Fire Or Chain Saw Cleanups Inevitable

Late-summer fires and smoke were a part of our region’s ecosystem long before white settlers arrived and started plowing the grasslands and chopping down the forests to build their cities.

Modern nature lovers who gripe about smoke as if a pristine world would spare them from breathing the stuff need perspective - and need to be careful what they ask for. By demanding freedom from smoke, they might make smoke more likely.

Fire is nature’s way to clear underbrush, insects and disease from forests - and, by the way, from grasslands as well.

The fires that now rage across the Inland Northwest’s national forests are, primarily, the result of an unusually dry summer. In that respect, they are similar to fires that cleared and renewed our region’s forests for thousands of years. It ought to be noted that some of this summer’s fires are in wilderness areas where logging has never been allowed. Surely, we all recall the 1994 fires that swept through Yellowstone National Park, likewise shielded from logging.

But it also is a fact - documented by forestry research following the 1994 fire season - that the past century’s forest management practices have made modern conflagrations worse.

After logging operations, some forests have been densely replanted with species that aren’t as resistant to healthy, brush-clearing fires as were the native trees such as white pine.

Protests rooted in ideology, not forestry, have attacked attempts to spray tree-killing insects or log trees that are infested, diseased and dying.

When forest fire crews extinguish a blaze, they plant the seeds for larger conflagrations. A century of fire suppression has left national forests filled with brush, dead branches, small trees - tinder for firestorms of unnatural intensity.

As a result, foresters now favor prescribed burns to prevent disaster. And yet, when fires do occur, what happens? Out come the fire crews. This is understandable, given the desire to protect cities, homes, timber and Bambi. But the contradiction speaks for itself.

Foresters face a difficult choice: Let fire cleanse and renew the forests while rural homes burn and skies fill with smoke. Or, suppress fires and clear forests with chain saws, instead.

Loud voices oppose either choice. On federal forests, where management policy is subject to political interference, this leads to the worst of all worlds: Fires are suppressed, insects and disease run rampant, and thinning operations are opposed. The result? Firestorms - worse than the wildfires that are nature’s norm.

After the 1994 fires, researchers warned that national forests are a tinderbox. Already, some compare this fire season to 1910, when massive fires swept across Idaho and Montana. But forest conditions in 1910 had not been altered by a century in which managers erred and politics made the errors worse. Pray for rain. And, for common sense.