized the firestick from Homo erectus. And it is the third strategy of wildland fire management.
The benefits seem apparent. We substitute our fires for nature’s, keep fuels under wrap, and replace the Manichean fallacy that we either must either have fire or not have fire with choices among a variety of fire regimes. There are places that have achieved this goal, that have ample Rx fires and no wildfires (see photo). But unless you have grasses, an endangered pyrophylic species, and tolerance for smoke, it has proved remarkably difficult. It is easier to take fire out than to put it back. Restoring fire is akin to restoring a lost species.
Why? Some fires escape (remember Los Alamos in 2000?). All fires produce smoke, which can afflict urban areas and highways (Florida suffered fatal vehicle accidents earlier this year from smoke drifting across I-4 in Polk County). Not all fires yield the ecological benefits promised: they burn too hot, too cool, too spottily; they promote invasives or kill more woody vegetation than they consume. Rx fire is not ecological pixie dust that, sprinkled over landscapes, makes the ugly and polluted into the beautiful and pristine.
Worse, Rx fire establishes agency. It identifies a person or institution responsible. This raises both legal and ideological concerns. If something goes wrong, an agent can be held legally or politically liable. Florida has passed a law that provides protection for burners, but even the federal agencies are now encouraging personal liability insurance. The threat of lawsuits is not an incentive for innovative, perhaps risky, experimentation. Moreover, the specter of people doing things in wildlands arouses suspicions. Today, Rx fire; tomorrow, chain saws and casinos. It’s easier to outsource the job, however compromised, to nature.
It is a curious spectacle, however, that has the one creature endowed to manage fire voluntarily surrender that charge. Other species knock over trees, dig holes, hunt – we do fire. Or we did, until we decided to funnel our firepower through machines and to cede back to inanimate nature control over the fire that the living world alone makes possible.
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Steve Pyne is the author of Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.
About Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne is one of the country's (and the world's) foremost writers on fire. He's written numerous books on particular regions of fire in the United States and one on fire in Australia. A firefighter himself in the Grand Canyon region for years, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, he's now a professor of history at Arizona State University.
Rocky Barker: Folk fire and forest history
Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, long one of the timber industry’s biggest supporters has always had a novel alternative history of forest management in the West.
In Sen. Craig’s narrative we had sound forest management in western forests from the time the Weyerhaeuser’s cut down the first growth of trees and the Forest Service put out all the fires. This age of enlightenment, in Craig’s forest history, ended in the 1970s when environmentalists came along and handcuffed the timber industry.
Suddenly, overnight the forests filled with fuel and bugs and disease and made Idaho and the West’s forests unhealthy. Beginning in the 1980s the forests started burning and the federal government began letting them burn up.
The gist of Craig’s folk forest history is that the only way to fix Idaho and the West’s forests is through logging. His basic story hasn’t changed since the early 1990s.
The actual history is of course different, according to every forest scientist and historian around. Fire burned through different forest types in the state at different frequencies depending on the forest type, the climate and other factors. In the low elevation ponderosa pine forests, fire regularly burned every seven to 30 years thinning out the underbrush and young trees but leaving the thick-barked pines.
Cattle ranchers moved in and grazed down the grasses, reducing the fuels that carried the frequent small fires. Miners and loggers cut down the biggest trees and left the species that weren’t marketable. Fire suppression eliminated the small fires. The number of trees per acre began rising.
The national forests, protected by Teddy Roosevelt were not intensively managed until after World War II. The only management previously was fire suppression, which became increasingly successful until after the war.
But with most of the private forests of the Pacific Northwest now young and growing after harvests in the first half of the century, the national forests became the woodshed of the post-war nation. Timber companies were given long, large contracts to cut down forests that included both good and questionable forest practices.
Environmentalists really didn’t have much impact on the harvest until the 1980s, when problems with water quality from poor roads and preserving endangered species led the nation to overcorrect at the same time Craig was building his career in Congress.
Now, in the waning days of that career the world’s scientists say that climate change is already happening due to the human release of greenhouse gases. Craig, still says he’s not convinced.
But he said on the Senate floor last month that there is another culprit for the carbon in the atmosphere. It is forest fire.
These fires, caused he said now that the Forest Service no longer fully suppresses fire, are a major source of carbon. His answer? Logging, of course.
Now make no mistake, logging is likely part of the answer. Forest scientists say that managing our forests to promote resilience may help them sequester more carbon and restore some of them to a healthy cycle.
But because of climate changes, some forests destroyed by the fires that were at least aided by decades of full fire suppression, will grow back as something else.
Craig’s narrative fits the frustrations of many westerners who have watched their forests burn up and seen millions of board feet of timber that could have been turned into jobs destroyed. But he ignores the role that decades of fire suppression had in turning the forests into tinderboxes.
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Rocky Barker is the author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America and environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman.
About Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne is one of the country's (and the world's) foremost writers on fire. He's written numerous books on particular regions of fire in the United States and one on fire in Australia. A firefighter himself in the Grand Canyon region for years, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, he's now a professor of history at Arizona State University.
