It’s the sweet time of year in northern
Montana, late drying-out summer, easing into the rains of autumn,
and in the soft low green hills of the Yaak Valley, on the Kootenai
National Forest, the mornings are tinged, not unpleasantly, with
the smell of wood smoke. Objects take on a golden glow, illuminated
by the smoke-filtered sunlight above. Sometimes the smoke is so far
away that you can smell it but can’t see it, or can see that
strange gold light on your arm, or a piece of fruit by the window,
even as the sky appears to be perfectly blue, and you know that
autumn is coming as it always has.
Up here, the really
large wildfires tend of late to run in six-year cycles, as they
have perhaps across the millennia, whereas the political cycles
rage every two years. Cycle by cycle, we make slow gains in
educating the public about fire–in separating fear-mongering myth
from scientific reality–though in election cycles, the truth often
backslides.
This year, the Bush administration’s so-called
“Healthy Forest Initiative” (H.R.1904, known in the Senate as the
“Senate Logging Bill”), was a document born of the times, one which
only aggravates a credibility gap that it would seem this
administration would be attempting to close.
The Healthy
Forest Initiative is most dangerous and untruthful on two major
points: First, it focuses on increasing logging of the national
forests in the remote backcountry, far from the human communities
supposedly at risk. The Forest Service’s own studies show that fire
prevention is most effective within 200 feet of a dwelling; beyond
that, proposing to stop a fire by logging a certain grove carries
the same odds as finding a needle in a haystack.
Second,
the bill proposes to take away the public’s democratic right to
participate effectively in the decision-making process of how our
national forests are managed, and it also intrudes on the federal
court system by directing the judiciary to rule in favor of the
timber industry.
Despite the timber industry’s claims to
the contrary, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has ascertained
that citizen participation in national forest management through
the formal appeals process has not had any detrimental effect
nation-wide; indeed, the appeals process, where citizens point out
oversights in federal proposals, can be, and often is, a positive
force, able to increase efficiency.
A more moderate and
democratic proposal to the Bush administration’s bill has
been offered in the Senate by Sens. Patrick Leahy,D-Vermont, and
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the latter certainly no stranger to
wildfire in her state.
Leahy’s and Boxer’s “Forestry and
Community Assistance Act of 2003” (S.B. 1453) would protect the
backcountry sources of municipal and community drinking water,
rather than logging those distant sources. (Roughly 80 percent of
the nation’s freshwater supplies originate in the last roadless
areas of our national forests). What most recently has emerged is a
compromise sponsored mostly by Westerners, including Ron Wyden,
D-Ore., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Max Baucus, D-Mont., Jon Kyl,
R-Ariz., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ariz., Pete Domenici , R-N.M., Mike
Crapo, R-Idaho, and Larry Craig , R-Idaho,, which, if not altered
by further compromise, will keep logging out of old-growth and
other sensitive areas, protect (though streamline) the appeals
process, and focus on, and fund, thinning in and around human
communities.
If this is the bill that winds up on
President Bush’s desk, Westerners will be watching to see if
the projects authorized focus on removing the small, flammable
overstocked trees closest to human communities, rather than
continuing to fund the disbursement of the largest, healthiest
trees to the timber industry. Having witnessed some abusive logging
on national forests disguised as “fuels reduction” or “salvage,” as
well as logging that did some good, I fear there will be plenty of
both emerging from whatever compromise is achieved. What I hope
emerges from our attempts to treat national forests near
settlements is “community forestry” — pilot restoration projects
on a small scale. As an added incentive for successful
implementation of fuels-reduction projects, a system could be
authorized that would bundle permanent protection of backcountry
roadless areas with fuels-reduction treatments near human
communities, in the front country.
These are the efforts
that can unite local mill owners and environmentalists. What some
timber industry executives and rural communities have learned is
that local relationships and agreements are far more effective than
iron-fisted legislative riders that attempt to undo decades of
federal law.
Rick Bass is a contributor to
Writers on the Range (hcn.org), a service of High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado. He is a geologist, wildlife biologist and the
author of several books about the Yaak Valley of Montana, where he
lives.
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