Fire Plan, or Smokescreen?

Wildfire protection must be a key part of any forest management plan -- as the dozens of San Bernardino and San Diego-area residents who lost their homes to last summer’s infernos know only too painfully. But fire protection is no reason to permit unsustainable logging or twist the truth.

So why is the U.S. Forest Service using a 1909 photograph of a Montana forest in a federal pamphlet extolling the benefits of logging in the Sierra Nevada? And why does the pamphlet imply the forest pictured is pristine, when the stumps in the background clearly show the area was logged?

The pamphlet is part of the agency’s attempt to generate support for a plan to greatly accelerate logging in national forests. The proposal, dressed up as wildfire prevention, is a troubling departure from the Sierra Nevada Framework, a plan carefully crafted to manage the 11 national forests stretching from Mt. Lassen south to the Sequoia National Forest, all in California.

It took years of negotiation between the federal government and Western states to develop that framework, balancing the needs of communities and logging companies with sustaining the forests. One of its key provisions designated 4 million of the Sierra’s 11 million acres of forest as an old-growth reserve. Logging could continue there, but with protection for the large old trees and the wildlife that depend on them.

Even some environmentalists concede the framework is too complex. But Bush administration forest officials are using recent wildfires as an excuse to scuttle it altogether. They propose doubling logging in the Sierra, including older, larger trees far from homes. Logging in such remote areas does little to cut fire risk in forest communities.

As first reported by the Associated Press, the Forest Service spent $90,000 on a private public relations firm to sell this “Forests for a Future” proposal. The brochure, published in January, includes six black-and-white photos spanning 80 years and asserts that “forests of the past” had less fire risk because they had fewer trees and underbrush. The 1909 photo shows a forest with large trees widely spaced. Each successive picture -- 1948, 1958, 1968, 1979 and 1989 -- shows more trees and underbrush.

“Today’s forests, dense with green, may seem beautiful,” the text explains, “but are in fact deadly.... Our old-growth forests are choking with brush, tinder-dry debris and dead trees which make the risk of catastrophic fire high.” Trouble is, as embarrassed agency officials acknowledge, the forest pictured is in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, not the Sierra Nevada. And the earliest picture is not of the forest in its natural state, but after it had been logged.

At a minimum, Congress should call for an independent scientific review of the Bush plan -- and for truth in advertising.