Those areas are now where timbering and quarrying operations proliferate. The plants that once thrived there have largely disappeared due to those activities - and to the suppression of fire. Fire played an enormously important role in shaping the destiny of plant life in precolonial Rowan, Baranski says. Because modern society places such importance on containing fires, the notion that fire can be beneficial might seem hard to grasp. Different ecosystems depended on fire - some more, and some less, Baranski says.
Prairies are areas where fire is a very important component.
Without fire, hardwoods take over. Indians, writes Lawrence Barden, a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Have lived in the Piedmont region of the Southeastern United States for 12,000 years. They burned the forest to improve hunting, to facilitate travel and, for the last 1,500 years, to clear fields for agriculture. When a fire would break out back then, Baranski says, it would go for a long ways. It may have burned thousands and thousands of acres before it ended.