8/26/02

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

President Bush’s Perverse Political Jujitsu on Wildfire Control

The purposeful confusion and half-truths about wildfire control propagated this last week by President Bush are appalling in their audacity and cynicism. To try to lay an objective basis for a sane discussion of the practical measures we could already be taking to protect our homes and communities if politics and greed had not gotten in the way over the last several years, let me bluntly state some of the facts about protecting homes and communities from wildfire.

• To protect people, homes, and communities, fuel reduction efforts should be concentrated on the wildland-urban interface where people live. Brush, young trees, and dense mature trees should be removed so that intense wildfires cannot ignite homes. This intense management and control of vegetation is required for only a hundred yards or so around human habitation.
• Homes and residential sites within or adjacent to forests that are properly constructed and maintained will not be ignited by even intense wildfires that come within a hundred feet or so of the house. Homes have to be maintained to reduce the chances that fire brands from distant fires or local ground fires can ignite them. Local fire departments and insurance companies can assist in this.
• Large commercially valuable trees tend to be fire resistant. That is obvious after a forest fire when huge quantities of fire-killed trees are harvested, “salvaged,” for their commercial timber value. The fuel in those large trees is not consumed by forest fires.
• Wildfire fuel management, therefore, largely requires the removal of the non-commercial brush and small trees and the leaving of the large commercially valuable trees. That is why commercial logging is not part of a wildfire fuel reduction strategy. An altogether different forest treatment is called for to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire than conventional commercial logging.
• Commercially logged lands are very flammable because of the waste material created, because of the dense brush and small trees that grow after the harvest, because the loss of the forest canopy raises the ground temperature and reduces the moisture content, and because of the higher wind speeds that are facilitated.
• Forest fuel reduction strategies are very costly. A recent US Forest Service research report found that even when trees almost two feet in diameter are allowed to be harvested to help fund the removal of smaller trees and brush, seven out of eight acres treated lose money. The average cost is almost $1,700 per acre. For the 211 million acres of federal forestland that has been identified as at risk for wildfire because of fuels accumulation, it would cost almost $360 billion to carry out such fuel reduction measures. Who will put up that level of funding?
• Almost no one opposes fuel reduction strategies on the wildland-urban interface. When the US Forest Service has focused its forest fuel reduction efforts where people, homes, and communities are located, only about one percent of those projects have been appealed and none have been litigated. Environmental groups have strongly supported forest fuel reduction efforts focused on where people live and have urged spending $2 billion a year for five years to reduce the density of trees in “community protection zones” within 500 yards of communities. This is the priority focus of the Western Governors, the federal land managers under the previous administration, forestry professionals, and fire control agencies as well as environmentalists.
• Unfortunately that is not where the US Forest Service has been concentrating its efforts. In FY 2001 only about a third of the Forest Service’s fuel reduction efforts focused on the wildland-urban interface where people live and where fires most threaten people. This year only about half of the fuel reduction expenditures are targeted on these top priority areas. Instead the Forest Service has focused its efforts on forests far removed from where people live and on commercial timber harvest rather than on forest fuel reduction. It is those disguised timber sales that would not have protected people and communities from wildfires that have been delayed by appeals.

Clearly then, the Bush attack on the Forest Service appeals process has nothing at all to do with protecting people and communities from wildfires. It has to do with protecting profitable commercial timber sales for private businesses. President Bush is asking that our environmental laws be dismantled not to protect people but to protect the profits of the large corporations with whom he is so closely allied. Instead of these proposed anti-environmental commercial measures protecting our homes and communities, they will put them further at risk both to wildfire and the degradation of the forested mountain landscapes that define the West.

This is perverse political jujitsu: Twist people’s legitimate concern about the threat of catastrophic wildfire threatening their homes and communities into a proposal that will put us all at greater risk in order to allow a handful of large companies to make some money.

This is a dangerous distraction that will not increase anyone’s safety. We know what we have to do to protect people, their homes, and their communities. We could have been doing that over the last several years. We could be doing it now. Instead of mobilizing the resources that could make a real difference in our safety, we are witnessing a pointless assault on the very laws that have helped us protect these spectacular natural landscapes in which we have chosen to make our home.