Planned Federal Prescribed Burns in National Forests Inflame Critics

Smokey Bear isn’t going to like this.

That’s what Rep. Dale Kildee was thinking as Forest Service officials explained why they intend to set fires at several national forests this year.

“When I grew up, fire was always the enemy of the forest. Now it’s a friend?” the Democrat from suburban Detroit asked during a congressional hearing in March.

Actually, it depends on whom you ask.

The Clinton administration has ignited controversy in Congress and across the West with plans to increase the use of prescribed burning--the intentional setting of small fires--to help clear overstocked forests of dead and dying timber.

“There are a lot of hidden problems in prescribed burning,” said Rep. Bob Smith (R-Ore.), the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

“People will always make misjudgments. Nobody can predict the weather,” said Smith, a friend of the timber industry who prefers salvage logging to clear the forest floor of downed wood.

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Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck says the low-intensity fires will reduce unprecedented fuel loads that threaten catastrophic fires across one-fifth of the 191 million acres of U.S. national forests.

Fire is indeed a friend, Dombeck told Kildee, one that should be “greatly respected.

“There isn’t a burn that’s not dangerous and shouldn’t be taken very, very seriously,” Dombeck told the House Resources subcommittee on forests and forest health.

But the burning planned over as many as 1.3 million acres next year--up from about 750,000 this year and an average of about 300,000 in each of the previous 10 years--is necessary because of decades of “extensive, overzealous, if you will, fire suppression,” he said.

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Until recently, federal firefighters tried to douse every blaze in a national forest. As a result, they upset the natural cycle of fires that for 10,000 years made way for more mature trees.

“The price that we have paid for 60, 80 or 100 years of very effective fire suppression is that we have changed the succession of ecosystems,” said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who drew industry criticism by pushing for prescribed fire in February.

The problem has been compounded by clear-cut logging that stripped forests of native tree species, Babbitt said. Many were replaced by less fire-resistant trees that thrive in the sunlight but are more susceptible to insects and disease.

“We must not sacrifice the integrity of God’s creation at the altar of commercial timber production,” he said. “If our forest patient has a long history of poor eating habits and indigestion, then we need to burn off the unhealthy fat, not practice forest liposuction.”

The administration is seeking $30 million to $50 million to fortify the burning program in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, which would allow for treatment of 850,000 acres to 1.3 million acres.

By lighting some fires, Forest Service officials say they can pick favorable conditions, temperatures, humidity, wind direction and speed.

“If there’s a disaster, Mother Nature takes its own course. There’s no ability to control the situation,” Dombeck said.

The shifting emphasis comes as the Clinton administration works its way out from under what Vice President Al Gore calls the biggest mistake of Clinton’s first term--the so-called “salvage timber rider.”

Western Republicans, warning of catastrophic fire threats and hoping to accelerate harvests, passed the special waiver through Congress two years ago exempting salvage logging from the usual laws protecting fish and wildlife.

The Forest Service ended up logging about 50% more salvage timber than normal during the 18-month period covered by the rider, which expired Dec. 31.

“It was the first time this administration has stopped pandering to the politically correct set and did something about forest health,” said Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R-N.C.), coauthor of the rider.

Environmentalists prefer prescribed burning as a more natural alternative to removal of the dead and dying timber. The charred, decaying wood left by fires helps nurture the soil and provides habitat for wildlife, they say.

“We don’t buy the argument that you have to get in there and harvest timber in order to make the woods safe from fire,” said Greg Aplet, a forest ecologist for the Wilderness Society in Denver. “What we’ve learned is the biological legacy of a natural fire is not present in the post-harvest of a clear cut.”

Smith said prescribed fire would have worked well 25 years ago, but fuel loads are too great now.

“When you get the kind of fuel loading we have now, you can’t fight fires. You just get out of the way,” he said. “Unless we take care of these forests and manage them, we are going to lose more every year.”

About 6 million acres of federal forest lands burned in natural fires last year, including 1 million acres in Oregon. Dombeck estimates that significant fire threats remain across 39 million acres nationwide.

One fire near Prairie City, Ore., last year started on about 35 acres. Because it was in an area slated for prescribed burning, “they thought they’d let it burn a little bit,’ Smith said.

“It went to 35,000 acres,” he said. Another fire in Hells Canyon that the government decided to let burn to about 10,000 acres instead jumped to 50,000 acres, he said.

“It is going to get away when you have 100-degree temperatures and 12% humidity and a 40-mph wind,” Smith said. “You are going to burn, I don’t give a damn what you do.”

Dennis Lynch, a forestry professor at Colorado State University, told the House panel that “prescribed fire is not a precise tool.”

“The task of restoring healthy forests in the Central Rockies will require the use of prescribed fire on a scale never before attempted,” he said.

Industry backers said removing dead wood is important before most prescribed burns to keep the fires from burning too hot and scorching the soil.

“It is absolutely critical that mechanical harvest is a vital player in forest restoration management plans,” said Martin Moore, director of environmental planning and research for Apache County, Ariz.

“Without mechanical harvest, in a time of constricting budgets, forest health and fire-hazard reduction will become impossible tasks,” he said.

Elaine Zielinski, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s state director for Oregon and Washington, said it’s a question of risks.

“I’ve been on prescribed fires. I hate them,” Zielinski said.

“There’s all the smoke. They are dangerous. People think you set a line and it stops. But we are at a point in time [when] we have to look at the trade-offs out there. There’s a feeling among a lot of folks that we have not used prescribed fire as much as we need to.”

Prescribed burning costs the Forest Service about $20 to $50 per acre; fighting fires costs from $400 to $4,000, Dombeck said. He recently visited a site near the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon where $1,600 per acre was spent to fight a fire that burned 19 homes.

Smith said that’s a good example of how the romantic notion of natural fires has run headlong into the urbanization of the West, where more homes are being built near national forests.

“It’s cheap and they say it gets us back to the way we found it when the Indians were here,” Smith said. “But they forgot to say the Indians didn’t want to burn the whole thing down with their tepees in it.”