Have you noticed? Each year with the coming of fire season
comes also a slew of guest commentaries and editorials in western newspapers
promoting the idea that the current fire, smoke and destruction are the result
of environmentalists’ lawsuits which have locked up the forests resulting in a
build up of brush and tees that in turn fuel hotter and hotter fires. These
formula pieces then go on to prescribe the solution: muzzle environmentalists’
lawsuits, open up the national forests to more commercial logging and soon the
fire risk will be gone.
It is also interesting to observe who is writing the
articles. It comes as no surprise, for example, when we see an example of this
genre penned by M. David Sterling, vice president of the anti-environmental
Pacific Legal Foundation, appearing in the pages of the Capital Press – an Ag weekly
widely read by rural folk in Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California. But we
also see similar editorials from county commissioners, foresters, extension
agents, retired forestry professors, middle level Farm Bureau officials and
even, occasionally, from FFA and 4H leaders. And these editorials appear in all
sorts of newspapers – including some of the larger dailies as well as the small
local chains and independents.
It appears that the timber industry has no shortage of
volunteers to carry their fire message.
The annual barrage of propaganda
seeking to link wildfire home burnings to environmental lawsuits and reduction
of wildfire risk to commercial logging is, in fact, a PR strategy conceived by
big timber and implemented on an annual basis for more than a decade. The
results are impressive: If a poll were taken today I believe it would find that
most westerners view commercial logging as an effective tool for fire risk
reduction.
It makes no difference that science, experience and
economics does not support that assertion. If one is able to repeat a message
often enough and have that message heard – no matter how wrong headed or untrue
the message is – people will begin to believe it. That is unless there is
someone else out there setting the record straight by providing the public with
solid information targeted to refute the propaganda line.
Unfortunately, each year while the timber industry and its
supporters are exploiting the public attention captured by wildfires, the
environmental community is nowhere to be found! I’m not sure if these folks are
on vacation or just have too much e-mail but they are definitely not present on
the opinion pages giving the lie to timber industry fire risk propaganda or –
better still – taking the offensive by linking logging with the destruction of
homes.
If the hundreds of folks who are paid by the environmental
community to work on “forest issues” were on the ball there is plenty of
ammunition at their disposal to refute timber industry fire propaganda and to
link logging to home destruction. For example, it was clearly demonstrated by
Forest Service researchers as early as the late 1980s that older forests
located next to clearcuts burn hotter than those which are within large blocks
of mature or Old Growth forests. And anyone who has fought forest fire in the
West knows that the tree “plantations” following clearcutting are tinderboxes
which explode in flame or that the “slash” left behind by commercial logging
generally constitutes the most flammable locations within our forests.
Furthermore, as an ex-forest activist I can cite you 10 or more
fires from the Klamath Mountains
which “blew up” into fire storms in clearcuts and logging slash. Some of these
logging-related firestorms destroyed homes. The evidence is out there on the
ground and the fire history has been recorded in some instances by forest residents.
A little investigation would likely uncover more immediate
links between logging and home-destroying wildfire. One of the headlines this
fire season occurred, for example, when wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes in
the Town of Paradise in California’s
Northern Sierra foothills. Paradise is surrounded by
industrial timber lands – most owned by Sierra Pacific Industries – one of the
nation’s largest timber companies. These lands have been clearcut extensively
in recent decades and they are full of logging slash, small trees and brush. I
have not done the investigation but if one of our plethora of California
“forest activists” did, I’ll bet the link between industrial logging and the
loss of those Paradise homes would likely come to light.
Don’t hold your breath waiting on that expose, however. Environmentalists working on western
forest issues spend most of their time reading and commenting on obscure Forest Service documents,
not educating the public about what is going on in the forests. With rare
exceptions, the field of western public opinion on fire and logging is plowed
only by the timber industry and its eager shills. That is the way it has been
for a couple of decades and there is no indication the situation will change
anytime soon.
So, why is commercial logging not an appropriate and
effective tool for fire risk reduction? This, of course, is the crux. But it is
a question which will have to await another day and another post.
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