Welcome to the
West’s new world of fire. With six out of the last eight
years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, it is a world
where every year is what we call a “bad” fire season.
Or maybe it’s the “indefinitely bad” season, as
Tom Boatner, the BLM’s chief of fire operations and a 30-year
firefighting veteran, puts it.
We live in a different
world in the American West at the beginning of the 21st century
than the cooler, wetter times of years past. Today’s world is
one I first discovered 19 years ago this summer in Yellowstone
National Park.
The 1988 fire season seemed an aberration
then. Now, it’s the norm. That means every summer, residents
of cities like Boise, Idaho, and Missoula, Mont., must suffer
through unhealthy levels of smoke. Vacationers now must watch for
the closure of entire national forests, and river outfitters face
uncertainty over the length of their seasons. This year’s
hunters still don’t know whether they can go to their
favorite camps. The fires mean that the summer tourist season may
face permanent changes in visitor patterns, says former Montana
congressman Pat Williams.
We re-engineered the original
forests into the ones we have today, using the science that
foresters gave us. In the process, we filled them up with fuel that
made them harder to protect, not easier. We even engineered the
wholesale burning of fossil fuels that — if the International
Panel on Climate Change is right — has contributed to the warming,
drying and longer fire seasons we are experiencing today.
A team of scientists headed by forest engineer Anthony Westerling,
based at the University of California-Merced, released a landmark
study last year that said we are experiencing longer fire seasons,
larger fires and more big fires because of climate change. The
effects of climate change even overwhelm the decades of fire
suppression and the build-up of fuel that created. If it continues,
the forests, which today capture 20 to 40 percent of all of the
carbon scientists say contributes to the climate’s change,
will burn up. That would turn our forests from net carbon sinks to
net carbon sources.
So, once again, we must turn to the
foresters for salvation. The practice of silviculture offers, just
as it did at the beginning of the conservation era a century ago,
the best option for conserving our forests and the natural values
on which they’re based.
The only thing we can do,
they say, is to reduce the overall fires through massive thinning
and yes, logging. This won’t sit well with people who have
spent their lives stopping logging on our national forests. Even
so, scientists are still not certain that thinning and logging can
curb the transformation of these forests. And building consensus to
do anything in this new world likely will be as hard as it was in
the old world.
No matter what happens, what trees will
grow where will be dictated by the changing climate, not by
history. We will have to adapt.
For 12 years, the
national land management agencies, the firefighting bureaucracy,
Western political leaders, environmentalists, industry groups and
local communities have struggled to transform policy to meet the
new reality on the landscape. Experts said then as they say now
that we are battling the clock. Each year, more acres burn. More
communities suffer. Billions of dollars are spent.
This
year, we are beginning to see the effects of the past 20 years of
fires on the larger landscape. Firefighters work hard to herd fires
into the wildfire-thinned boundaries of past fires. The path for
some new fires is no longer an open road. Add the millions of acres
that have been intentionally burned and mechanically thinned over
the last decade, which now present obstacles to fire growth, and
the opportunity to manage these new fires appears as a sign of
hope, an orange sunrise on the horizon.
But as convection
clouds rise in the afternoon heat of this waning summer, what seems
inevitable is that more wildfires will devour trees and threaten
homes. We are far from being out of the woods.
Rocky Barker is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Boise where
he’s an environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman.
He’s also the author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of
Yellowstone Changed America.
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