Forests Managed With Fire, So What About Grass Seed?

Using fire to manage forests, as proposed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, makes sense to Spokane Valley grass grower Clarence Argyle.

“In dealing with a living plant,” said Argyle, “you have to go by the laws of nature.” Fire, he said, is nature’s way of triggering certain plants’ reproductive systems.

Even as Babbitt suggested burning trees, Carol Browner, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was calling for tougher air-quality standards to control smoke.

“If some smoke is good and other smoke is bad,” asked asthmatic Ivan Kalita of Spokane, “how can I tell the difference? I hear that these decisions are being made using science, so I guess the next question should be about what kind of science are these government folks using - medical or political? Are these new EPA rules going to require me to get sick from grass smoke this year even though forest fire smoke has bothered me the most in the past?”

The reason environmentalists approve of burning public forests but not grass fields, says Edwin G. Davis of Spokane, “may be that the government does the one, but the other is done on private property by owners who want to make a profit - capitalism - which environmentalists hate.”

Actually, says Paul Lindholdt of Spokane, not all environmentalists support a ban on grass-field burning.

“The potential loss of farmlands to residential or commerical development would be a bad thing,” he said. “The loss of those same fields for their function of filtering water that goes into the aquifer also would be a bad thing. But farmers profiting by burning fields and damaging air quality is, perhaps in the eyes of many Spokane County residents, a worse thing.”

“Many times,” says James A. Nelson of Spokane, “our city has been totally engulfed by smoke from nearby forest fires, sometimes for many, many days. You hear nothing from the media about massive overloads at hospitals with people having breathing problems during these periods, but the first time the grass burners burn, and for weeks prior and afterward, you hear about the devastating effect on hundreds of individuals.”

In Kettle Falls, Wash., Gary Garrison says he thinks Babbitt also should give thought to logging as a method of restoring forest health.

“If salvageable trees were taken out,” he said, “a lot of that fuel would be turned into boards and houses.”

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