Burns occurring now are clearly growing season burns. The spring flora is well underway. Bumble bee queens are about. For reasons given in a previous post, most of these burns, especially those occurring in remnant natural communities, will do more harm than good in the long term. They will destabilize versus stabilize. It’s a shame, because we had a surplus of good burn days in between late October and late March–at least 25 in February and March. This year I think we entered a caution period on about March 15 that went until about April 10. Ideally those burns would have happened earlier, but they were probably OK-ish. Now is clearly late.

Growing season burns in natural communties have short and long-term effects that contribute to the misconception that fire is not effective or healthy. I know it’s hard to get enough fire on the ground, but nature doesn’t care about our convenience. It just responds how it will. We need to adjust.

WDNR planned burns from 4/13 on their prescribed fire dashboard. Some of these are in state natural areas. They aren’t the only ones burning. These burns are well-intentioned, and those involved face very tough constraints/choices, but the grim reality is that most of these sites won’t maintain their ecological integrity if we don’t burn enough, and they won’t maintain their ecological integrity if we burn this late. With the level of resources society is willing to allocate to conservation, especially land management, I think, the footprint of our “protected” resources far exceeds our capacity to maintain.