9/11/200

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Timber Harvest and Wild Fire

 

          As rain and cool weather have slowly brought Montana’s wildfires under control, some of the firefighters who left Montana last week were headed for Texas where drought, triple digit temperatures, and high winds combined with dry lightning storms have ignited forest, scrub, and grasslands that, as in Montana, threaten homes and small communities. 

I was waiting for Montana’s governor to blame the wildfires in Texas on two-term Governor George W. Bush just as he blamed Montana’s wildfires on Clinton’s two terms.  But Governor Racicot’s belated conversion to a “non-political” approach to coping with wildfire probably kept him from extending his political analysis that direction.

          An interesting aspect of the Texas wildfires is that about 40 percent of them, both in terms of number of fires and acreage burned, ravaged pine plantations. That is, they blazed through land that had been cleared, planted, and managed for timber production.  These are not natural forests where unnatural fuel loads had been allowed to build up for almost of a century as a result of past fire suppression and failure to harvest trees.  They were the opposite: intensely managed, commercial timberlands.  Yet fires roared through them nonetheless.

          One does not have to look 1,500 miles to the south to discover that lands heavily managed for commercial timber over the last decade can burn with ferocious intensity.  The largest wildfire in the nation this fire season, the Valley Complex Fire, is found in Western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.  That fire has burned through some of the most heavily roaded and logged areas in the state.  It swept through, for instance, the land that the Darby Lumber Company had roaded and stripped.  Maps of the area look like plates of spaghetti because of the density of the lumber roads that worm their way across the mountains.

          The relationship between timber harvest and wildfires was explored recently by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service operating out of the Library of Congress.  It pointed out the obvious for those of us who were around in 1988:  Despite very high levels of timber harvest on National Forest lands during the 1980s, leading to peak levels of harvest in 1987-88, wildfires swept across Montana and elsewhere in the West.  Nationwide, 7.4 million acres burned in 1988 compared to the 6.6 million that have burned so far this year.  Earlier, over 5 million acres burned in 1976 and 1983 despite federal timber harvests building during the 1970s to reach a peak in 1978.

          Clearly, logging the land and then managing it intensively for timber production does not eliminate or, even, reduce the threat of wildfire. That is the reason so many of our homes and communities, which are located adjacent to low elevation forests that have been managed for timber and other commodities since us white folks first settled the region, were so threatened by fire this year.

          The message here is one that most of those concerned about minimizing the damage done by wildfire have begun to emphasize.  Let’s stop talking about commercial logging as either a solution to or cause of the wildfires.  Commercial logging is largely irrelevant compared to weather conditions, the impact of past fire control, and the condition of the land surrounding our forest homes.  Mixing commercial logging in with wildfire control simply raises doubts about the motivation and objectives of policies and triggers a return to the battles and stalemates of the past.  There is more than enough to puzzle through, try to reach consensus on, and act effectively so that we can continue to safely inhabit these beautiful forested mountains. 

          As we do that, we should be very cautious about importing into the Northern Rockies the results of experiments in the much drier southwestern states.  There has been considerable talk about adopting the “Flagstaff model” of forest treatment aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic fire.  That approach seeks to re-establish the historical Ponderosa Pine park-like settings of a few very large fire resistant trees spaced widely apart.  It is clear that some of Montana’s dry, lower elevation forests once had these characteristics too and have since grown thick with closely spaced small trees that allow very hot, destructive fires.  But only about 8 percent of the acres burned by wildfire in the Northern Rockies this year were in these dry, lower elevation forests.  Only about one sixth of the forested acreage in the region falls into this category.  In contrast, almost half of all our forests and almost half of the burned forest acreage in the Northern Rockies this year are the wetter and cooler sub-alpine forests that have always had more closely spaced trees. These higher elevation forests burn every 50 to 300 years.  Most of them have not missed a fire cycle because of the fire suppression activities of the last century.          If we are interested in forest health and returning forests to their past conditions before fire suppression changed them, we cannot take an approach based a small fraction of our forests and apply it to all the forests.  That would simply replace one serious ecological mistake with another.  Hopefully we have learned better.

          The key to a rational, ecologically and economically sound approach to fire safety in a forested landscape is to keep our attention focused on the public interest and on cooperating with nature rather than simply seeking to dominate it with brute force. That will not be easy to do both because fire frightens us and because some see lots of money to be made by focusing exclusively on commercially valuable trees rather than on living productively with our beautiful but challenging forest landscapes.