When it comes to fire, we need to get
going on some concrete changes and stop pussyfooting around (HCN,
5/26/03: A losing battle). I can’t speak for spruce stands in
Wyoming, or Doug-fir old growth in Oregon, or redwood groves in
California, but let me say this about ponderosa forests and the sky
islands of the Southwest:
1) The U.S. Forest Service needs
to come clean and admit that its 100-year-old policy of fire
suppression is WRONG and directly results in disastrous,
catastrophic fires. Smokey the Bear has got to go.
2) The
Forest Service needs to admit it has known #1 for 35 years. 3)
Congress must stop diddling in Forest Service matters about which
it has no knowledge or expertise.
4) Public (taxpayer)
liability in ALL forms on our public lands must be eliminated.
Whether you drown in the river, your house burns down, or you get
bit by a snake — whatever — you are on your
own.
5) All wildland burning from all causes on public
land must be disconnected from the Clean Air Act. Forest managers
can’t be fooling around, calling some bureaucrat in Phoenix
or Albuquerque, when they want to burn.
6) Fire must be
acknowledged as the best, cheapest and indeed our principal
forest-management tool. Thinning is astronomically expensive, slow
and temporary.
7) We do not have the time to play around
with carefully delineated, surgically managed “controlled
burns” — most of which are cancelled because the
criteria are too complicated to begin with. We have to burn
“off season.” Light them and leave them.
8)
Given, say, a 10-year period to off-load all our current fuel and
transition into a fire-acceptance scheme, phase out fire
suppression over the same 10-year period. No more
firefighting.
9) Eliminate the Fire Fund, a congressional
boondoggle appropriation, now in the billions of dollars each
year.
10) Landowners adjacent to public wildlands must all
be informed that they are responsible for their own fire
protection. As a survivor of this year’s Aspen Fire holocaust
in the Catalina Mountains outside of Tucson, I am convinced that
the Forest Service can NOT be reasonably expected to
“protect” anything, given the magnitude of the problem
that it has created.
Firefighters are a relic of the 20th
century. The pyrotechnician lugging a drip torch through the woods
is our man of the 21st century.
G. Arthur
Janssen
Tucson, Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Light them and leave them.
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