Fire Against Fire

Wildfires are burning across almost every Western state, making this the most damaging fire season since 1988. The mammoth fires have not been sparked just by some bad-luck combination of high winds and drought that is unique to this year. Rather, they were kindled by nearly a century of misguided fire management.

From the founding of the National Forest Service in 1905 until a policy shift by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 1997, government officials took an almost warlike stance in fighting forest fires: Don’t give them a chance to spread; knock them down as rapidly as possible.

That policy disrupted the occurrence of frequent, low-intensity fires, many sparked by lightning, that had periodically and naturally removed flammable undergrowth. Highly explosive undergrowth has thus built up in 39 million acres of land in the American West, turning the region into a tinderbox.

Babbitt sensibly recognized, as fire ecologist Stephen J. Pyne put it, that the government’s “near-extinction of free-burning fire has upset ecological systems as fully as if rain ceased.” Despite some recent disasters, the science behind this concept is sound.

Babbitt always had a tough time selling the idea of controlled burns, but opposition reached new heights in May when National Park Service fire managers lost control of a burn they set near Los Alamos, N.M. The runaway blaze ultimately ranged over 47,000 acres and destroyed or damaged more than 380 structures.

It was inept management at its worst, but that a blaze raged out of control in New Mexico is not in itself a reason to end controlled burning. The Park Service’s overall record of controlling such fires has been good. In the last two decades, just 1% of its 3,783 controlled burns escaped designated limits. Kieran Suckling of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based environmental group, frames the matter bluntly: “Airplanes crash, but we don’t ban air flights.”

However, Los Alamos does show that the government does not have nearly enough trained staff to accomplish the fivefold increase in controlled burning that it had planned over the next five years. A second obstacle has been opposition from some environmentalists who say the smoke from controlled fires violates air quality standards set by the federal Clean Air Act. Federal officials should grant limited exemptions from the act, recognizing that the ecological benefits of controlled burns--removing woody fuels, breaking down nutrients into ash, promoting vigorous new growth and allowing seeds from some plant species to germinate--may exceed the harm of resulting air pollution.

A third and final obstacle preventing federal officials from increasing the use of controlled fire is money. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that the cost of reducing fuels on the 39 million acres at highest risk could be as much as $12 billion between now and 2014. That’s about $725 million annually, or more than 10 times the level of funding the Forest Service requested for last year.

Disarming the tinderbox that is the American West may be an expensive, imperfect process, but the cost of doing nothing might well be higher. The number of out-of-control wildfires destroying 1,000 acres or more each year in the United States has more than tripled since 1984, from 25 to 80, and the damage and the costs of firefighting have risen accordingly.

To prevent future runaway blazes, federal fire managers clearly need more training, which of course means that Congress will have to give them more money. But the alternative is allowing undergrowth in the West to reach ever more explosive concentrations.

The government, in the end, has little choice but to fight fire with fire.