The Cost of Hazardous Fuel Reduction Efforts to Control Wildfires

Last December President Bush signed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act and federal agencies immediately began implementing the hazardous fuels reduction sections of that law. The law authorizes the expenditure of $720 million a year to reduce unnaturally high fuel levels in our forests in hopes of reducing the number, size, and intensity of wildfires. A total of up to 20 million acres of federal land are to be treated over the coming years. Federal agencies have been treating an average of 2.5 million acres each year.

To put these fuel reduction efforts in perspective, federal wildfire specialists estimate that 190 million acres of federal land are at high or moderate risk of unnaturally hot wildfires because of the accumulation of fuels. If all lands, public as well as private are included, 620 million acres fall into these risk categories.

Although data is somewhat scarce and largely based on complex computer models, it appears that efforts to reduce hazardous fuel levels down to the low risk category will be very expensive. An analysis of what it would cost to reduce hazardous fuel levels in south central Oregon’s dry and mountainous Klamath ecoregion concluded that if all of the biomass required to reduce the fire risk to the low category were removed, the cost would be $1,800 per acre.

If we cut that cost in half and apply it to the acreage the fire scientists tell us is at risk to unnaturally intense wildfires, we are still talking about spending $171 billion dollars just to treat the federal lands or $558 billion to treat all lands at high or moderate risk. Clearly Bush’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” represents just a drop in a very large bucket in terms of both acres treated and dollars spent.

Other wildfire scientists tell us that if we are willing to drastically reduce the density and increase the spacing of trees on our public lands, the costs of hazardous fuel reduction can be dramatically reduced. This would be true because such a prescription would remove most of the large trees in our forests and they have substantial commercial value. In addition, such drastic reductions in the number of trees and other woody vegetation in our forests would reduce the need to reenter the forest regularly to keep hazardous fuel levels low.

Even it we were willing to drastically change our forests in this way, still only about half of the forest lands at risk in Montana could be so treated at no or low cost, only a quarter of the at risk lands in New Mexico would pay for themselves, and almost none of the lands in Oregon’s Blue Mountains could be treated costlessly. The key to this low cost fuel reduction treatment is the harvest of commercially valuable trees, that is, turning the hazardous fuel treatment largely into a commercial timber sale but using the revenues from those timber sales to pay for the removal of vegetation that has no commercial value. Where there is limited commercial timber value because of forest conditions, isolated locations, or rugged terrain, this economic alchemy of using commercially valuable timber to fund the removal of non-commercial fuels does not work.

Whether it works ecologically and environmentally is also a matter of considerable dispute. Natural forests are not all park-like with widely spaced large trees. Natural forests are a complex mosaic of different species, different densities, and different age structures. At different elevations, different aspects, and different climates, natural forests vary dramatically. Imposing a single fire control regime would be an ecological and environmental mistake besides being an economic disaster.

So what should we be doing? First we should abandon the fantasy, largely propagated by the timber industry that we are going to “treat” the entire forested landscape. We should also firmly reject the suggestion that commercial timber harvest is a hazardous fuel reduction program or a tool of ecological restoration. It is neither.

Then we should engage in vigorous experimentation with a variety of vegetative manipulations in the human-dominated landscapes where we actually live, that is on the urban-wildland interface. We need to see on the ground what the various hazardous fuel reduction prescriptions look like, how they affect wildlife habitat and fisheries, and how effective they actually are at helping control wildfire. Since these landscapes have already been dramatically modified by our roads, our homes, our activities, and our domesticated animals, there is less of a concern about protecting the full range of forest values. These are already committed lands. That is not to say that we should ignore natural processes. We only make the pursuit of our objectives more difficult and costly when we try to fight nature rather than cooperate with her.

As we gain experience with what works both in terms of fire control and ecological functioning, we can then seriously but critically consider the appropriateness of applying those lessons to forestlands further away from our homes and communities. This is a good, old-fashioned pragmatic American approach that we can afford and to which we all should be able to agree.