CARSON CITY, Nev. - A drive into the Sierra Nevada can seem
like a retreat from time,
a return to landscapes unmolested by the 20th century.
But the mountain range dividing Nevada and California, while
largely undeveloped, is far
from unaltered. George E. Gruell has the photographs to prove
it.
The 74-year-old retired federal wildlife biologist hiked and
occasionally helicoptered his
way to dozens of mountain spots recorded in photographs taken
in the late 1800s and
early 1900s.
He hunted for the same peaks and boulders, the same vantage
points. And when he
found them, he took another photo.
In a just-published book, Gruell matches the new and old images,
showing how much the
landscapes have changed. In scene after scene, the contemporary
photographs document
dense forest and lush growth. Their historical twins show leaner
country in which the
trees were fewer, the ground more open, the meadows more abundant.
The face of the Sierra has filled in - and Gruell says that's
not good for wildlife, the forest
and the future of the range's ecosystems.
He says factors that caused the growth include heavy livestock
grazing a century ago
that bared soil for tree seedlings to take root; logging that
cleared the way for new
growth; and a wet climate cycle in the 1900s.
Most of all, Gruell argues that decades of anti-fire policies
reduced wildfires, and they
need to be brought back to return the Sierra to what it was.
Gruell's work, partly reimbursed by logging interests, touches
on an impassioned debate
about the Sierra Nevada's vast forest land. Logging levels, the
role of fire and the decline
in wildlife have been the subject of fierce political and environmental
battles for years.
Gruell advocates prescribed burns - controlled, deliberate
fires that many
environmentalists favor as a way of clearing dense undergrowth.
But he also says logging limits imposed on federal land in
the past decade are too
restrictive and that in many places, stands need to be thinned
before periodic prescribed
burns can be started.
Gruell is well aware that his work, "Fire in Sierra Nevada
Forests: A Photographic
Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849," is more
than just a picture book.
"This publicly advocates forest management, which involves
disturbing the landscape.
And there are a great many people out there who don't want any
disturbance in the
landscape," he said.
After retiring from the U.S. Forest Service in 1987, the Carson
City, Nev., resident
started lecturing and consulting on fire ecology and fire's effect
on wildlife habitat.
In 1992, the California Forestry Association, a timber industry
group, offered him a
contract to conduct a repeat photographic study of the Sierra
Nevada. He produced a
brochure of about 20 photographs and wanted to do more. So he
pursued the work on
his own, poring over thousands of old photographs in historical
libraries.
Gruell said he had been rejected by several publishers and
was waiting to hear from
another when he showed his manuscript to the Forest Foundation,
a nonprofit group
affiliated with the California Forest Products Commission, funded
by industry
companies.
The foundation was interested in his work and paid him a fee
that covered his expenses
in developing the book.
Gruell said he that had no reservations about taking a fee
from the foundation and that it
exerted no influence on his work. "It's an objective look
at the landscape and what has
happened," Gruell said.
He snapped his first repeat photographs with a 35-millimeter
camera borrowed from his
aunt in the 1950s. When he joined the Forest Service in 1962,
he started using
large-format cameras belonging to the service.
Again and again, his photographs showed that the landscape
had been more open a
century ago. Along with others, Gruell began to question the Forest
Service policy of
fighting fires and suppressing the natural fire cycle.
He says that without nature's cycle of frequent fire to clean
out undergrowth, the forest
has become so dense that fire now can reach catastrophic intensity.
Gruell says the tree canopy has become so thick that desirable
plants beneath have
declined - and in places, the Sierra resembles a jungle.
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