This autumn, like every autumn, western U.S. forests are burning. Fires seem to be getting more frequent, bigger and more destructive. Some of that may be due to media coverage - the immediacy of video footage and live reporting - and is all the more newsworthy due to the politicization of forest management policy. Journalists not only get to don woodsy togs and be taped in dramatic situations with firemen, they get to ambush politicians with sound bites provided by activists of various persuasions. But some of it is real. Many of the most destructive fires in the history of the U.S. as measured by acreage burned and economic loss have happened in the last 20 years. Western forest fires are getting bigger, hotter, and are destroying more structures.

There are two good reasons for this. One reason is that there is more development in what were rural areas until recently but are now gentrified as many wealthy urban refugees have built McMansions in forested areas. Another reason is that decades of inappropriate forest management policies have degraded western forests leaving them vulnerable to catastrophic fires.

Politicization of forest management policy is nothing new. Degradation began in the New Deal era of the 1930s, a time when the nation was increasingly mobilized by government initiated mass movements. This behavior wasn't unique to the U.S. and can be understood as a continuation and escalation of the mobilizations that swept Europe and infected the U.S. during the world war. It was also the depression era when economic desperation made people receptive to dramatic and hopeful gestures promoted as solutions to pressing needs. FDR initiated a campaign in 1937 to reduce anthropogenic fire featuring Uncle Sam as a forest ranger accusing "Your Forests – Your Fault – Your Loss".

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, occupation of some Aleutian Islands and an attack on an oil field near the Los Padres National Forest in California provided a new motivation for citizen fire prevention efforts, especially since many firefighters were away from their posts on military duty. The potential for wild fires terrorized the country. The Wartime Advertising Council developed fire prevention posters with slogans such as, "Forest Fires Aid the Enemy," and "Careless Matches Aid the Axis."

In 1944, after Disney released the animated classic Bambi, the Forest Service recognized the power of animal cartoons to carry messages, especially to children and parents. Disney allowed Bambi to be used in the campaign for one year and wildly popular animal illustrator Albert Staehle was called upon to donate his talent. The result was "Smokey Bear", named for a famous New York City firefighter, Smokey Joe Martin.

The problem with these efforts for western forests is that the conventional wisdom of a nation of immigrants drawn largely from northern Europe who settled in similar lands in the Americas is inappropriate. Western forests aren't composed of slow growing, shade tolerant deciduous hardwoods such as those in Europe and the U.S. northeast. Fire is a destructive and rare natural event for those wet eastern forests with no redeeming virtues. Western forests are fire adapted. They require fire to clear room for new growth and to open seed cones. Western trees aren't shade tolerant, they need clear skies overhead and grow quickly to overtop their mates and soak up sunlight. When frequent fire was suppressed in western forests they became choked with brush and deadfall litter, and the crowded trees grew spindly, weak, diseased, water starved and riddled with parasitic insects such as beetles. Standing dead trees added to the fuel that choked the forest floor. When fire came, as it always does due to lightning strikes, there was more fuel to make hotter fires that climbed the ladder of litter, brush and standing dead to the crowns of mature trees and produced fires that utterly destroyed forests. Such destruction is rare in natural western forests. Comparatively cool fires that race through clearing the forest floor but leaving most tress singed but alive are common. They have thick bark that largely protects them from such fires. Weakened by decades of fire suppression and choked with unburned litter western forests have become disasters waiting to happen.

This isn't news. Informed environmentalists have been trying to alter forest management policy in the west for decades but they were either ignored or vilified by the political establishment and its bureaucracy as well as pseudo-environmentalists more concerned about the possibility that individuals and companies - especially forest products companies - might benefit from better forest management than they are about the health of the forests. Restoring western forests isn't simply a matter of allowing natural fires to burn. They are sick and overpopulated. Fire destroys them. To restore forests to a healthful condition the fuel accumulated over the decades must first be removed. The forests must be thinned and the litter must be removed or burned very carefully to avoid touching off wildfire. This is a very expensive proposition but so is the alternative of fire suppression and inevitable environmental damage to forests, watersheds and structures. We can't afford the price tag of either approach. Those best trained and equipped to clean up the forests are forest products companies, the same folks the anti-capitalist pseudo-environmentalists have been fighting all these years. Any politician or bureaucrat that proposes enlightened forest management policy that would hire such companies, and allow them to salvage some of the timber and so help reduce costs, is met with frenzied denunciation.

The idea of joint efforts between foresters and forest products companies isn't an untried dream likely to fail, it has a long and distinguished record of success in state forests. State forestry regulations are targeted to specific forests and staffed by locals. In California, in my southern Sierra home turf, state forests exist adjacent to federal forests. The difference is night and day. When you cross from state forest to federal forest the boundary is obvious since you leave healthy forest and enter a realm of sickness and overpopulation devoid of wildlife except for insects. State forests are well managed. Foresters and biologists monitor the forests for health. They have diseased trees removed and thin stands to keep them healthy. They auction the trees that are to be removed to forest products companies who use helicopters to remove them from roadless tracts. It's expensive but cheaper than building roads when only a few trees from a a parcel are to be removed. Federal forest management can at best be described as neglect due to federal regulations that lack provisions for sensible management of western forests. Policies that are acceptable for wet, eastern and coastal forests are inadequate in the mountain west. Worse, federal foresters move around from park to park to gain broad if shallow experience with the nation's forests and advance to higher career levels.

In the last days of his term President Clinton nationalized some of the local forest lands that had been managed by the state. The local foresters and biologists were fired since there would no longer be a need for them. The forest would no longer be monitored for health or thinned to remove diseased or crowded trees. The local forest products company closed its facility as a result. The forests will gradually decline to the level of other federal forests and fires will get worse. What was loudly trumpeted as a coup by politicized pseudo-environmentalists when a lame duck President seized the forests is an unmitigated disaster for the forests and the people who live in the area.

Western forests are a mess. Bad if sometimes well intentioned but naive policies have reduced healthy forests to diseased wrecks. Old timers on my mountain say that the native Yokuts managed the forests for 10,000 years and before them God did the work. They set fire to any area that became overgrown when random natural fire skipped it too often. When Europeans settled the area they learned from the Yokuts and continued or even accelerated the program of prescribed fire. That ended when Smokey the Bear began his reign of terror. Now we pay the price. Either we thin the forests to restore them to a condition where natural fire can resume its role in management on a go forward basis, or we continue to suppress fires as we can and suffer catastrophic fire when we can't.

P.S. - See this post about forest management tools.

» Local Knowledge from Crumb Trail
Having been sucked into a vortex Knowledge Problem hasn't had a lot of posts lately, but this one was in Lynne's wheelhouse and she parked it. The subject is the reversal of a Clinton Administration restriction on development on federal lands. Before ......[read more]
Tracked: July 13, 2004 09:54 AM