U.S. Plans Policy of ‘Prescribed’ Forest Fires

Despite fears the idea prompts in the West, the Clinton administration is launching a major campaign to thin the nation’s forests by igniting more controlled fires and allowing a greater number of naturally occurring blazes to burn themselves out.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt will open the campaign in a speech today in Idaho. The administration intends to more than double the amount it spends on planned fires over several years.

The plan reflects a reversal of a century-old policy under which the federal government and state agencies deployed whatever forces were necessary in a warlike stance to extinguish all forest and grass fires as quickly as possible.

Although the federal policy shift began a decade ago, forest managers have been slow to put it into practice. Forestry experts have complained that there has been a dangerous gap between the continuing practice of fire suppression and the policy of starting or allowing burns in forests where they destroy undergrowth but leave mature healthy trees undamaged.

Babbitt’s campaign is part of a broader focus on the health of the nation’s forests and puts the administration in the middle of a battle involving timber companies, Congress, environmentalists, state agencies and local communities over how to protect forests while also taking advantage of their timber.

Those who favor greater use of fires said that is the best way to help forests and reduce the number of out-of-control blazes that have broken out in the West in recent years.

But critics in California and other forest-rich states said that supervised fires can burn out of control, threatening communities and fouling the air, whereas timber interests want to make sure that the policy will not diminish logging.

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As part of its program of prescribed fires, the Forest Service burned more than 45,000 acres of national forest in California in 1995 and more than 52,000 acres last year, according to Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the Forest Service in San Francisco. The agency administers 20 million acres of national forest land in the state.

“We hope to do more this year and Congress has given us an additional $6 million to use on prescribed burns in 1997,” Mathes said. He pointed out that among the hurdles faced in California are periodic objections by state air quality officials about the impact of smoke.

Moreover, Forest Service officials said that they must contend with the concerns of rapidly expanding communities in the Sierra Nevada, where about half of the 20 million acres of Forest Service land is located and where more and more homes are being built adjacent to forest boundaries.

At stake under the new federal policy, proponents said, is nothing less than the future health of millions of acres of ponderosa pine and other old-growth stands of western giants, as well as the safety of communities from Arizona to Montana and across the Sierra range to the Pacific shores. Will they be destroyed in catastrophic, uncontrolled fires, or can their health be maintained through limited, controlled burning?

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Environmentalists and representatives of the timber industry, nearly always at odds, find themselves supporting a policy of increased burning. But budget concerns and what some describe as bureaucratic inertia stand in the way.

So, too, do concerns that burning forests could create air pollution problems, because where there’s fire, there’s smoke--so thick and choking that during fire season it fouls the air across broad stretches of the West and can settle so heavily in fog-like conditions that it can cause auto accidents.

As Babbitt intends to explain, the problem in the West stems from an interruption of a natural process in which fires thin out low-lying brush and saplings that compete with established trees for water and nutrients. Without such fires, the newer growth sucks up ground water and crowds space for roots. The older trees grow spindly and, their immune systems weakened, fall prey to infestations of beetles and disease.

When fires occur, either naturally from lightning or by arson or accident, the brush provides fuel, the younger trees offer ladders for the spreading fire to climb, and the older trees are unable to resist combustion, their green crowns bursting into flame 150 to 200 feet above the ground.

The fires grow so hot that “the heat can explode a tree a quarter mile away,” Babbitt said in a recent interview.

Indeed, he said, the uncontrolled forest infernos of the last decade, beginning with the Yellowstone National Park fire in 1988 and later fires in other western forests, reached an unprecedented intensity as a direct result of the failure to maintain healthy forests with the help of cleansing fires.

The shift in the federal government’s emphasis can be seen in budget figures for planned fires. In 1994, the Interior Department spent $4.3 million on prescribed burning and the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Agriculture Department, allotted $12.7 million, officials in each agency said.

For fiscal 1998, the administration is asking Congress for permission to spend as much as $62.8 million on similar activities, up from the $36.9 million allocated in the current year.

The need for increased clearing of old brush can be seen throughout the West, according to the text of Babbitt’s speech, planned for today at Boise State University. In Boise National Forest not far from the campus, fires burned an average of 3,000 acres a year before 1986. Since then, an average of 63,000 acres have burned each year.

The fires are several hundred degrees hotter than in the past and bake the ground so that little can grow, leaving nothing to absorb drenching rains that set off mudslides.

“To restore health and vigor to our forests . . . the obvious first step is to bring back their own ancient predator: wildland fire,” the speech says.

“But it’s no longer so simple. Where forests are choked with fuel, a drip torch would merely set off an uncontrollable inferno. Where forests are packed with homes, we must continue to keep fire out. Where the public worries about smoke and believes all flames are evil, we need to explain and prepare them for this change in our stewardship values.”

Environmental groups and independent forestry experts praised Babbitt’s emphasis on prescribed burning, as did representatives of the timber industry.

However, John Heisenbuttel, senior director of the forest resource program at the American Forest & Paper Assn., said he is concerned that the administration is focusing too heavily “on controlled burning as the silver bullet” while ignoring “mechanical thinning”--heading into the forest with chain saws to cut trees for timber.

And within the Agriculture Department, according to forestry experts, including some in the Forest Service, there is a gap between policy set in Washington and how it is carried out in individual forests.

“Institutional inertia among line managers,” as well as the interruption planned fires would cause in logging and recreation in national forests, are responsible for the failure to carry out burning policies set in Washington, said Norm Christensen, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

Times environmental writer Frank Clifford contributed to this story from Los Angeles.