"FOLLOWING FIRE: A Resilient Forest / An Uncertain Future" is a long term inquiry by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick J Swanson. The collaboration combines David’s artistic sense of form and color and Fred’s scientific focus on the biological and physical processes shaping forest history and the forest’s future.
Researchers examined drivers behind patterns of high tree mortality levels (>~75%) within the five megafires that simultaneously burned in the western Oregon Cascades in 2020.
Following Fire: A Resilient Forest / An Uncertain Future an 18 month collaboration between photographer David Paul Bayles and HJA scientist Fred Swanson can now be viewed at: www.followingfire.com
See more of David Paul Bayles' work at https://www.davidpaulbayles.com
Please join us on Thursday, April 21 at 10am in Richardson 107 or on Zoom for a presentation of Amanda Brackett’s thesis, titled: “Effect of residual canopy cover and wildfire smoke on near-surface microclimate temperatures.” Amanda is earning her MS in Forest Ecosystems and Society with Klaus Puettmann and Chris Still. She used PRIMET and CENMET data from the Andrews Forest as part of her study.
Contact the FES Department for zoom link.
In January 2020, Catholic theologian and Andrews Forest writer-in-residence Vince Miller produced an essay with text and selected photographs from David Paul Bayles’s collection, Old Growth Dialog, set in the lush, green old-growth of the Andrews Forest. The essay, titled “A Cathedral Not Built by Hands,” appeared in the journal Commonweal. Little could Miller and Bayles imagine returning to the upper McKenzie valley to collaborate again, only months later, in an effort to comprehend the Holiday Farm Fire. Both struggled with the tragedy and trauma, the side-by-side stark beauty and rapid ecological responses of the forest, which Bayles caught in his photographs, titled “Standing, Still.”
In their second article, “Tears and Ashes: Three Ways of Looking for Hope at the Recent Wildfires in the West,” also published in Commonweal, Miller reflects on human efforts over millennia to find hope in devastation. He visited the burned landscape and spoke with people trying to cope with the loss of homes and ways of life. Miller seeks a “way of seeing adequate to the changed world being revealed in these catastrophes.” He contrasts the perspectives of thinking in “forest time,” the scurry and distractions of everyday life, and an apocalyptic view. Miller aims for an apocalyptic hope with “open eyes, a hard seeing of the truth of circumstance” that can find in “the charcoal remains of a burned tree or a survivor’s trauma…a gateway for truth” in the Anthropocene that demands our attention and action.
Thanks to McKenzie River Trust for giving artists and writers of the Reflections program access to burned forest on their lands along the McKenzie.
Andrews Forest Monthly Meeting: Friday, April 1, 2022, 9-11 AM
“Linking mycorrhizal fungi to emergent forest carbon capture” presented by Colin Averill, Senior Scientist, ETH Zürich
“Restoring Forest Cover after Wildfire” presented by Robyn Darbyshire, Regional Silviculturist, USDA Forest Service, PNW Region
After our presentations we will move into our general meeting, which includes updates on graduate student activities, site, WNF, community, education, new faces, and recent publications.
Our meetings follow the academic year. Next meetings: May 6, June 3, 2022. 9-11 AM.
Contact Lina DiGregorio for Zoom link.
"Fire and Philosophy in an Uncertain Future"
Michael Paul Nelson
Ruth H. Spaniol Endowed Chair of Renewable Resources,
Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society Oregon State University
Hosted by the Eugene Natrual History Society
View a recording of the talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfUAyrkfTU0
There are few studies of vegetation responses to fire in young forests of the western Cascades, in contrast to a rich history of study in older forests.