By now we’ve all heard — oh, how
often have we heard –that a century of fire suppression has
created a buildup of fuels that threatens an inferno across the
forests of the West.
Forest Service officials, once happy
to pose for photos with Smokey Bear, now give grim news conferences
to announce that natural fire regimes are terribly unbalanced and
that only massive “fuels reduction” can retrieve “forest health.”
Under the business model promoted by the Bush administration, such
fuels-reduction projects are generally paid for by cutting trees
large enough to be profitable for the timber industry.
To
many, that seems like a reasonable trade-off, since we want to
fire-proof our forests for the long term. But before we embrace
this vision of logging our forests back to health, let’s
examine its basic assumption: Is unnatural fuel buildup really
causing more severe fires?
Like all seductive
oversimplifications, the idea that fire suppression has created a
tinderbox in the West’s public forests has elements of truth.
It’s true that federal firefighters have been extraordinarily
successful at keeping fire out of most Western forests for decades.
It’s true that fuel loads are high in many places as a
result, particularly in ponderosa pine forests that evolved with
frequent surface fires. Most obviously, it’s true that fire
cannot be kept off the land forever: Sooner or later, flammable
fuels will burn.
But there’s a problem. According
to the fire-suppression hypothesis, the longer it’s been
since the last fire, the more fuel buildup and the worse the next
fire. It’s like one of those notoriously clear relationships
–simple, clear and wrong.
A meticulous new study in the
Klamath Mountains of northern California– by Dominick DellaSala of
the World Wildlife Fund and others — has shown that when fire does
come, forests that have not burned for a long time burn with lower
intensity than more recently burned forests. What’s more,
tree plantations experienced twice as much high-intensity fire as
did multi-aged forests.
That’s right: Young stands,
whether created by logging or by stand-replacement fires, are more
flammable than forests full of big old trees. This really
shouldn’t come as a surprise. When you’re getting a
campfire going, do you toss on some kindling or a two-foot-thick
log?
This research shows the folly of logging big trees
to reduce fire risk. In many forests, such an approach is likely to
increase the severity of fires. The study also points out an
obvious but too-often overlooked reason for our current fire
problem — past logging activities. Over the last hundred years,
our biggest impact on the forests of the West has not been fire
suppression. It has been the elimination of over 80 percent of
old-growth trees by logging. What remain are younger stands with
smaller trees and more brush — exactly the sort of forests that
are the most flammable.
Any experienced firefighter will
also tell you that both the behavior of individual wildfires and
the severity of fire seasons are driven by one factor above all —
weather. Large-scale atmospheric patterns that bring low rainfall
and high temperatures are far more important in producing major
fire years than is the biomass of fuel present, which varies little
on an annual basis.
There has been an increase in severe
weather events over recent decades, which many experts believe is a
consequence of human-caused global warming. If this is the case,
the bad fire seasons of the past 10 years may pale in comparison to
what’s coming. What is our government doing to address carbon
dioxide emissions or even acknowledge global warming? Nothing.
It’s time to stop pretending that there is a simple
cure for the many and varied problems of our diverse Western
forests. What’s needed is a cautious and site-specific
approach to forest management. We also need a clear focus on
actions that will protect human life and property.
There’s no question that wildfire is a serious threat to the
many rural communities surrounded by logged-over forests. To deal
with that threat, fuel reduction should be carried out in the
immediate vicinity of those communities. Farther away, federal
forest managers need to focus on thinning the regenerating
plantations and small polewood stands that are the true forest
tinderboxes.
Together, Smokey Bear and public-lands
loggers have created the conditions that global warming could turn
into the perfect firestorm. But if we respond calmly and
thoughtfully, we can do much to reduce the risk to our communities,
without logging one big tree from our last remaining old forests.
Pepper Trail, a wildlife biologist who lives in Ashland,
Oregon, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He spent last summer in
the smoke of the Timbered Rock and Biscuit
fires.
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