8/28/2000

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

A Strategy for Controlling Wildfire While Pursuing Healthy Forests

Ordinarily it is good to wait until a crisis has passed before jumping to conclusions about what to do next time to avoid the crisis or reduce the damage. Judgments formed in the anxiety, fear, and exhaustion of battle may more reflect frustration and anger than thoughtful analysis. But in our collective struggle with wildfire this summer, a lot of influential folks are not waiting for more careful reflection. For a variety of self-interested reasons, they began to offer grand solutions to the wildfire threat almost as soon as the first fire broke out. They were clearly waiting for an opportunity and stage to pursue an already well-formed agenda. The fires have given them that.

Just as a place holder in this unseemly rush to judgment, let me offer my own tentative snap analysis. First, it is crucial to face up to the fact that what is optimal for wildfire control is not optimal for forest health. After all, wildfire plays an important role in forest health. Just as important, what is optimal for the control of wildfires or forest health is usually not optimal for commercial timber management. Profit maximizing timber management can involve measures that both increase the likelihood of large wildfires and damage a broad range of other forest values, undermining forest health.

It is misleading and dangerous to run wildfire control, forest health, and commercial timber management together as if they are all perfectly compatible objectives. They are not. That is why we are in the mess we are in. If commercial logging promoted forest health and controlled wildfire, the ambitious and aggressive timber harvest program on public lands over the last half-century would have left us with amazingly healthy, fires resistant forests. The opposite of what we have now.

Fire suppression by itself simply tends to allow fuel loads to build up so that when the inevitable dry, hot, windy years come the wildfires are not controllable. Commercial timber harvest by itself takes the larger, more valuable, fire resistant trees, leaves behind lots of wood waste that becomes fuel, and is followed by a thick tangle of new growth including brush and closely packed small trees.

This is not to say that we could not manage our forests in a way that reduced fuel loads and the threat of catastrophic wildfires. We could, but it would be very expensive, would yield few commercial products, and would require a huge public subsidy. The US Forest Service’s estimate is that it would take about $825 million a year for 15 years to remove brush, thin small trees, and manage prescribed burns where appropriate, on the 40 million acres of public land in the West that currently have dangerous fuel loads. That is a total of $12 billion dollars. This would have to be an ongoing effort. The job would never be done. And every 50 or 100 years, when conditions were ripe, wildfires would still whip across the land as they did in the firestorm of 1910.

The Forest Service is actually going to ask Congress for that $12 billion, but don’t hold your breath. What Congress will find more attractive will be the forest products industry’s assertion that it will not cost any where near as much if lumber companies are enticed to do this brush removal and thinning by allowing them to also take some, or many, or most of the large, commercially valuable trees too. That way, they tell us, the public subsidy could be a lot smaller and we would be able to afford “treating” all 40 million acres.

Of course this would just twist fire control and the pursuit of forest health into a massive 40 million acre commercial timber harvest. The result would be neither forest health nor fire control because both would have been compromised by the pursuit of profitable commercial timber.

There is a way to get out of this corner. It involves a three-way categorization of our arid, western forestlands into the residential-forest interface where most of our firefighting effort has been concentrated on saving human lives and structures. The second category involves those forest lands that we intend to manage for commercial timber indefinitely into the future. Finally, there are the roadless wildlands, some already classified as wilderness, most already committed to non-timber objectives because of their limited commercial timber potential.

On the residential-forest interface a two-fold strategy is appropriate. First, severe fuel reduction measures should be taken by mechanically removing brush, young trees, other fuel, and drastically reducing the density of trees to broad park-like distances. Second, in cooperation with commercial insurance companies and local building code and zoning authorities, a significant part of the cost of protecting homes in dangerous forest settings would be shifted to the homeowner. It is they who implicitly take on the risk. They should be made aware of both the risk and the cost of fire control in a way they cannot ignore, namely through their wallets.

On lands that are going to be managed for commercial timber, harvest techniques should be modified so that the aftermath is in fact a landscape with reduced fire danger rather than increased fire danger. This will raise the costs and reduce the revenues from timber harvest. Even more of our public timber sales would be below cost. The public will have to decide in that cost context how much of our public lands should be managed for commercial timber.

Finally there are the lands that we never intend to manage for commercial timber. Most of these are far removed from human settlement and the fires in them threaten neither human lives nor valuable timber resources. Fires there should, as now, largely be allowed to burn. Those fires, as the Yellowstone fires of 1988 showed, are good for the larger ecosystem. Where past fire control has allowed unnatural fuel buildups that could lead to fires that actually damaged natural system, fires could be intentionally set during seasons and years when the risk of rapidly spreading fire is low.

This approach focuses our attention exactly where our firefighting efforts have been focused, on human safety and homes. It does not use the fires as an excuse to log everything and add to our fire and environmental problems. But it does work systematically to reduce the fire dangers we ourselves have created through past fire control, inappropriate timber harvest methods, and careless home building. Finally, it does not mindlessly charge into our roadless wildlands with chainsaws and bulldozers, recklessly spending billions of dollars of taxpayers money to do massive environmental damage.

It is a logical, focused, and measured response to the wildfire problems we face here in the arid West. For that reason, it is probably dead on arrival.