11/3/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

 

Using the California Wildfires to Justify the “Healthy Forests” Bill

 

            The “Healthy Forests” legislation sped through the Senate recently, passing almost unanimously.  The wildfire storm that was sweeping across southern California at the time, destroying thousands of homes and killing both residents and firefighters, provided the impetus to end debate and pass legislation that the authors claim will reduce the threat of such catastrophic wildfires in the future.  The legislative battle is not yet over since the Senate and House versions of the bill are quite different.

            Watching legislation being drafted, amended, and passed is always as stomach churning as watching the making of sausage, but the use of the California fires to pass this legislation is more disturbing than most legislative processes in its disregard for the facts.

            First, 90 percent of the lands burned by the southern California wildfires were not forest lands but shrublands dominated by head-high brush, grass, and dwarf trees.  On most of these lands there are few, if any, small commercial trees that can be removed by thinning or logging.

            Second, the US Geological Survey issued a press release during these wildfires pointing out that it was not past fire suppression and resulting fuel buildup that were the cause of the chaparral shrubland fires in southern California.[1]  The researchers also pointed out that thinning these chaparral lands would have no real effect on wildfires.  When 60 mile per hour Santa Ana winds are blowing, the fires sweep through the chaparral in stand-replacing crown fires regardless of whether previous fires had thinned out the vegetation and reduced fuels. Large, intense fires in California’s chaparral were equally common in the late 19th century before widespread fire suppression was attempted.  One of the largest fires in Los Angeles County (60,000 acres) occurred in 1878 and the largest fire in Orange County’s history (over a half a million acres) occurred in 1889.

            Third, almost two thirds of the lands burned by the recent California wildfires were on non-federal lands, beyond the reach of the federal “Healthy Forest” legislation.

            Protecting homes and human life in these fire prone and fire adapted shrublands depends not on landscape-wide removal of vegetation from federal lands but on the management of the vegetation immediately adjacent to homes, regardless of ownership, and the construction of homes out of materials that are resistant to ignition from wind-carried fire brands.

            Another focus of the “healthy forest” legislation is to speed up hazardous fuel reduction efforts on public lands by limiting the ability of citizens to appeal government decisions that they see as wrong or dangerous.  But just as Congress was voting on this legislation, the US General Accounting Office, Congress’ independent, non-partisan research agency, released its fourth analysis in two years of the impact of appeals and litigation on the ability of the US Forest Service to carry out its hazardous fuels reduction activities.[2] The GAO again found that citizen appeals and litigation were not delaying hazardous fuels reduction. The GAO found that on 95 percent of the acres where the Forest Service was trying to reduce fuels, appeals and litigation did not prevent the activities from being ready for implementation within the normal 90-day review period. On 98 percent of the acres the Forest Service sought to treat, there was no litigation.  Even the Forest Service did not claim that appeals and litigation were the primary cause of the delays it experienced. Instead it pointed to bad weather and the diversion of fuel reduction funds into seasonal fire fighting as the primary reasons for delay.

            Of those fuel reduction proposals that were appealed, over a quarter, 27 percent, were modified or abandoned by the Forest Service. Clearly the appeals process was working as intended, allowing the Forest Service to interact with citizens, improve the proposals or agree that some of the proposals were seriously flawed and should go back to the drawing board. Our forests, the Forest Service, and our democracy are better as a result.

            If thinning forests far from where people live and shutting down the public involvement that has actually been quite productive will not protect people, homes, and communities, what then is the explanation for the drive to pass this so-called “healthy forests” bill? It largely comes down to the timber industry seeking to regain the privileged access to the commercially valuable timber on public lands that it had for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The horrible mess the timber industry made of public lands with its sprawling, commercially driven, clearcuts led to a public outcry that shifted forest management back towards the original purpose of our National Forests: protection of the full range of environmental values that natural forests can provide, not just the extraction of commercial products. The timber industry now seeks to exploit our natural fear of catastrophic wildfire and our desire for health forests to renew their private commercial claim on those public forests. The debate in Congress is over whether we willing to be frightened into yielding our public lands once again to those private claims. 


[1] Oct. 30, 2003, USGS Western Region News Release, Office of Communications, Eureka, CA, contact Gloria Maender. “California fires not typical, expert says,” Sherry Devlin, Missoulian, Nov. 5, 2003, p. 1.

[2] Information on Appeals and Litigation Involving Fuels Reduction Activities, GAO-04-52, October 24, 2003.