Forest Expert Calls For Thinning Now Environmentalists Worry That Fire Protection Plan Is Excuse To Log

Forests around Spokane and Coeur d’Alene are threatened by fire danger - and won’t replenish themselves without immediate thinning and prescribed burns, an expert said at a forest health symposium here.

Environmentalists are skeptical of Leon Neuenschwander’s call for more logging and prescribed burns. Neuenschwander is a University of Idaho fire ecology expert.

Improving the health of Ponderosa pine forests such as those in the Inland Northwest - especially around homes and buildings - should be a national priority, Neuenschwander told about 50 people at a forest health sympo- sium sponsored by the Selkirk Conservation Alliance on Friday.

President Clinton last month approved a $1.8 billion strategy to combat wildfire risk across the country with a combination of logging and prescribed burns.

So far this year, wildfires burned nearly 7 million acres of forest and range around the country. Roughly 8 percent of the fires burned in Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests, the kind that grow at lower elevations in the Inland Northwest.

That’s where Neuenschwander recommends the government focus first.

Historically, parklike Ponderosa pine savannas covered much of the Inland Northwest’s valleys, researchers say. A combination of decades of fire suppression and logging created a dense tinderbox of the Ponderosa pine mixed with fir trees, which are less tolerant of fire. Following Spokane’s big fires of the early 1990s, forests grew back in a carpet of young trees.

That carpet represents the most flammable kind of forest in the country, Neuenschwander said.

Those even-aged small trees will never be a forest because they will burn, Neuenschwander said. And when they go, the seed source for the next forest will go up in smoke.

If global warming is real, the West can expect more extreme drought and more big fires in the pine and fir forests, “accelerating the deforestation,” he continued. “That’s what I came to tell you.”

Federal forest managers are unsure exactly how the federal National Fire Plan will play out on the ground, said Dan Dallas, Newport District Ranger on the Colville National Forest. Part of that stems from the uncertainties of funding under a new presidential administration.

But Dallas, taking a break from the symposium, said Neuenschwander’s comments also made him wonder. He doesn’t know what kind of fire reduction plan he should submit to the Forest Service. Though the Newport district holds some drier forests along rivers, much of the district is wetter hemlock and cedar forests that Neuenschwander says don’t benefit as readily from treatment.

“Do I want to go treat the whole district, or am I going to really concentrate on what will do the most good?” Dallas asked.

Several environmentalists at the symposium, however, questioned the fire ecologist’s dire predictions.

Environmental groups are wary of the government’s call to log forests back to health. They say timber companies will use the fire reduction strategy to increase logging. Historic photographs show dense forests around Coeur d’Alene with occasional open stands, and dense forests in the Blue Mountains studded with occasional large trees, said Mike Petersen of The Lands Council in Spokane.

“The thing that’s missing now are the large trees because they’ve been logged out,” Petersen said.

Regional timber companies support Neuenschwander’s call to start restoring forests in the pine and fir stands near homes, said Stefany Bales, spokeswoman for the Intermountain Forest Association in Coeur d’Alene.

The companies hope the American public sees that thinning and burning do reduce fires in forests near people’s homes, Bales said. Then the public - particularly skeptical city dwellers - may be more responsive to industry’s push for the government to do fuel reduction work in backcountry areas.

“It makes sense to do the easy stuff first,” she said.