Wired: Megafires May Change the Southwest Forever.
“For at least the next few centuries, if not millenniums, towering Ponderosa forests will not come back. Instead there will be pine and Gambel oak and New Mexico locust trees. “It will convert to a more shrubby ecosystem. The system will have gone past the tipping point.” It already has. The Sangre de Cristo foothills used to be unbreakable green; now they’re getting rockier by the year, looking more like Phoenix than Santa Fe. I’ve been watching it happen, unintentionally cataloging it in all my photographs.
Comments:
In doing some research at the state archives, all the historical photographs from the late 1800’s show Santa Fe and environs as being extremely bare. Images of downtown - no trees. I have a feeling we’re going back to that model. Only manmade this time.
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I agree with you, G-man. The fires are occurring because the Southwest ecosystem has changed, not the other way around. There will be refugia, but only a scattered mosaic in the changed landscape.