Burning Issues — The Dangers of Government Forest Management
Robert H. Nelson, Ph.D.
Professor of Environmental Policy, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland
...I am going to talk about fire. That is the most recent area of gross mismanagement. It represents an attempt on the part of the Forest Service to apply what they thought, or at least what they claimed, was scientific management. Fire—and management of fire and control of fire—was supposed to be one of the principal examples of their scientific skills and management abilities. In particular, what they did was to institute a regime of fire suppression throughout all the forests.
Now, there were some reasonable objectives to that. It did protect timber from burning and some of that timber was very valuable, and it did protect homes sometimes. But the Forest Service also turned it into a virtual religious crusade against fire and also a great PR bonanza as in Smokey Bear, which probably most people here can remember. Or at least some people here can remember. I’m not sure. At one time Smokey Bear was one of the great public images of the United States. It turned out, however, that fire suppression was actually not such a great idea scientifically or in any other way. We always have to keep in mind, and our technical experts of the 20th century have a hard time with this, but there is this thing called the Law of Unexpected Consequences. It seems to interpose itself in a lot of places and a lot of times despite the smartest people, or at least the people who think they are smartest trying to anticipate things.
In any case, when you suppressed fire, there was one basic problem. You increased, you kept on increasing, the wood volume on the forest. If you suppress fire, you didn’t exactly, yeah, you prevented fire this year, but the trees continued to grow and so you didn’t get rid of the wood. So actually what you were doing is continuously building up the fire hazard. In fact, the volumes of wood despite a fair amount of timber harvesting are in the West and in the inland West are now higher than they were 50 years ago. If you take the inland West as a whole, which is basically from Montana down through Colorado, Nevada, Utah to New Mexico and Arizona, there were 57 billion cubic feet in 1952. In 1992 there was 70 billion cubic feet. So all this fire suppression had led to a lot more wood being there.
Furthermore, it had changed the composition of the forest and in particular certain kinds of forest. Not all forests are the same. We don’t want to use over-generalizations, but one of the most important forests found in the West, especially in the inland west, are ponderosa pine forests. They are very common. They are also at lower elevation. They are more likely to interact with private property that is intermingled with federal lands in the West in a lot of cases.
In the old days, in a ponderosa pine forest you would have maybe 50 large trees. They might be three feet in diameter. Then you had forest fire that would burn through this forest every 10 or 20 years, and the forest fire would actually clean out all the underbrush and also clean out some of the fir trees that might be trying to get settled in there but that were more fire prone. So basically you had a fairly open understory with a small number of large trees. You can see this in pictures that are available now of the West from a hundred years ago. Now you go back to the same place and what you find is that instead of this fairly open park-like terrain you have 300 to 500 trees. Now they are a lot smaller and, as I said, the total volume has increased. These trees are maybe 4 to 10 inches in diameter. Technically, they call them small diameter wood in the jargon of forestry. One of the main problems with this wood is that it is virtually kindling wood. The trees are packed together, there are large numbers of them, there is a lot of wood there, and what has happened is that by suppressing fire over many decades going back to the early part of the 20th century out West, we have created a set of firetrap forests where there is a tremendous potential of catastrophic fire.
This is especially true in National Forests. Private lands are in better shape. One, the private sector has been more concerned about protecting their lands from fire danger and also they were much more likely to thin them because actually thinning them reduces the fire hazard but also can increase the total growth potential because trees that are packed so closely together are susceptible to disease, they don’t grow as fast, and there are other problems. But on the National Forest, where we have had more of a do-nothing kind of management for a long time, instead we have roughly 50 million acres, that is a quarter of the system, which are severely fire-prone and another 50 million which are somewhat fire-prone.
When these fires occur on these forest where you have these dense trees packed together, you get historically unprecedented types of fires. They burn at temperatures of 1000 to 2000 degrees. They become crown fires, that is, they don’t clean up the underbrush, they actually jump to the top of all the trees. If you have old trees, the old trees were protected before because their bark was fairly fire-resistant, but now, because the fire climbs the ladder of the kindling trees that I have been describing, it reaches up into the understory of the old trees so it burns the whole forest in one stand-clearing fire.
