5/22/2000
KUFM/KGPR
T. M. Power
Wildfire, Roads, and Timber Harvest
Those commercial interests that see our public lands primarily as a commodity warehouse that they have always profitably controlled miss no opportunity to argue that the commercial exploitation of public resources on which they earn their profits also happen to be absolutely necessary for the pursuit of all manner of public interests. This is the old “multiple use” clearcut fantasy that asked us to believe that the huge sprawling scars that stripped our forested mountains to mineral soil were good for wildlife, fisheries, water quality, recreation, and overall forest health. Of course, the weren’t, and we are now paying a high price to try to repair the damage associated with that commercially-motivated fantasy.
Now these same folks are using our primordial fear of wildfire and the painful images of tearful families returning to their incinerated homes in Los Alamos to warn us that the Clinton Administration’s roadless area initiative threatens our own homes and communities with exactly this type of catastrophic wildfire. This, like their invention of the multiple-use clearcut, is a shameful distortion of the truth.
One need only look at the facts about where damaging wildfires occur to realize that setting the National Forest’s inventoried roadless areas off limits to roads and commercial timber harvest will help protect people from wildfires not increase the damage done by them.
Wildfires are seven times more likely to start outside the inventoried roadless areas of our National Forests. On the basis of fire starts per 10,000 acres of land, fires are twice as likely to start outside of roadless areas. 92 percent of human-caused fires on National Forest lands are set outside of the roadless areas. Per ten thousand acres of land, a human-caused fire is almost four times more likely outside of the inventoried roadless areas than within them. That is, 11 out of every 12 human-caused National Forest fires have nothing to do with the roadless area initiative we are now debating. However we manage those areas, 92 percent of the risk will remain. Fires outside of the roadless areas not only are more likely but also tend to be larger than those within roadless areas. For instance, in the Mountain West, fires outside the roadless areas are almost 60 percent larger than fires within them.
There is no mystery here. Building roads into wildlands brings human activity that tends to increase the risk of fire. Timber harvest opens up the forest canopy and allows fuels on the forest floor to dry more quickly and stay dry longer. Harvest also allows wind to penetrate more easily allowing the fire to spread faster and become larger. The harvest of the large shade-intolerant trees like the ponderosa pine, western larch, and western white pine and their replacement with homogeneous, small, dense stands of Douglas fir and various true firs enhanced the fire danger. Similarly with heavily grazed lands, grasslands and forbs gave way to increasingly woody vegetation such as sagebrush, juniper, as well as Douglas fir forests, adding considerably to the fire danger. In general the areas with the most forest health problems are areas that have been roaded and harvested. This interacts with the negative impacts of past fire suppression activities which are given a higher priority and are more effective in roaded areas. This leads to higher fuel buildups and fire dangers in the roaded areas.
Roads bring more visitors and more casual visitors. With this comes more frequent human-caused fires. Homes increasingly are built up against National Forest boundaries, the parts of the forests closest to the regular system of county roads and the most likely part of the Forest to have already been roaded. This means that the highest risk of National Forest fires that threaten property and human lives are found in the areas already roaded and, usually, logged. The roadless areas tend to be remote, located many miles from human habitation. That is one of the reasons that fires in them are usually assigned a fairly low priority, allowing firefighters to concentrate on fires that represent more of a threat to commercial resources, property, and lives.
As long as the timber industry insists on using the issue of forest health to justify business as usual and the unlimited expansion of commercial timber harvest on our public lands, those who are concerned about the past damage done by the extensive clearcutting of our forested mountains will equate “forest health” with “commercial harvest” and reject the concern. This may not be good for our public lands, but it certainly will better for them than a continuation of the clearcutting of the past. Those who are serious about forest health issues have to stop using it as a cover for a quite different commercial agenda.
Punching roads into all roadless areas and then clearcutting them is not a prescription for either fire control or forest health. It will add to our problems with both. In addition, it would be outlandishly expensive requiring ongoing subsidies for the timber industry from the US Treasury. Finally, such a commercial assault on the remaining unprotected roadless areas would represent a amazingly destructive attack on water quality, fisheries, and endangered species that would cost us and future generations dearly in the years ahead.
Thomas Michael Power
Economics Department
University of Montana
Missoula, Montana 59812
406 243-4586