The forests that won’t grow back
Sofia Jeremias
When Jonathan Coop was 4 years old, he watched ash rain down from the sky.
The year was 1977, and a fire was burning on the Pajarito Plateau, canyon country in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.
From his backyard in Los Alamos, Coop saw a plume of smoke rise from the mesa just outside of town.
The paradigm of forest ecology had yet to shift when he explored these charred forests in his youth. Fire was destructive, but eventually the trees grew back. The ponderosa pines that dominate the dry landscape of the Southwest, trees that were adapted to flame, would drop their seeds, and ash would make way for saplings.