7/28/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Wildfires: Why Don’t We Do Something About Them?!

Thick smoke chokes parts of the Flathead and Bitterroot Valleys, homes burn, firefighters’ lives are lost, communities are put on notice to prepare for evacuation, the western half of Glacier Park is shut off to visitors from around the world, and many other recreation lands are closed. We are obviously well into the 2003 fire season.

The threat, discomfort, and disruption associated with wildfires encourage us to ask why we cannot do something to eliminate the threat of wildfire.

We can get a feeling for the right way to ask and answer that question by considering other natural phenomenon that regularly threaten us and make life miserable: hurricanes, tornados, floods, earthquakes, droughts, heat and cold waves, and blizzards.

Some of these natural threats, such as hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes have no know prevention measures. So we focus not on prevention but on preparation to minimize the damage: warning systems, building codes so more homes survive and are safer for residents, and some land use restrictions so that people are not living where the damage would be greatest. We also do not try to fight heat waves, cold waves, or blizzards. Instead we simply focus on protecting people as we wait for those natural phenomena to pass.

For other natural threats such as floods, we have imagined that our technology could save us by controlling or managing natural forces, but that often as proved to be a costly error. We built dams, dikes, and levees to save us from floods, but floods periodically overpower those structures as in the Mississippi Valley floods of 1993 and the Red River’s inundation of Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1997. In addition, we have discovered that the flood control structures and management damaged the natural functioning of rivers, harming fisheries, wildlife, and vegetation. We are now trying to undo that damage at substantial cost. We have also tried to fight periodic droughts by storing water to supplement rainfall, but when real droughts hit, as they are now, those reservoirs dry up.

Can we stop large fires completely by roading and logging all of our forestlands? Absolutely not. Commercially logged forests are very flammable. Some of the largest and most destructive fires in American history have been in heavily logged forests.

Can we thin our way out of this problem? Yes, if we are willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to remove massive amounts of vegetation from our forests, most of which has no commercial value, and we are willing to repeatedly re-enter all of those lands to control new vegetation and/or to supervise controlled burns.

We would have to do this on hundreds of millions of acres of land, including broad expanses of forestlands where the natural pattern has always been large, hot, stand-replacing fires every 150 to 300 years. Such an effort would be like trying to construct dams and levees to deal with 300 or 500-year floods, very costly, ultimately futile, and destructive of other important values.

When it comes to wildfire, we are still in the early “flood control” frame of mind, imagining that we can stop all large, hot, stand-replacing fires. With unlimited money, we might well be able to do that, but, to do so, we would be destroying the forests to save ourselves from their perceived threat. Of course, there is also a “heat wave” and “drought” aspect to the current wildfire situation. We are currently going through an extended period of extremely hot weather with almost zero rainfall. Dead woody material on the forest floor is almost bone-dry, with record low levels of moisture, a literal tinder pile waiting to be ignited.

That is not to say that we cannot do anything to protect ourselves, our homes, and our communities from wildfire. We can, if we approach wildfire the way we do most other natural threats. We can build and maintain our homes to minimize their susceptibility to damage. We can drastically modify the forests immediately around our homes and communities. And we can either prohibit habitation where the danger is extremely high or put the entire burden of living with that danger on those who insist on living in naturally dangerous places.

Where appropriate in the lower-elevation dry forests in the West, we could also be committing the funds to recreate the park-like forests that ironically timber harvest, grazing, and fire suppression have destroyed and replaced with dense tangles of woody vegetation. Begin this forest restoration adjacent to existing communities.

If we do all of this conscientiously, wild fire would not threaten homes, communities, and lives but wildfires would still burn up forests, close areas to recreation, and fill the air with smoke periodically. Just as we have learned to live with heat waves, droughts, and blizzards, we can learn to live with wildfire.

Why are we not following this prescription? Primarily because timber interests and their anti-environmental allies will not accept these as the priority tasks. Instead they want to use the threat of wildfire to both substantially weaken environmental standards and dramatically increase commercial timber harvests on public lands, things that will do nothing to improve our safety or the health of our forests.