Group Seeks to Prove Fires Can Help Forests : Environment: Some conservationists will conduct experimental burns in New York to preserve the natural ecosystem.

To fervent followers of the gospel according to Smokey Bear, Stephanie Gebauer is a heretic.

This spring, Gebauer is organizing a band of fire-starters who will arm themselves with implements of destruction and hike into the last remnant of a unique natural area called the Albany Pine Bush.

Using drip torches filled with kerosene and gasoline, they will lay a line of fire across the awakening landscape. Then they will stand by and watch as the flames consume aspen and locust saplings and blacken acres of scrub oak and pitch pine forest.

Their mission, however, is not to wreak havoc, but to renew.

“We’re working to reintroduce fire to the area to maintain it as a natural ecosystem,” Gebauer says. “The lack of fire has had a severe effect on the Pine Bush.”

Fire has long been treated as the archenemy of forests. For years, Smokey Bear, the popular propagandist of the U.S. Forest Service, sternly admonished us that “only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

“Smokey did a really good job of convincing people that fire was bad,” says Rick Johnson, director of land stewardship in New Mexico for the Nature Conservancy, a conservation group that owns about 1,600 nature preserves around the country. “People are now opening their eyes to the very positive effect fire can have.”

A century ago, the National Park Service and other conservation agencies adopted strict fire-suppression policies, intending to protect forests. Before long, trees started overtaking prairies and marshlands. Without heat to unseal their cones, giant sequoias stopped reproducing. Dead trees and other debris built up to the point where accidental fires would rage out of control, as they did in Yellowstone National Park in 1988.

“One of the things that’s had the greatest impact on the natural environment since this park was established in 1890 was the suppression of fire,” says Dave Parsons, a researcher at Sequoia National Park in California.

Controlled burning was started there and at other national parks about 20 years ago, Parsons says.

Ecologists are now using fire to preserve scrub oak forests in Ohio; pine barrens in New Jersey; savannas in Texas and North Carolina; marshlands in Mississippi, and bald cypress swamps in Florida’s Everglades.

“In the last few years, we’ve been burning about 25,000 acres a year in Minnesota’s tall-grass prairies,” says Johnson, who directed the Nature Conservancy program there before moving to the grasslands and desert of the Southwest. “We’re building a program in New Mexico now.”

The idea of prescribed burning has been slow to gain acceptance in the densely populated Northeast. But this spring, the Nature Conservancy plans experimental burns in a remnant of tall-grass prairie called the Hempstead Plain in Nassau County, just outside New York City, as well as in Albany’s Pine Bush.

Fire is essential to the survival of the Albany Pine Bush, Gebauer says. The distinctive community of plants, animals and insects there has evolved with specific adaptations to fire, which regularly seared the region before urban sprawl and vigilant fire departments arrived 50 years ago.

“Without fire, non-native species like aspen have come in and can easily dominate an area,” Gebauer sats. “Black locusts are even worse.”

The Pine Bush, a stark landscape of glacial sand dunes covered with scrub oaks, pitch pines and wildflowers, once spread over 40 square miles. All but 4,000 acres are now entombed beneath suburban lawns, a sprawling state university campus, shopping malls, nursing homes and office parks.

The state, the Nature Conservancy and local governments have purchased about 1,700 acres for the Pine Bush Preserve. In 1988, the state Legislature created a commission to manage it, and passed a law allowing prescribed burns.

The Nature Conservancy is in charge of research and management programs in the preserve; Gebauer is director of that work.

One day this spring, she walked along firebreaks cut in a 190-acre section of the preserve called Blueberry Hill. The open swaths, as wide as a one-lane road, carve the scrub forest into sections for which individual fire plans have been devised.

About 25 acres, in sections of two to five acres, are scheduled to be burned in the experimental program between mid-April and May 1.

“These are buck moth eggs,” Gebauer says, pointing out a cluster of tiny brown beads encircling an oak twig. “Before the burn, we’ll go through and cut any twigs with these egg masses and move them to a non-burn area.”

The buck moth, a large, black, white and crimson creature, is one of the distinctive and rare insects peculiar to pine barrens. It depends on fire, Gebauer says, because fire stimulates the oaks to send out the long, slender, tender twigs needed by the moth’s larvae.

Another insect that depends on fire is the Karner blue butterfly, the Pine Bush’s most famous resident. The inch-long insect, first identified by novelist and butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov, is on the state endangered species list and is expected to be on the federal list soon.

The Karner blue is the poster child of Pine Bush preservationists, who have mounted butterfly-versus-bulldozers battles with varying success. Now it’s firetrucks, not bulldozers, that pose the greatest threat to the Karner blue, says Nature Conservancy botanist Robert Zaremba.

The blue lupine is the only thing the butterfly’s caterpillars will eat. But the wildflowers have become scarce, shaded out by trees.

“The best chance to maintain a large population of Karner blues is to restore their natural environment,” Zaremba said. “Fire is an important part of that.”

Some of the people who live or work just outside the preserve are uneasy about the planned fires, however.

Gebauer talked to a crowd in the Pine Bush firehouse one evening. She explained the exacting requirements of a burn “prescription,” which calls for just the right temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction. She talked about firebreaks, black-lining, back fires and other fire-control techniques. An experienced fire scientist, she said, can control the length of flames, the rate of spread, the amount of smoke and the fire’s intensity.

The flames won’t race through the treetops as they do in a wind-whipped wildfire, she said, but will creep through the underbrush.

Some people remained dubious.

“It’ll look like the dickens afterward,” said a man in an orange hunting cap.

“You’ll find it comes back dramatically,” Gebauer said. “Within weeks, everything will be green. Wildflowers long dormant will come up.”

What about the animals, the man asked. Won’t they burn?

Birds and mammals will flee, Gebauer says. Reptiles such as hognose snakes and spadefoot toads will stay cool in deep burrows.

“I’m very concerned about smoke,” said Ruth Davis, director of a nearby nursing home. “If smoke gets in those buildings, people will die.”

“Smoke is our biggest concern,” Gebauer said. “That’s why we’re burning when the leaves aren’t out yet, so there won’t be much smoke.” The fires will only be set under wind conditions that will carry smoke up and away from homes and highways, she said.

Others seemed satisfied that the burn program was safe and necessary.

“My back yard ends where the Pine Bush begins,” said Marjorie Rulison, who has lived there since 1956. “We’ve seen the wildfires started when someone riding horseback throws away a cigarette. The flames would go 15 feet in the air when the wind was blowing.

“But these are controlled fires they’re talking about,” Rulison said. “I think they need these fires to preserve the Pine Bush.”