Posted by Ranger Janet (165.83.6.33) on September 12, 2002 at 11:27:34:
In Reply to: Beauty Lost posted by Laura on September 12, 2002 at 11:15:20:
: My mother told me that she saw Yellowstone before 1988. She now misses the beautiful old trees. I think that you should put out all fires to prevent the death of trees and animals. What do you think?
Hi Laura,
Thank you for your comment. Your mother and my mother should get together! I live in the park; and when my mother came for a visit, she had a difficult time with the dead tree trunks projecting from the ground. Like your mother, my mother "remembers when."
I'd like to share a quote from Don Despain, a former National Park Service Plant Ecologist. ---"In Yellowstone, the resource is not 20,000 elk or a million lodgepole pines or a single grizzly bear. The resource is wildness. The interplay of all the parts of the wilderness--weather, animals, plants, earthquakes--acting upon each other to create the wild setting creates a state of existence, a wildness, that is the product and the resources for which Yellowstone is being preserved."
From the earliest time, humans have used and tried to control fire. Where we have placed our homes and agricultural developments, fire is suppressed. But in the natural world, fire is an integral part of life. Fire is nature's way of cleaning up the dead so that the living can get on with things. I've heard some describe fire as nature's way of taking a bath.