12/15/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Wildfire Rhetoric and Reality

It was only last week that Glacier National Park opened the last of the areas closed during this summer’s wildfires. Cold weather and rain cooled the fires down in September, but the fires continued to smolder into late November when heavy snow buried the last of the hot spots. A series of early winter windstorms also knocked down the most dangerous of the trees weakened by the fires and allowed Glacier Park to decide that the burned areas were safe for human entry again. The last of the summer fire closures had ended.

The political fallout from this year’s wildfires, however, was just reaching its peak with the final passage of the Bush Administration’s “Healthy Forests Initiative.” The fall wildfires that ravaged Southern California provided the final “kick” needed to push this controversial legislation through.

Two broad assumptions about wildfires helped mobilize the political pressure to pass the “Healthy Forests Initiative.” The first assumption is that most wildfires burn in forests, hence the focus on doing something to the forests to keep them from burning. The second assumption is that logging and thinning those forests will reduce the incidence and severity of forest fires. The 2003 wildfires show that neither of these assumptions is correct.

Recall that 90 percent of the Southern California fires burned through grass, shrub, and scrub lands. These incredibly volatile chaparral lands are dominated by head-high brush, grass, and dwarf trees, not forests. But we do not have to look to Southern California to see that all manner of landscapes can support wildfires. The first serious wildfire in Montana during 2003 was a lightning-caused blaze in the grass, sage, and Ponderosa pine hills in and near the C.M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Montana. In early August a large fire erupted in the grass, juniper, and pine hills northeast of Big Timber. In general many of the largest and most rapidly spreading wildfires are those burning in desert, grasslands, and shrub lands. Of course, it is not clear how one can log and thin grasslands and shrub lands.

In our forests, however, we obviously could be carrying out more logging and thinning. Governor Martz even told Glacier National Park that “there had to be some thinning” done in the Park so fires like this summer’s would not happen again.

The Governor should have looked over the private, cut-over, commercial timberlands of Plum Creek to see how likely it was that logging and thinning would reduce the wildfire danger. Plum Creek Timber Company, which has worked feverishly to liquidate its standing timber inventories using dense systems of roads, saw over twice as larger a percentage of its Montana timberlands burn this last summer as burned on National Forest land. Just southeast of Missoula, the Cooney Ridge fire burned very, very hot through Plum Creek’s slash, stumps, and clearcut mountainsides, blowing up into a high severity industrial conflagration until it hit the Welcome Creek Wilderness where the burning slowed and became less severe, proceeding in more of a mosaic pattern, and eventually burning itself out within the wilderness boundaries. West of Missoula the Fish Creek fire burned through 14,000 acres of logged-over Plum Creek timberlands. The clearcut and intensively roaded lands in the Deer Creek drainage of that fire burned at especially high severity. Up Gold Creek northeast of Missoula and on the edge of the Rattlesnake Wilderness, Plum Creek lands also burned explosively. The fires sweeping across Plum Creek’s commercial timberlands there left them looking bombed out while the fires in the adjacent Rattlesnake Wilderness burned with more of a diverse mosaic pattern.

The point is not that logging causes wildfires and wilderness puts them out, but that logging and thinning do not prevent fires or even reduce the severity of fires. Wildfires occur in all kinds of landscapes, not just in forests. And forest fires occur under all kinds of management regimes: commercial timber management including clearcuts and tree farms, thinned forests, roadless areas, as well as National Parks and Wildernesses.

Given that the Bush “Healthy Forest Initiative” is premised on assumptions that this past fire season proved to be incorrect, one has to be left wondering about that legislation’s likely effectiveness in reducing the wildfire threat. The legislation focuses on one type of landscape, ignoring the very type of Southern California fire that helped get it passed. It emphasizes logging and thinning even though many logged and thinned lands burned especially hot this last summer.

The likelihood that the enormous amounts of money this legislation will spend removing trees from out forests will be spent well is drastically reduced by the limits that the legislation puts on citizen involvement in and review of the decisions of federal land managers and the restrictions on our courts traditional supervision of adherence to federal laws and regulations.

This could be a terrible waste if environmentalists’ worst fears are confirmed and much of this money is again used to open backcountry forests to the equivalent of logging. On the other hand, the federal land managers could show that they can operate independently of the political pressure from the timber industry and spend the money where it would do the most good, reducing the flammability of the human dominated forests that surround many of our communities and neighborhoods.