Experts Seek Costly Thinning of Forests

Facing a swath of wildfires that on Wednesday threatened to meet on the Idaho-Montana border, ecologists are becoming increasingly concerned that massive blazes could sweep through most of the fuel-choked forests of the interior West in the coming decades.

“Because we’ve been controlling fires for so long, we are pushing them outside the range where they might have been manageable,” said Ann Bartuska, director of forest management for the U.S. Forest Service. “We need to take action.”

The Forest Service this week plans to deliver to Congress a $12-billion proposal to clean dense, fire-prone underbrush out of 40 million acres of forests from Montana to California.

The fire prevention effort--which would be one of the biggest ever undertaken in the national forest system--would amount to a tenfold increase in current spending. Without it, specialists say, ferocious blazes like those that already have plundered millions of acres will probably burn through the majority of the forested wilderness west of the Rockies. The damage would persist for generations.

The recommendation is for preventive burns and extensive tree thinning through 3 million acres a year--far in excess of current logging levels. It reflects a growing realization of the potentially devastating consequences of the fierce fires now burning on wild land in 12 states. Far from the kind of beneficent blazes that nourish soil and replenish trees, these are so massive and hot that it could take decades or longer for forests to recover, ecologists say.

“Without the funds to address the underlying causes . . . these fires are just going to continue and just get worse--until essentially there’s not much left,” said Leon Neuenschwander, professor of forest ecology at the University of Idaho. “Our tax dollars will be spent trying to contain these fires, while all the firemen can really do is basically pray for rain.”

“It is apparent that time is running out for a strategy to successfully avert high-cost, high-loss consequences,” said the report signed this week by Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck for delivery to Congress.

Montana Governor Declares Disaster

With 1.1 million acres burning in 86 major fires on wild land, Montana Gov. Marc Racicot issued a disaster declaration Wednesday. Firefighters, meanwhile, prepared for a new set of lightning storms that could link the worst of the wildfires into a single inferno in Idaho and Montana.

A total of 800 homes in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley south of Darby were under evacuation orders as a thick haze of smoke hampered efforts to spot new fires and fight existing ones. In Idaho, authorities closed the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness--a popular rafting destination--as firefighters attacked blazes on the southern bank of the Salmon River.

The Forest Service recommendation to spend $825 million a year to help avert wildfires promises to escalate the political war already brewing over the Clinton administration’s timber policy. Over the past decade, there has been a 74% reduction in harvests.

At a public meeting with Forest Service officials last week in Darby, talk quickly moved from firefighting tactics to blame. The logging cutbacks, residents said, are what caused the dense fuel loads now aflame in the forests.

“We have some elections coming, and we can take back the West!” shouted Suzy Foss, an Arabian horse breeder from Hamilton, Mont. “We have sat on our butts enjoying the beauty, and let the environmentalists take over this country!”

“This fire did not start a week ago. It started 15 years ago, when we stopped selective logging,” said Guy Copenhaber, a Darby resident. “We had an economy then. We don’t have one now.”

Racicot, a Republican, has accused the administration of ignoring warnings that under-managed forests were creating a wild land fire hazard. GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush said last week that current policies restricting logging have “made the forests much more dangerous.”

“The Forest Service has known for some time that . . . in a hot, dry year [forests] were destined for this kind of catastrophic fire. And yet we have an administration in Washington, D.C., that is hellbent on locking these lands up to any kind of management,” said Cary Hegreberg of the Montana Wood Products Assn., a logging industry group.

Environmental groups, however, have countered that past logging in federal forests has left them even more vulnerable to fire by removing shade cover and moisture.

“The frustration is that our congressional delegation in Idaho is just using this to bash a lame-duck presidency. . . . It’s pure politics, and it purely confuses the issue,” said Dallas Gudgell of the Idaho Conservation League. “Past management practices are not stopping these fires, either. I’m not seeing the fires run up against these clear cuts and stop.”

GAO Reported Critical Buildup of Fuel

The Forest Service has indeed known for years that a century of vigorous fire suppression was leading to a dangerous buildup of brush and small trees--the kind of fuel that is likely to turn a small, cleansing fire into a devastating inferno.

The biggest wake-up call came last August, when the General Accounting Office declared that 39 million acres of national forests in the interior West were at high risk because of the fuel buildup. Forest managers have only 10 to 25 years to take action “before catastrophic wildfires become widespread,” the GAO said.

Fire ecologists have echoed those findings, warning of the potential for damage across huge swaths of the western U.S. that could take generations to reverse.

“In our dry forests . . . damage can be very long lasting or even permanent, in terms of hundreds and hundreds of years,” Neuenschwander said. “It leads to changes in soils, it exposes sites to erosion, it creates situations where the natural nutrients either get burned off or erode off. And, of course, that translates to mud in the streams, as well.”

The Forest Service has been spending about $92 million a year on fuel reduction, enough to help clear 570,000 acres annually. Upping that to the 3 million acres a year now envisioned has been economically and politically impossible for a number of reasons.

First, increases in preventive burning--a tactic generally supported in the environmental community--are complicated by the growing proximity of residential areas to the national forests. And there is the potential for smoke created by controlled burns to violate federal air pollution laws.

There also is the possibility that a preventive burn will get out of control. In New Mexico earlier this year, a controlled national forest burn got out of hand, threatening the Los Alamos National Laboratory and causing $1 billion in damages.

Brush management has presented the Forest Service with an economic quandary. Most loggers aren’t interested in the small-diameter trees and brush that need to be cleared for good fire control. So to offset the costs of removing the small trees, the government has sold an increased number of contracts permitting logging of big trees.

There is no way to significantly expand such a strategy across the Western forests without huge increases in the overall timber harvest--an unlikely scenario.

In fact, environmental groups complain that many of the trees being cut under the guise of “stewardship” sales involve large, healthy trees, which studies have shown actually keep forest fires from burning hotter and faster.

In one timber sale last year in the Tahoe National Forest--ostensibly cut to protect California spotted owl nesting habitat from the risk of fire--most of the trees removed were more than two feet in diameter, and some were in excess of three feet, said Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project in Pasadena.

“Historically, fire suppression has been almost entirely about protecting timber commodity value. Now . . . [the Forest Service] realizes that because they’ve been doing fire suppression for 50 years, they have the potential for very large blazes to burn bigger,” Hanson said. “Basically, they’ve created a Frankenstein monster, and they’re trying to prevent it from walking off the land and causing damage.”

Finding Markets for Materials

The primary focus of the new prevention proposal is on forests near urban areas and wilderness areas with high ecological risks. Bartuska said the Forest Service is seeking to promote development of cottage industries and milling techniques that can make economic use of small trees that traditionally have had little value.

“Like any good market-driven economy, people are finding all kinds of creative uses for materials,” she said. In New Mexico, for example, builders of traditional adobe homes make use of small poles called vigas, “and some of the small-diameter material you would use for thinning is the ideal size.”

“We don’t have to be investing in big trees; we can be developing value from a product that we’re moving for other purposes,” she said.

Nonetheless, the new proposal concedes that at least $500 million of the $825 million in annual costs would require new funding.

Fighting the inevitable forest fires that would result from doing nothing would cost even more, the agency says.

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Western Forests and Fire

Years of suppressing fires in Western forests has made them denser, leading to an increase in catastrophic wildfires, like those currently burning in 12 states. The larger, intense fires destroy more habitat and subject soil to subsequent erosion.

Burned Acreage

The number of acres of national forestlands that have burned in the last 10 years has increased, reversing a trend.

Source: Government Accounting Office’s presentation of data from U.S. Forest Service