Fireweed in burnt forest, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, Montana. Photo: George Wuerthner.

I attended the University of Montana as an undergraduate back in the 1970s. I had many professors who I felt were exceptional. The common denominator in the teachings of all my professors was to look at things from an ecological and evolutionary perspective.

Of all my professors, Richard (Dick) Hutto had the greatest influence on my thinking about ecology.

I took ornithology and several other ecology courses from Hutto. His enthusiastic lectures on evolutionary biology often ended with a smile and his signature exclamation, “Isn’t this cool?”

Yes, it was cool.

A good professor provides a new way to view the world. From Hutto, I learned to see things from an evolutionary perspective and to question traditional assumptions about ecology.

I was already beginning to confront my original assumptions about fire ecology and how the only “good fires” were low-severity and frequent, when the 1988 Yellowstone Fires occurred. At that time, I was residing in Livingston, Montana, just north of the park, and almost every day that summer, I was in the park observing the fires.

Watching the forest burn, I had Hutto’s views on evolution and natural selection in mind. I began to revise my view of fire as an agent of destruction and more of an agent that rejuvenated the landscape so that my book on the 88 blazes was titled Yellowstone and the Fires of Change, which reflected that shift in paradigm.

In part due to the worldview I gained from Dick’s classes, I have come to understand that many animals and plants live in mortal fear of green forests—they are so dependent on the dead snag forests and downed wood that results from these high-severity blazes, where most trees are killed.

Challenging traditional wildfire assumptions is central in Richard Hutto’s new book, A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Fire. He’s among the few who study the unique, necessary role of severely burned forests in western conifer ecosystems. Hutto explains why negative views of burnt forests are misplaced, arguing for a new paradigm that values them as critical ecological elements and calls out misguided policies like post-fire logging and thinning.

His book, like his classes, is a superb overview........

© CounterPunch