Tree For Two

Forest health: What does it mean and how is it connected to wildfire? Timothy Coleman suggests that what is good for diverse forest ecosystems can be radically different from what’s best for corporate profits. Sandy Clark says environmentalists are arrogant and uninformed.

Protecting forests should be top priority By Timothy Coleman Special to Perspective

It’s well-known that decades of industrial logging, fire suppression and livestock grazing have altered, or in many cases damaged, forest ecosystems. What isn’t clear is what to do about it. While industry and some agency officials call for more logging, many scientific reports suggest a different approach should be taken.

Natural forests are biologically complex, interconnected systems that depend on wildfire. Wildfire destroys disease and insects while it releases nutrients, creating the seedbed for a new forest. Dead trees often contain a higher level of biological diversity than living ones and play an essential ecosystem function.

Historically, Columbia Basin grasslands and ponderosa pine forests burned more often than higher elevation fir and lodgepole pine. Years of fire suppression have caused a build-up of fuels in some ponderosa pine zones, but most other forest zones are within normal fire-return cycles.

The terminology “catastrophic wildfire” is used by industry to incite public fears to support forest health logging in all forest zones of our national forests. In the context of objective science, the term “catastrophic wildfire” is misplaced. Instead, most scientists use the terms “stand-replacing” or “high-severity fires,” acknowledging that wildfire plays an essential role.

Stand-replacing fires are quite normal and natural to areas of Eastern Washington. As noted in a 1994 Forest Service publication, it was typical for the Colville National Forest to experience moderate- and high-severity fires.

The timber industry argues that forest health logging benefits all parts of the ecosystem. But it fails to recognize the potential negative effects logging has on water quality, noxious weed spread, wildlife displacement and soils.

If more than a century of logging hasn’t fixed the wildfire or forest health problem, why should the public believe that more logging, especially in remote roadless forests, will? Forest health logging is an experimental approach, and should be treated with caution.

We can protect people and homes from wildfire without cutting down our forests. The way to achieve this is by removing brush, low-hanging limbs and thinning trees in the urban/rural interface zone.

Jack Cohen, a scientist at the Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, discovered the best way to protect homes and property is to clear vegetation within 10 meters of buildings and install a metal or other non-flammable roof.

Cohen’s findings demonstrate that logging miles distant from rural or urban communities does not reduce fire threats to communities.

Montana’s Bitterroot Valley fires showed that firebrands — pieces of burning material — were carried by winds miles ahead of fire fronts, igniting new fires. Forest health logging will not prevent this from occurring again — in fact nothing will.

The real economic costs of fighting wildfire are not protecting forests, but protecting communities. It cost $1,000 per acre to fight Montana’s Blodgett fire (near communities), but only $10 an acre to fight wildfire in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Wildfire can occur anywhere where weather and fuel conditions are right for ignition, no matter if it’s grasslands, clearcuts, or ancient forests. We cannot maintain ecosystem health by preventing fire, nor can we keep up with the cost of constantly thinning tens of millions of acres of national forest.

* Timothy Coleman is executive director of the Kettle Range Conservation Group.

Environmentalists’ views too extreme By Sandy Clark Special to Perspective

So much has been written about how the Clinton administration’s forest policy failed. Two million acres of timber were torched last summer because there was too much tinder dry fuel on the forest floor.

As we mourn the unnecessary and preventable waste of enough lumber to build 100,000 houses, we need to know why Congress and the administration repeatedly ignored the pleadings of forest professionals and Western residents.

The answer is clear. The folks who make the rules simply don’t care. With very limited exception, Congress doesn’t give a hoot about Western forests or those residents who work in them or live near them.

Trees aren’t an important crop, and they don’t do much to support families from urban areas. Trees don’t feed the world. They’re not an economic weapon, and they are not an annual crop to be subsidized like wheat or corn. And, there’s not enough revenue derived from American timber to register in a $2 trillion annual budget.

Residents of the rural West live here because we crave a way of life that crowded urban dwellers envy — safe schools, clean air and water and unclogged roads.

Unfortunately, that stands for little to the elected representatives of about 48 states.

Sad to say, if every logger and mill worker in the nation lost his or her job, the rest of America wouldn’t notice. In a booming high-tech economy, why should they be concerned about a 19th century industry whose time has clearly passed?

Timber jobs don’t really matter to most lawmakers and bureaucrats. Here’s what does matter: money.

Since 1993, the timber industry has endured the suffocating effect of a no-cut policy to assuage the misplaced guilt and to satisfy the uninformed demands of a powerful and wealthy environmental lobby.

Both Clinton-Gore candidacies have been financed by environmental activists, whose extreme views and arrogant attitudes dominate the Interior and Agriculture departments. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wants to blow up Western dams. Forest Service director Mike Dombeck wants to let the forests burn. What in the world are these people thinking?

Regrettably, most of Congress has turned a blind eye to these outrageous and thoughtless policies.

Why? To be blunt, a few million dollars in political contributions by the environmental lobbies and entertainment industry is of greater value than $15 billion in timber and job losses. Simply put, there are not enough contributions accruing from 20 million scorched acres, let alone a mere 2 million acres (this summer’s timber loss) to change the minds of lawmakers who have been bought and paid for by enviro-dollars.

Fire, according to laissez-faire environmental activists is natural. Well, so is tooth decay.

Special spending bills to support schools that have lost revenue from reduced timber harvesting are fine, but they are like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. They exist only as empty policy that fails to provide a long-term solution.

Effecting forest policy by campaign contributions must not overshadow the legitimate, verifiable needs of America. Nor must their effect subvert good science for the sake of the guilt-ridden, uninformed few.

Oddly, campaign finance reform, or better, term limits, may offer the only long-term hope for healthy forests.

* Sandy Clark is a Coeur d’Alene resident.