7/1/2002

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Political Exploitation of the Wildfire Threat

We are well into this year’s wildfire season, especially in the southern Rockies. Unfortunately that also means that anti-environmental economic interests and the politicians they have in tow are busily trying to exploit our natural, almost primordial, fear of fire for their own personal financial and political gains. Montana’s governor has carried this to a new low, labeling as “terrorists” those environmental groups that have been trying to get our National Forests managed for something other than commercial timber harvest. Managing our National Forests for non-commercial purposes is an objective shared by the vast majority of American citizens. Apparently most Americans, then, according to Governor Martz, are rabid religious zealots who are purposely trying to commit mass murder.

Such outbursts of mindless political cynicism are what have driven so many citizens away from the political process and, even, the polls. It poisons the public dialogue and makes it almost impossible for us to collectively solve very real public policy problems. But in the case of wildfire, this cynical political manipulation of our fears is also very dangerous to our safety and the safety of our communities. By ignoring the facts about how wildfire threatens us and by trying to turn our fears of wildfire into support for commercial activities that will actually make the wildfire threat greater, these politicians and economic interests are actually putting us in greater danger.

The facts are relatively straightforward.

First, our national fire science laboratories have shown that the most reliable and cheapest way to protect people, homes, and communities from the threat of wildfire is to change the way we manage our homes, yards, and the land within a couple hundred feet of where we live. If we build with the right materials, if we maintain our homes correctly, and if we maintain a fire-safe landscape immediately around those homes, we can keep almost all homes safe no matter what the intensity of the wildfire that sweeps across the larger landscape. The place that landscapes need to be intensively managed is immediately around homes and communities, not dozens or hundreds of miles away in remote natural forests.

Second, commercial timber harvest increases the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire rather than reducing it. Commercial timber harvest removes the least flammable part of the forest, the commercially valuable large trees, while leaving the most flammable, the smaller trees and brush. In addition, commercial timber harvest leaves behind the branches, needles, and other waste products of logging, adding a very flammable fuel load. Commercial timber harvest also opens up the forest canopy allowing the temperature to rise and the moisture content to decline on the forest floor. The logging roads also open the forests to motor vehicles and human activity that can ignite wildfires.

Third, a landscape-wide effort at non-commercial thinning across the Western United States would be impossibly costly and not ecologically justified. The money will never be made available to carry it out, nor should it. Most wildfires do not threaten people, homes, communities, or commercial resources. In addition, those wildfires are a valuable part of our forests’ natural lifecycles. Most of them take place in remote areas that are not part of the commercial timber base, and those fires provide a broad array of environmental benefits. We clearly saw that in the Yellowstone fires of 1988. We cannot possibly “fireproof” our forests unless we are willing to cut them down and pave them over with a non-flammable material like concrete. That has the same appeal as committing all of our natural rivers and streams to concrete ditches and dams to control flooding.

These basic facts clearly suggest a non-controversial way to protect our people and communities from the dangers posed by wildfire: focus the efforts to reduce wildfire threat and damage where we live. This requires a cooperative effort by homeowners, home insurers, local land-use planning authorities, local fire departments, and forestland owners like the US Forest Service. The buffer of “defensible space” required around a home built of the right materials and maintained so as to reduce the probability of ignition is at most a couple hundred feet. That is were forest fuels management should be focused. Instead, the US Forest Service, with the support of the timber industry and the politicians working with them, has spent much of the money that has been made available to protect people and homes on what amount to commercial timber sales far removed from the urban-forest interface. As a result, instead of protecting people and homes, we have been putting them at greater risk. That is the actual result of the politically motivated manipulation of our natural fear of wildfire to support commercial timber harvests rather than pragmatically focusing on protecting people and homes.

We can learn how to safely inhabit our Western forests and mountains. To do so takes a pragmatic approach that focuses on managing what is already a human-dominated landscape, namely our home sites and the land immediately around them, rather than attacking the region’s entire forested landscape. To focus where our efforts will do some good, we have to put aside the commercial timber interests who do not really care about our safety. Then a whole array of non-commercial landscape management possibilities emerges that can both improve our safety and the health of our natural forests. Until we clearly and unequivocally stop allowing wildfires to be used politically to pursue commercial objectives that have nothing to do with protecting people, homes, communities, and resources, we will continue to both threaten people and squander enormous resources. It’s time to tell our cynical politicians to “shut up” and get to work.