KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
The Rational
Response to Wildfires
As the summer weather breaks and ushers in cool, moist fall weather, all of us are breathing a sigh of relief, both literally and figuratively: The 2003 fire season may finally be over. At the same time, given the apparent increased frequency of bad wildfire seasons, we cannot avoid being haunted by the question of whether there is something we ought to be doing to reduce the wildfire threat.
Any
rational response to the problem of wildfires has to begin with the recognition
that in extreme weather, characterized by drought, high temperatures, low
humidity, high winds, and frequent dry lightning storms, there is nothing
we can do to prevent or stop all wildfires. They, like hurricanes in the south
and tornadoes in the
I am naïve enough to actually believe that there is a broad consensus about the high priority things we should be doing to protect our communities, people, and property from wildfire. That consensus, however, begins to dissolve when special interest groups try to piggy-back their private interests onto our wildfire response in hopes of exploiting people’s fear and misery to advance private, non-fire, objectives.
Ignoring that perverse effort to abuse other people’s hard times, let me outline the priority wildfire responses that I think that almost everyone could support.
We should obviously begin with the homes and structures at risk. Protecting those homes is the priority objective of fire fighters. A huge chunk of the resources deployed to fight wildfires are focused on protecting people and property. Those homes and the land immediately surrounding them have to be made fire resistant. This is a private responsibility in which the public has a direct interest since it is the public who fund the firefighting and in whose name firefighters are put at risk. We know how to do this. The question is how to quickly implement the necessary steps. Local building codes and land use plans, local fire departments, and insurance companies all have a role to play to make sure it gets done. If, for instance, insurance companies required regular fire department certification that a home in the forest was defensible against wildfire, mortgage lenders would automatically add their pressure on homeowners to adapt their property to minimize the threat wildfire poses to that property. Regular wildfire maintenance would become part of living in the woods just as regular lawn watering and mowing is a part of living in suburbia. The federal government can help by allowing federal forest fuel control funds to be spent on all forest lands, regardless of ownership.
The next priority is to treat the human dominated forestlands that immediately surround these homes and our communities. These forestlands are already roaded; timber has been harvested from them in the past. As a result of that past logging, grazing, and fire suppression, these dry low elevation forests carry unnaturally high fuel loads that in hot dry years can explode in fire. We need to begin to strategically build the equivalent of forested fire breaks on those lands, thinning the trees so that tree canopies are far apart and young trees and brush along with the slash from the thinning are removed. Then these forested fire breaks have to be regularly maintained as low fuel areas. Wildfire hitting such areas will lose most of its energy. Such forested fire breaks would also create accessible working spaces from which fire crews could operate to stop or turn wildfire approaching homes and communities. Focusing resources here involves focusing on a small fraction of the Western landscape rather than the astronomical 40 or 100 million acres some are insisting we must thin. On this much smaller acreage, we could afford to focus exclusively on fuel and fire control, un-compromised by commercial timber harvest objectives.
The unroaded backcountry should be left alone. Most fires there do not threaten us, especially if we have made our homes and the forests immediately surrounding our communities safer. Besides, we cannot afford to treat the entire forested landscape and these rugged isolated areas would be the most costly to treat. Just as important, we do not even know whether these lands need to be treated or what treatments might be effective.
This set of wildfire priorities leaves the bulk of our forests and grasslands, those already roaded and strongly affected by past commercial logging and grazing, open to continued public debate over the appropriate role of commercial objectives as opposed to real ecosystem health objectives. We have not finished that debate yet, and we cannot and should not try to legislate an end to it. We also do not have the scientific knowledge and experience to know what would work on the many different aspects of that complex forest mosaic. And, again, we do not have the financial resources to engage in broad ranging ecosystem restoration on all of those lands.
Given our limited resources and the high priority of protecting people, homes, and communities, we have more than enough to do for the next half-dozen years that we can all agree on while we continue to study the larger, landscape-wide problem of forest health and try to build a consensus for appropriate action.
Let’s get on with the priority work we know we have to do.