In the News: “Duluth’s Park Point forest will be set afire so it can “take a deep breath”
Minnesota Point 50 (MP50) Chair, Pat Sterner recently spoke with the Duluth News Tribune to share insights on the upcoming prescribed burn to Minnesota Point and the importance of restoring fire to the sandbar’s pine forest ecosystem.
Why it matters – Prescribed fire is a critical tool to restore forest health, reduce wildfire risk and support native species that depend on fire to thrive.
“We see this as the launch of ensuring that the pine forest is resilient for years to come,” Sterner said.
Recent media coverage of the “Returning the Spirit of Good Fire to Minnesota Point” initiative, has highlighted our collaborative efforts with partners—including the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the City of Duluth and the Minnesota DNR—to restore fire dependent ecosystems through Indigenous-led stewardship practices.
Read the full article: “Duluth’s Park Point forest will be set afire so it can “take a deep breath” by Minnesota Star Tribune (March 25, 2026)
Fire: In our region, fire came in two ways, lightening fire and cultural fire.
Lightening Fire: Lighting fires follow predictable spatial temporal patterns (Heinselman 1973,1981), mainly confined to xeric landscapes such as sand gravel plains, rock outcrops, and southwest aspects (e.g. goat, elk, caribou, deer, prairies, diurnal winter yards). However, in drought periods lightening fire becomes boundless, covering thousands of acres, especially following peak budworm pulses (Figure X). Lightening fire tends to burn hot, sometimes removing entire biomasses, including soils down to bedrock, over large areas, again and again, over thousands of years. This intense biomass removal (oxidation) is a significant factor (variable) in maintaining hyper-oligotrophic lakes that support cold water oxygenated ecosystems for lake trout, ciscoes, whitefish, and a plethora of other clear-water obligate species. It is inconceivable, following 10,000 years of unaltered soil formation, that regional landscapes would not have burdened aquatic ecosystems with significant organics that starved cold water hypolimnions of oxygen, hence no more lake trout, ciscoe, white fish, and a plethora clear water aquatic species, e.g. loons, wild rice, wild celery, etc. In this sense, many regional aquatic species can be considered “Fire Dependent (FD)”.
Cultural Fire The second type of fire is cultural fire, brought by humans with objectives to enhance vegetation for themselves and the herbivores they loved (Lopez 1986). Cultural fires were frequent but not intense. Traditional narratives (Day 1953, Lewis 1978, 1984, Kimmerer 2001, Anderson 2013), and explorer notes (Morton 1635, Vancouver 1792, Carver 1776) describe frequent burning, annual burning, highly targeted burns, trickles of flames wandering through woods, and snow-fire along south aspects shorelands and snowless escarpments.
Cultural fires were employed across many different landscapes and periodicities not frequented by lightning fire. Many south aspects, such as outcrops (caribou prairies) and aquatic shorelands were burned annually when snow was still in the woods. Vast networks covering hundreds to thousands of acres of Calamagrostis Carex meadows were snow-fired to attract and fatten moose, elk, bison, caribou and deer. Buring was also used to refresh winter yards, such as Northshore’s south aspects covering thousands of acres, creating and maintaining open-grown pine, birch, maple, aspen, spruce parklands, browsed annually for thousands of years, and floodplain savannas along the St Louis and Cloquet Rivers, covering thousands of acres, open-grown silver maple, bur oak, spruce and white groves, browsed annually for thousands of years.
Cultural fires were also significant in maple dominated landscapes that Indigenous people serviced for maple sugar production. These maple grove fires were not “running” fires, but instead, dead down wood (DDW) was collected and brought to the burning fires to distill raw maple sap into stable sugar solutions. The outcome of burning DDW during maple sugaring created open park-like manicured conditions (Gawboy 2024) and reduced DDW decomposition nitrogen inputs into rich maple soils.
Cultural fire significantly ramped up savanna assemblages across the land, such as pine groves, pine barrens, birch groves, oak groves, oak barrens, aspen parklands, spruce parklands, pine oak barrens, pine oak openings, and meadows.
WITHOUT FIRE & HERBIVORY
Loss of Keystone Processes (LKPs): LKPs triggers a series of trophic cascades that unravel highly evolved homeostatic feedbacks that manifest catastrophic transitions (Figure 2) in ecosystem quality. Symptoms associated with LKPs currently manifesting in Lake Superior watersheds include:
• Terrestrial / aquatic eutrophication,
• Vegetation overgrowth like cancer,
• Declines in functional diversity
• Declines in edibility, foodweb complexity, and trophic structure
• Declines in evolutionary advance oligotrophic species
• Collapse of foodwebs,
• Collapsed energy flows,
• Collapsed nutrient cycles,
• Increase in evolutionary primitive nitrophilic species (aka invasive species),
• Increases in pestilence and disease (biting flies, ticks, fungal and microbial pathogens),
• Increase in bare soils,
• Increase soil erosion,
• Increase bank sloughing,
• Excessive build up and decomposition of biomass, and
• Corrosion of natural capital, e.g., declines in water quality, nutrient regulation, & climate cooling.
So important are keystone processes in reinforcing high quality, resilience ecosystems, that the number one goal for land care and restoration is restoring, or substituting, or mimicking keystone processes. Restoration that fails to restore keystone processes is merely a form of native plant landscaping, creating at best, imperial forest hyper-realities that require significant physical, chemical, and biological subsidies2 that are unsustainable for large scale projects.
2 This is what we do in natural resource management, managing from resources from behind green curtains, pulling green levers to “command” and control” more of species x and less of species y, while confusing behaviors (invasive species) for causes, that creates a pathology that invariably destroys the entity we sought to preserve (Holling 1996).