So you had, for example, a tree that had been around in Idaho for hundreds of years was burned up in one of these fires in the 1990’s. It was the oldest ponderosa pine in Idaho and it would have survived the kind of fires that it would have historically experienced.
Because of the intensity of the fire it destroys the organic matter down to maybe six or ten inches sometimes. They call it sterilizing the soil. In the older lighter fires it might have done that down to an inch. So that means the soil, the re-growth potential is significantly reduced. There is also a much greater problem with runoff, so that if you have heavy rainfall after one of these devastating types of fires, you have got heavy silting of streams, you get lakes filled up with ash-type soil running off, and it is a mess. The Denver Water Board, for example, had to spend millions of dollars cleaning out their reservoirs after one of these fires in their watershed and then it washed down and basically, you know, filled up the water with all kinds of contaminants.
That was the situation as we reached the year 2000 in the summer. Now the fire season began with the Los Alamos fire. I am sure you heard about it. The press coverage emphasized the fact that the Bandelier superintendent, which was in the Bandelier National Monument in the National Park System, had set a controlled burn when it was a bad weather condition, which was true. So it was a mistake. However, the press coverage hardly noted the fact that the fire moved almost immediately out of Bandelier National Monument onto the Santa Fe National Forest. And it was actually in the Santa Fe National Forest that it hit one of these set of fire trap conditions and it raged and then they had the bad luck to have a heavy wind come along. Wind is one of the great dangers of fire. The wind blew the fire straight to Los Alamos where 400 homes were destroyed and significant damage was done to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
If the Santa Fe National Forest had not been a tinderbox, the error made by the Bandelier superintendent would have been a much less significant error. Now most of the forest in the Southwest, 85 percent according to the Forest Service’s own figures, are in this kind of a fire-prone condition. You know, there are different degrees but all of them have significant, virtually 100 percent, have significant fire hazards relative to their historic norms.
Los Alamos, of course, turned out to be the beginning of the worst fire season since the 1950s. It is not entirely over,—could burn some more in California, for example, where the fire season is later. But at this point over 7 million acres have already burned in the West. At one point they had to close one quarter of the state of Montana to recreational access into the forest, huge chunks of Idaho burned, there was vast air pollution all over the West, lots of people had to cancel travel plans, the air pollution grossly exceeded what would be legally allowed, and, as I mentioned, there was $1 billion that we are going to spend for fire-fighting.
Another thing that I point out to environmentalists is that there was probably, certainly, the largest unplanned emission of carbon dioxide of the year 2000. So if you are concerned about global warming, you ought to be concerned about not having the forest of the nation burn down on a regular basis.
For the government, of course, this was a somewhat awkward situation for the Interior Secretary Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. The Forest Service is in the Agriculture Department, so Glickman was the nominally responsible person. He was quick to say, well, okay, this is an act of nature. Don’t blame the government. I mean, we didn’t, really, you know, what were we going to do. The weather was unusually dry, and the winds were bad in some cases, so, but, you know, the record is clear. I think even Glickman wouldn’t say that now. I think he just said it then, I don’t think he really knew what was going on. And, of course, it is kind of difficult to be faced with the prospect of being charged with having burned down the West. So you want to come up with some spin pretty quickly to, you know, to avoid that charge. And so Glickman reached out for the first argument he could find, but by now I think even you know it has been pretty thoroughly refuted.
One of the reasons it has been refuted is there is a record of warnings going back almost ten years that Western forests are a fire hazard waiting to happen. But as far back, certainly, as 1993 we started having expert group after expert group in the forestry profession saying, look, if we don’t do something, these fires are going to blow and it is going to be a mess out there. There was the National Commission on Wild Fire Disasters in 1994. They said, “Millions of acres of forest in the Western Untied States pose an extreme fire hazard from the extensive buildup of dry highly flammable forest fuels.” In 1995, the Forest Service put out its own document that said something similar. Then even the joint document issued by the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture in 1995 said something similar. They warned of the extreme fire hazards “in need of immediate treatment.” Then in 1998 the General Accounting Office testified to the Congress that there were “vegetation accumulated creating high levels of fuels for catastrophic wild fires transforming much of the region into a tinderbox.” This is two years before the fires of 2000. And then the GAO issued another report in 1999 that said all the same things all over again.
more at the link
prfamerica.org |
