Timber Policy Promotes Use Of Fire Federal Lands Would Be Managed With Natural And Controlled Fires

A year after deadly wildfires charred the forests of the West, the Clinton administration has proposed a new policy that would promote the use of fire in managing federal lands.

The policy emphasizes the natural role of fires in improving the ecological health of overgrown forests, and would use both naturally occurring fires, like those caused by lightning, and controlled fires set wherever land managers determined they would be beneficial.

The new policy was praised by environmentalists but it was criticized by timber interests, which said it ignored their calls for increased logging as a way to treat forests that are prone to fire.

The policy gives the administration’s approval to an approach to managing forests that has been in and out of vogue over the years, but has never been wholeheartedly embraced by the federal government.

It culminates a series of reviews of federal firefighting procedures that began after fires burned out of control in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, charring half of the park’s 2.2 million acres, and continued through last year, when fires burned several million acres in the Western states.

Under the policy, federal land managers hope to reduce the overgrown timber and underbrush found in many forests and, especially in Western states, have fueled runaway fires. Such fires can radically change forests that were naturally adapted to small, frequent fires.

The new policy, published in The Federal Register for public comment on June 22, is to be made final after a public comment period that ends on July 24. The policy keeps safety as the paramount concern and would maintain the current stance of fighting fires aggressively when necessary to protect lives and property.

But it would also seek to expand the use of what are called “prescribed” fires - allowing them to burn within pre-determined limits, the same approach that got out of control in Yellowstone in 1988 and has been used with caution since then because of the risks.

Administration officials said the new policy would require a careful balancing act, involving the safety of firefighters, the risks to private property and the preservation of natural resources.

Referring to people living in newly developed areas bordering federal lands, James Lyons, assistant secretary of agriculture in charge of forests, said: “Some of the changes that we propose are likely to cause some heartburn for some folks. Our past policies have instilled in some people the idea that all fire is bad. In many instances, fire is more natural to the landscape than the homes that have been built on those hillsides.”

Lyons spoke by telephone while flying home from memorial services in Glenwood Springs, Colo., near Storm King Mountain, where 14 Smokejumpers, an elite crew of Forest Service firefighters, died a year ago this month while trying to put out a fast-moving wildfire.

Environmentalists welcomed the new move.

“It is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Steve Holmer, an environmental lobbyist at the Western Ancient Forest Campaign in Washington, D.C.

Tim Ingalsbee, a spokesman for the Cascadia Fire Ecology Education Project, a grass-roots group in Oregon, said, “In many cases, perhaps most cases, the damage from firefighting is more enduring than the impact from the fire itself.”

But logging companies said that it would be a mistake to reintroduce fires to the forests without first trying to thin out over-abundant trees and underbrush.

“It may seem self-serving, but the only way to control those areas or to get them back into a system where you can use fire again is to use some kind of thinning or logging or mechanical removal of the fuel,” said Doug Crandall, assistant vice president of the American Forest Products Association. “There is no other way to solve that problem.”

The timber industry is lobbying for a major program of logging in areas susceptible to fire, drought and disease.

A provision to suspend environmental laws to encourage the additional logging was included in a spending measure that Clinton vetoed last month. A compromise version has been approved by the House and is pending in the Senate.

The biggest obstacles to the new fire policy probably lie not in the timber industry but among people who live near federal lands that might be allowed to burn.

The Agriculture and Interior departments said their new policy “may require that the public tolerate some smoke and accept a certain amount of fire in their environment as an investment in the long-term health of the land.”

They said the proximity of housing and other development near forests “has become a major fire problem that will escalate as the nation moves into the 21st century.”

Last year, they said, half of all federal firefighting efforts were spent protecting built-up areas on the fringe of forests and undeveloped lands.