As summer weather breaks in the West and
ushers in a cool and moist fall, all of us are breathing a sigh of
relief. At the same time we cannot avoid being haunted by the
question of whether there is something we ought to be doing to
reduce the wildfire threat.
Any rational response to
Western wildfires has to begin with the recognition that in extreme
weather, characterized by drought, high temperatures, low humidity
and high winds, there is nothing we can do to prevent or stop all
wildfires. Like hurricanes in the South and tornadoes in the
Midwest, fires are a natural part of the landscape we inhabit. But
that doesn’t mean we can’t reduce their damage.
I’m
naïve enough to believe there’s consensus around the
high-priority things we should be doing to protect people,
communities and property. That consensus, however, begins to
dissolve when special interest groups try to piggy-back their
private interests onto our wildfire response.
Ignoring
that perverse effort to exploit other people’s hard times, let me
outline the responses I think almost everyone supports.
We must begin with the homes where a huge chunk of the firefighting
resources are already focused. Those homes have to be made fire
resistant. This is a private responsibility in which the public has
a direct interest, since it’s the public who funds the firefighting
and in whose name firefighters are put at risk.
We know
how to do this. The question is how to quickly implement the
necessary steps. Local building codes and land use plans, local
fire departments and insurance companies all have a role to play.
If, for instance, insurance companies required regular
certification that a home was “firewise,” mortgage lenders would
automatically pressure homeowners to adapt their property to
minimize the threat wildfire poses.
Signaling a positive
step in this direction, State Farm announced earlier in the year
that customers in wildfire-prone areas of six Western states have
two years to remove overgrown brush from around their homes or risk
losing coverage.
Regular wildfire maintenance would
become part of living in the woods just as regular lawn watering
and mowing is a part of living in suburbia. The federal government
can help by allowing federal funds to be spent on all forest lands,
regardless of ownership.
The next priority is to treat
the human-dominated forestlands that immediately surround these
homes and our communities. For the most part, the forestlands
surrounding our communities have already been roaded and logged. As
a result of these activities, coupled with aggression fire
suppression over the past 60 years, many of these dry, low
elevation forests carry unnaturally high fuel loads. Clearly, we
need to begin strategically reducing fuels in these areas so that
young trees and brush are removed.
Focusing resources
here involves focusing on a small fraction of the Western landscape
rather than the astronomical 40 million or 100 million acres some
are insisting we must thin. On this much smaller acreage, we could
afford to focus exclusively on fuel and fire control, uncompromised
by commercial timber-harvest objectives.
We can leave
unroaded backcountry alone. Most fires there don’t threaten
us, especially if we have made our homes “firewise” and reduced
fuels in the forests immediately surrounding our communities.
Besides, we cannot afford to treat the entire forested landscape,
and these rugged isolated areas would be the most costly to treat.
Just as important, we don’t know whether these lands need to
be treated or what treatments might be effective.
This
set of wildfire priorities leaves the bulk of our forests and
grasslands, which are already roaded and strongly impacted by past
commercial logging and grazing, open to continued public debate. We
have not finished that debate yet, and we cannot and should not try
to legislate an end to it.
We also don’t have the
scientific knowledge and experience to know what would work on the
many different aspects of that complex forest mosaic. And, again,
we don’t have the financial resources to engage in ecosystem
restoration on all of those lands.
Given our limited
resources and the priority of protecting people, homes and
communities, we have more than enough to do for the next decade
that we can all agree on, while we continue to study the larger,
landscape-wide problem of forest health and try to build a
consensus for appropriate action.
Let’s get on with the
priority work we know we have to do.
Thomas
Michael Power is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org). He is professor of economics and at
the University of Montana in Missoula.
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