KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Safely Putting
Forest scientists working with the US Forest Service have been assuring us that they have the scientific knowledge to guide effective landscape-wide hazardous forest fuels reduction and forest “restoration” across tens or even hundreds of millions of acres of public forest lands. Allowing those forest “treatment” proposals to proceed, they tell us, would put these forests on a healthy and sustainable fire-resistant basis.
The worrisome thing about what we know and do not know about our forests is that the current high fuel loads in our Western forests are largely the results of past Forest Service activities. It was the Forest Service’s commercial timber programs that harvested the large, more valuable, but also least flammable, trees and then allowed dense forests of small flammable trees to replace them. It was the Forest Service’s commercial livestock grazing program that eliminated the light fuels, grasses and forbs, and replaced them with woody, hotter-burning vegetation. It was the Forest Service’s heroic fire suppression activities that kept natural fires from controlling the forest fuel build up.
Now, without a mention of the “scientific” studies and evidence that once was used to justify the creation of the wildfire problem we are now wrestling with, we are told that forest science clearly shows us the way out of the hazardous forest fuels problem it earlier created. Strangely, but not surprisingly, the new “scientific” solution involves the heavy harvest of commercially valuable trees. Conveniently, this has also been the Forest Service’s primary focus for a half-century.
It should not be surprising that some folks outside the Forest Service and the timber industry are a bit skeptical about the new scientific evidence that seems to justify “more of the same.”
A review of the recent studies of the effectiveness of mechanically removing excess forest fuels to control damaging forest fires both feeds that skepticism and offers some important guidance.
The new forest
fuels control studies largely consist of linking a half-dozen or more computer
simulation models together to “predict” what a particular level of thinning
might do to future forest fire behavior.
This type of computer simulation is heavily used in other sciences. Weather forecasters and economists studying macroeconomic trends both use very elaborate and complex sets of linked models in their projections. These efforts are certainly not useless or “unscientific,” but not very many of us rely on them for accurate predictions. Actual, on-the-ground, scientific experiments testing alternative hypotheses about how vegetative manipulation of the forest can control fires is in its infancy although interesting progress is being made.
These complex computer simulations do provide us with some interesting results:
First, normal commercial logging does not reduce the threat of damaging forest fires. The small trees, brush, and slash left behind leave high risk forests in the same high risk category.
Second, our forests are biologically diverse. Only a minority of federal forest land falls into the lower elevation, dry, previously park-like savannas that often are mistakenly used as a model for all of our forests.
Third, reducing hazardous forest fuels can be very costly, even if we ignore, as all of the studies do, the management costs of conducting such a landscape-wide effort. Although on some lands the fuels removed will have a high enough commercial value to pay for the fuel reduction efforts, on 50 to 80 percent of even the lower elevation forests this will not be true. When one adds in the management costs and the need to continue to treat all of the areas to prevent re-growth of the most flammable fuels, the costs are even more discouraging.
This does not mean that we know nothing or that we cannot rationally do something about wildfire threats to our homes and communities. Given the consensus that has developed that we can and should be engaged in fairly dramatic forest thinning activities immediately around our homes and our communities, we have an opportunity to both test and demonstrate the various types of wildfire control treatments that various forest scientists have been proposing.
Initially focusing hazardous fuel reduction projects on these already human-dominated forests has several advantages. First these forests often are the dry lower elevation type forests that originally were more open and park-line. Second, this would match the priority objective of our fire management programs: protecting people and property. Third, it would give citizens a chance to see exactly what the modified forests would look like and what the positive and negative consequences were. If the results were good, it could generate public confidence in applying those tools away from human habitation. Finally, since these are easily accessible areas, often located near mills, the access and transportation costs would be lower, reducing the overall cost of the fuel reduction activities.
Instead of emotionally debating forest simulation modeling results in the abstract, let’s get on with implementation where it is least controversial and then evaluate the results.