The spectacular blazes that so far have consumed 2.84 million acres across the West, mostly in Oregon, Washington and California, have produced indelible images of destruction, of vast swaths of pine forests sending clouds of pungent black smoke billowing skyward.
This year’s fires are only slightly bigger than the 10-year average for acres burned through Aug. 22 and well below last summer’s, the worst outbreak in 50 years. Yet they are accentuating a sense of a crisis surrounding wildfires in the West, and adding to a growing consensus that a shift in the nation’s firefighting policies is sorely needed.
For 90 years, forestry officials have raced to extinguish any fire on public lands, part of a federal policy that saw forest fires as an enemy that warranted constant vigilance. But state and federal officials now acknowledge that those policies were misguided and must be replaced by a new strategy focused on preventing out-of-control fires.
“We can’t wait. … The forests will be gone,” South Dakota Gov. William Janklow said at a meeting earlier this month at which Western governors and federal officials endorsed a 10-year proposal to thin out forests through planned burning and logging, creating more natural, less dangerous conditions.
Seasonal fires are often nature’s way of clearing out the forest. But by sending in firefighters to stomp out any spark, officials have promoted the growth of thick underbrush and dense stands of trees that burn like tinder.
Denying fires fuel
Experts believe that thinning the forest will minimize the chances of a fire burning out of control by giving it less fuel to burn. It also will help restore open spaces to the nation’s forests, much as they were before the region was settled.
“We want to reduce the potential for high-intensity fires in the future by emulating what Mother Nature did for eons: clearing things out, and letting fire back in,” said Gail Kimbell, a supervisor of the Pike and San Isabel National Forest in Colorado.
The strategy faces political opposition from some environmentalists who believe it is a way to advance logging interests by allowing trees to be removed from forests. It also is likely to provoke scrutiny from members of Congress concerned over its projected $3 billion-a-year cost.
But experts say the consequences of not acting are severe.
“Today’s wildfires are so extreme in their behavior and effects that they are in many ways worse than clear-cutting,” William Wallace Covington of Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute wrote in an influential article in Nature last November. “Critical habitat for threatened and endangered species is destroyed, watershed function is disrupted and human habitat value reduced for centuries to come.”
As usual, the devil will lie in the details. Despite general consensus over the need for a broad shift in wildfire policy, disagreements over the particulars of what to do and where are widespread.
Those differences of opinion are felt throughout the West, but especially in the 1.6 million-acre Bitterroot National Forest that spans Montana and Idaho, site of some of the most intense showdowns over clear-cutting in the West in the 1970s.
Last summer, the Bitterroot was struck by the largest forest fire of the year, a blaze that swept through 307,000 acres of ponderosa pine, destroyed 75 homes and cabins, and displaced thousands of residents. Now the mountain slopes are dotted with blackened trees, dead or seriously injured but still standing.
Forest Service officials want to clear out many of the burned trees from 73,000 acres near the scenic Bitterroot Valley on the Montana side, the state’s fastest-growing area. By doing so, they say they would reduce the risk of future catastrophic fires that could feed off the dead or decayed wood, and restore the area to a more natural view, with fewer trees and more open areas.
“We want to reintroduce fire back into the ecosystem,” mimicking the way things used to be, when low-intensity blazes passed through ponderosa forests every 5 to 20 years, explained Spike Thompson, deputy forest supervisor.
Left untouched, Thompson said, will be at least 230,000 remote acres of forest that burned last year, as well as vast stretches of the Bitterroot that have no roads or have official wilderness designation. Fires in those areas are less likely to cause damage or to require significant firefighting, he noted.
Environmentalists disagree
But environmental groups are up in arms over the Forest Service plan. While some trees probably need to be removed, “what they’re proposing is out of scale,” said Bob Ekey, Northern Rockies regional director for the Wilderness Society.
“The priority should be to protect homes, and the rest of the land should be left mostly alone,” Ekey continued. “Our forests are going to burn, and we want them to burn naturally.”
The different perspectives on what to do with the fuel-clogged forests and how to let fire return to the land could spell a stalemate. Bitterroot forest officials plan to make a formal recommendation about proposed salvage logging operations in early October but expect a court fight.
At the very earliest, trees might start coming out of the forest early next year.
Similar conflicts are playing out in Colorado, where environmental groups have said they may sue to stop 17,000 acres of the 600,000-acre Upper South Platte River Watershed from being thinned and treated with prescribed fires.
