Cleansing Fire, Not Salvage Logging, Is The Better Way
One July night two years ago in McCall, Idaho, I watched big trees burning across Payette Lake. Spruces and pines caught and flamed and crowned from the fires that crept through the forest understory.
Those Payette fires cost so much to fight. By day, the droning cargo planes scooped and dropped water and fire retardant but all to no avail.
The fires burned for three months - not the racing infernos of Disney productions but the slow and searching flames of forest health as it was meant to be. Tree by tree, draw by draw, hillside by hillside, that portion of the Payette National Forest exhausted its unnaturally high fuel loads.
You can see the burn pattern today - mosaic striations of intermixed dead, dying and scorched but still living trees. The forest floor is clean for the first time in decades and ready for fresh growth in morel mushrooms, lupine, vine maple and new trees.
Strong populations of deer, elk, moose and bears follow fires when the forests open up. Other species, such as lodgepole pine, either rely on fire to reseed or have been shaded out by too-thick forest understories.
Fire is natural. Our forests evolved with fire. Not only did the Native Americans use it, but lightning-caused fires routinely swept the region. Replanting trees is easier after fire has come through. The fire not only takes out shrubs and weedy species like thistle and ninebark, it also burns to ash the limbs that logging leaves. That ash layer acts as a fertilizer.
Forest Service Chief-designee Michael Dombeck, if he is finally affirmed for the job, promises to revise agency policies to include prescribed burning.
The hunting community seems willing to endorse that idea. As I heard in a locker room recently, “You can see the deer to shoot ‘em better when there are fewer trees.” But sounder scientific reasons than that favor forest fires as management tools over chainsaws and logging roads.
In Washington and Idaho, many forests are cluttered with underbrush from generations of fire suppression. Smokey Bear taught us so well that we have made it an institution in the Northwest to suppress every fire that starts, much to the detriment of native biodiversity. Trees get crowded and even diseased from lack of light when we “prevent forest fires.”
Conservationists would like to believe Michael Dombeck actually can do what he says. But Jack Ward Thomas, a former Forest Service head who likewise promised ecosystem-based changes, buckled to external pressures and to the bureaucratic intertia that long has beset the agency. Call it “analysis paralysis.”
Much of the pressure comes from the forest products industry.
Boise-Cascade, Potlatch, Louisiana-Pacific and timber trade associations in the Inland Northwest greatly politicize the matter of forest fires and other natural disturbances. To persuade us they are doing the right thing, they sponsor radio shows, take out newspaper ads and give out free seedlings as part of their feel-good public relations campaigns. They swing heavy clubs in land management decisions.
That’s why regional GOP leaders have been so vociferous over “salvage” logging and forest health - because they have been elected and re-elected thanks to hundreds of thousands of forest products dollars. Now it’s payback time. They do the bidding of the pushiest and wealthiest lobbies in their home districts, including timber coalitions that want to keep the flow of national forest products coming, subsidized by our tax dollars.
As we talk through the White House skirmish about campaign finances and their reform, just look at the consequences of corporate contributions regionally.
Combine those contributors with powerful inholders in our national forests, i.e. folks who build remote cabins or castles deep in the woods, and you have a recipe for both a culture clash and an ecological disaster.
People who retreat to the woods increase the incidence of fires. Often, they want the federal government off their backs yet demand federal firefighters and disaster relief when the inevitable flames arrive. Fire suppression is performed at the behest of retirees, vacationers and private and corporate investors in overgrown woodlots.
Managers of Yellowstone National Park, who had the wisdom to let fires burn in 1988, took unreasonable heat from people whose lands abut park boundaries. Science doesn’t govern forest decisions nearly as much as it ought to. Politics and economics are calling many of the shots.
Building more roads and cutting more trees won’t promote forest health. Instead, we should be ripping out roads, which not only bring silt into streams but also facilitate logging and fire suppression. The areas that have been most fire-suppressed are those that have been roaded and logged.
Creative and scientific thinking about management of our public lands could put unemployed loggers to work. Let them rip out roads and help the forest Service to reinvent fire as a natural management tool.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Paul Lindholdt Contributing writer