Opinion: Bring Back Buffalo Herds to Prevent Fires

Michael Lind

August 1, 2001

Every summer, news reports portray firefighters struggling heroically to
contain wildfires as they rage out of control in the American West,
threatening homes and sometimes lives.

Most of us assume that
these giant conflagrations, often started by lightning, are a normal
part of the natural cycle. That's partly true—and partly wrong.

The worst fires tend to occur where enormous amounts of dead tinder have accumulated in thick stands of trees. In much of the American West, neither the trees nor the tinder are "natural." They are there because something else is missing. That something is the buffalo.

Only a few centuries ago, much of what today is scrubby, flammable woodland in the Mountain West and the Great Plains was grassy parkland. Vast herds of buffalo, roaming between Canada and Mexico, kept the grasslands open. The grazing of buffalo, combined with foraging by deer, pronghorn and many other animals that benefited from the bulldozing activities of buffalo herds, prevented dead vegetation from piling up in heaps that could fuel cyclonic fires.

Grass fires on the premodern prairie seldom had the intensity of today's worst wild fires—for the simple reason that the fire had to compete with the herbivores for food.

Today, however, much of the former Western grassland has mutated into forest. When prairie is fenced and bison are removed, in the absence of extensive grazing by cattle, trees that were formerly confined to riverbanks and creeksides rapidly invade and colonize the entire landscape.

Deer, the only remaining large herbivores in much of the region, cannot prevent the build-up of mounds of leaf litter and wood that can energize colossal wildfires.

Obviously reintroducing the buffalo and the pronghorn to settled areas is out of the question. But much of the land of the West is in federal parks, and already off-limits to development.

The federal government could also encourage landowners to allow unnecessary farm and ranchland to revert to wilderness, either in public or private hands, and could accelerate this reversion of land by slashing wasteful federal agriculture subsidies, which harm the land even as they cheat the taxpayer.

Already the buffalo—which was nearly extinct a century ago—is making a comeback in the few surviving pockets of American grassland. Federal, state and private land managers ought to give serious consideration to reintroducing buffalo in other large wilderness areas where grassland, in only a few generations, has been replaced by invading—and highly flammable—thickets of trees.

As a result of this, the frequency and intensity of wildfires would diminish as much of the North American landscape resumed its traditional appearance. "Fire behaves much like mega-herbivores do—consuming dry and coarse vegetation," the paleontologist Tim Flannery writes in his recent natural history of North America, "The Eternal Frontier."

Flannery, an Australian, also endorses an idea proposed a few years ago by the American naturalists Paul Martin and David A. Burney: Restore the elephants to North America.

Thirteen thousand years ago, the American prairie resembled Africa's Serengeti. Mammoths and mastodon lived alongside herds of wild horses, long-horned bison, antelope, camels, giant armadillos, and monstrous ground sloths. Along with wolves, bears, coyotes and pumas the predators included American lions and short-faced bears far bigger than today's Kodiaks.

When the ancestors of the American Indians arrived from Siberia across the Alaskan land bridge, they wiped out most of North America's big game animals in a few millennia—perhaps a few centuries. The Paleo-Indian hunters were no worse than primitive peoples elsewhere—early Europeans killed off the native European lions, bison and mammoths as well.

Beginning with Columbus, European conquerors and settlers found a depopulated continent where only the short-horned bison and pronghorn remained as forlorn survivors of North America's once teeming savannah. In the words of Paul Martin, "while 'Home on the Range' commemorates buffalo, deer and pronghorns, it misses the mammoths, glyptodonts (giant armadillos) and camels."

As Martin, Burney, and Flannery point out, 13,000 years is a mere blip in geological time. Because plants evolve much more slowly than animals, the vegetation of North America is still adapted to an environment which ought to include elephants, horses and camels. Today's wild mustangs and wild burros—so these scientists argue—should not be treated as invaders, but rather as exiles that have returned home.

In a North American West that is restored to the way it was before the Paleo-Indians arrived, the now-empty place of mammoths and mastodons in the ecosystem could be taken by Indian and African elephants.

If experiments in cloning mammoths succeed, the real thing might make an American comeback. Lions, too, could be reintroduced, along with jaguars and other big cats that used to live in North America but today are found only south of the U.S. border.

Sounds crazy, right? But already in Siberia scientists are populating a new "Pleistocene Park" with wild horses, musk ox and bison. Will Yellowstone be the next Pleistocene Park?

The idea of restoring an equivalent of America's Ice Age ecological diversity in Western lands—lands that have been emptied of big animals, first by prehistoric immigrants from Asia and more recently by European settlers—is controversial among environmentalists.

But even if the herds are only those of bison and pronghorn, it is time to restore big herbivores to some of the Western lands that were, until recently, shaped by their presence. It is time to stop the century-long conversion of former buffalo country to forest—and of that forest into firewood.

Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based public policy institute.

Copyright 2001 United Press International