Plans To Reduce Wildfire Threats Going Nowhere Shortage Of Money, Excess Opposition Stalls Forest Service Pledge To Quickly Decrease Vulnerability To Fires

At the height of last summer’s forest fires, top Forest Service officials called for prompt action to reduce forests’ rising vulnerability to wildfire.

But their plan to do that, released more than four months later, will change little in the coming year and leaves the long-term trend unclear.

“What is going to happen better, faster, more appropriately in 1995 is pretty close to nothing,” said Neil Sampson, executive director of American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation group.

Sampson has been leading a campaign to reduce forest vulnerability. He says a stronger proposal was picked apart within the Clinton administration by a shortage of money and an excess of opposition.

The timber industry also lamented the plan’s delays, while environmental groups said it threatened to go too far. But both agreed it would do little in the short run.

“They’ve got to get congressional support before they can move,” Sampson said after the Dec. 12 release of the administration’s Western Forest Health Initiative. “I don’t think they can make it by themselves.”

The initiative’s rhetoric should encourage forest managers who plan timber treatments aimed at improving forest health; but managers aren’t expecting big financial boost.

“We’re not putting our hopes on a national emphasis,” said Elton Thomas, who is heading fire restoration programs for Washington state’s Wenatchee National Forest. “The key,” he said, “is going to be a bunch of incremental approaches.”

Nationally, the forest health initiative stems from concerns that forests in the Rocky Mountain region and the intermountain West have increasingly fallen prey to huge, destructive wildfires. Fire exclusion since the turn of the century has let forests grow far more dense than in presettlement days - and more vulnerable to drought, insect attacks and all-consuming wildfires.

Senior officials of the Forest Service propose to thin stands mechanically, salvage dead or sick trees and set more prescribed fires. They say these tools could limit the spread of wildfires, improve the health of remaining forests and make it easier to protect homes and property from fires.

“It’s senseless to have these forest burning up when we know what we can do to reduce wildfires,” said Jim Lyons, the undersecretary of agriculture for environment and natural resources, who oversees the Forest Service. As wildfires spread last August, he added impatiently, “When are we going to do something about it?”

The forest health initiative, drafted at Lyons’ request, heralded “an accelerated, national approach that fully addresses the urgency and magnitude of these problems.” The plan listed 330 priority projects that would improve forest health over the next two years. The New York Times hailed it as a proposal for changing agency land management across the West.

But close examination reveals that the proposal largely repackages existing projects as forest health work and defers until the coming year key decisions on how to build a forest health plan.

Project leader Anne Bartuska, director of the Forest Service’s division of Forest Pest Management, explained that most of the 330 projects had already been planned and funded in this year’s budget. A few dozen fire damage restoration projects were added - but many had been announced in November and were emergency responses, not preventative measures.

These are examples of the kinds of projects the agency would promote in the future, Bartuska explained in a telephone interview.

When he learned that, American Forests’ Sampson deplored the slowness to launch new projects.

“We’ve got to get ahead of the problem,” Sampson said. “If we can’t start to do minimal preventive treatment ahead of wildfires we’ll be spending billions of dollars fighting fires and then continuing to argue over salvage.”

The agency’s leading interest groups viewed the report through the lenses of their main interests. The timber industry complained that it logs too few dead trees.

The timber industry charged that the agency is wastefully leaving hundreds of millions of board-feet of lumber to rot in burned or bug-infested stands.

Doug Crandall, vice president of the American Forest and Paper Association, called for excluding salvage logging from some environmental reviews. He charged that the idea was quashed by Lyons’ office. The Forest Service “has backed off” of its forest health program and is “in disarray,” Crandall lamented.

Environmentalists warned that the program threatens to harvest in roadless areas, which they want to keep road-free. Mike Francis, The Wilderness Society’s chief forest lobbyist, also complained that the listed projects were planned while ecosystem studies were incomplete in eastern Oregon and Washington. He charged that the agency was pushing old-style timber harvests under a forest-health guise.

“They should, at least in roadless areas, put a hold on any projects until the scientific review is done,” he said. That will take years, is likely to be litigated and will delay decisions even longer.

Sampson says the forests cannot wait. But the Forest Service, having suffered from three years of injunctions and delays to protect the northern spotted owl, appears to prefer the slow, careful route.

Still, the forest health report contained ambitious rhetoric about thinning, cutting fuel breaks and re-establishing light fires where they naturally play a big role in forest development. And it scheduled decisions through 1995 on how to define forest health, help fund the program, expand prescribed fire use and incorporate forest health concerns in forest planning.