Dispute rages over increase of wildfires in West

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Andrea Booher/Federal Emergency Management Agency Charred foundations left behind two years ago after the Cerro Grande fire near Los Alamos, N.M., emphasize one of the primary challenges firefighters in the West now face: an increasing number of homes built on the edge of highly flammable forests.

Rain and snow brought an official end to the Western wildfire season earlier this month, allowing crews to finally get a handle on the last of this year's major conflagrations: a 500,000-acre monster dubbed the Biscuit fire, which chewed its way across southern Oregon for four months before a storm dumped 2 inches of rain on the blaze and allowed firefighters to declare it under control on Nov. 8.

The end of the fire season will not, however, bring to an end the intensifying debate over the role of fire in the Western landscape and the best way for public agencies to deal with it. This summer, as wildfires scorched their way across the West, lawmakers from the region joined the Bush administration in setting off a conflagration of their own by blaming environmental groups for the widespread destruction and by unveiling proposals to reduce the threat by accelerating logging and road construction in national forests.

"The recent wildfires that've burned over 6 million acres of land this year were not only predictable, but they were also inevitable when environmental extremists continue to prevent responsible logging and thinning of over-fueled forests," said Rep. Richard Pombo, a Republican from California's Central Valley and chairman of the Western Caucus. "Now is the time for these green obstructionist groups to rise above the smoke and come to terms with the facts about proper forest management practices."

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, whose department includes the U.S. Forest Service, also blamed environmental groups for the summer fires, alleging her agency's efforts to thin forests and reduce the buildup of debris and small trees — which some fire experts blame for the increasing size and severity of wildfires, and which are widely believed to be the result of a century of federal fire-suppression efforts — had been stymied by lawsuits.

To bolster her contention, the Forest Service issued a report saying that 48 percent of its efforts to let logging companies thin forests to reduce fire danger had been appealed by logging opponents.

That assertion drew sharp rebukes from environmental groups, which cited a 2001 General Accounting Office report concluding only 1.2 percent of the fuel-reduction projects proposed by the Forest Service the previous year had been appealed and none had been the subject of a lawsuit.

"The Forest Service didn't like the finding of the GAO report, so they cooked up numbers more to their liking," said Tom Weis, executive director of the National Forest Protection Alliance. "This is unconscionable behavior on the part of the Forest Service, but not a big surprise, given that 25-year timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey is running the show as the Bush administration's undersecretary for natural resources and environment."

The difference, Weis and others noted, was that the GAO review looked at thinning projects proposed in areas of high fire danger near communities, whereas the Forest Service review included proposals to remove stands of virgin timber in areas far from human habitation. More of those projects were appealed or litigated, the organizations said, because they were actually commercial logging operations of the sort that have been found to increase fire risk instead of reducing it.

Pray for rain

Photo courtesy Bureau of Land Management In 1988, a wildfire that roared through Yellowstone National Park helped spark public debate on the role of fire in the Western landscape and the proper way for federal and state agencies to respond.

There is no doubt that fire has long been a part of the Western landscape. Drought is a recurrent event in the region and so is summer lightning; dry forests and incendiary bolts from the heavens inevitably produce flames.

It has become a popular conception that professional firefighting efforts over the past century have prevented natural fires from periodically clearing away dead underbrush and small trees. This suppression, the theory suggests, has allowed a buildup of fuel to the point where even natural fires — which in the past would have crept harmlessly through the understory — quickly explode into all-consuming infernos, leaping from tree crown to tree crown in a cyclone of flames that veteran firefighters wryly suggest can be fought only one way: Pray for rain and run like hell.

But to many fire scientists and landscape ecologists, it is not entirely clear that the conventional wisdom — which is driving much of the public debate over where and how to battle wildfires — is accurate. And even the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark suggest the story of fire and its relationship with the landscape and with human beings is a great deal more complicated than today's debaters acknowledge.

As they crossed the Great Plains in 1804, the explorers reported witnessing prairie fires. When they left their winter camp in North Dakota in early 1805, they reported that their neighbors, the Mandans, set fire to the prairie to stimulate an early crop of grass for their horses and to attract bison.

Nor was the intentional setting of fires by American Indians restricted to the Plains. As the expedition crossed the Bitterroot Range on the border of Montana and Idaho, Clark wrote that "Maney parts of this country were bare of timber they having burnt it down" — "they" presumably meaning the natives.

Although it is quite possible that lightning set the fires responsible for the charred timber Clark observed, subsequent travelers reported that tribes in forested regions routinely ignited fires to keep the woods open and encourage the growth of grasses preferred by deer and other game.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University and MacArthur Foundation fellow who worked 15 seasons as a firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, has compiled a substantial body of data to support his thesis that human beings wielded fire as a tool from the moment they migrated into North America 12,000 or so years ago, greatly modifying the landscape.

"So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general consequence of the Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savannah, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush," he wrote in his monumental work "Fire in America: A Cultural History Wildland and Rural Fire," one of five books he has written on the subject. "Most of the impenetrable woods encountered by explorers were in bogs or swamps from which fire was excluded; naturally drained landscape was nearly everywhere burned. Conversely, almost everywhere the European went, forests followed. The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it."

In other words, according to Pyne, the landscape Americans have regarded as "natural" since settlers began following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark across the West was actually the product of human manipulation.

Are things getting worse?

Even today, human beings remain the primary cause of wildfires in the United States. Between 1990 and 1999, according to the Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, an average of 106,306 wildfires broke out annually. People caused 88 percent of them and lightning caused the rest. Lightning fires, however, tend to occur in remote areas where it is difficult or unnecessary to fight them, so the acreage charred by naturally set fires far exceeds that burned by human-caused ones.

Researchers have also noted there is actually little scientific data to support the contention that fire-suppression efforts over the past century have changed the fundamental character of North American forests.

There is evidence of periodic severe and destructive lightning-set fires — the kind capable of obliterating entire stands of trees — over the past 300 years, according to reports presented at last year's meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Other studies found no real change in the average overall amount of forest burned each year, regardless of suppression efforts.

Curiously, for all the high-volume angst among politicians over the terrible cost of this year's fire season — and the haste of some to blame the devastation on impediments to logging and forest thinning — historical data suggest the problem is no worse now than in the past. Since 1960, according to the Interagency Fire Center, total acreage burned has equaled or exceeded this year's figure four times: 1963 (7.1 million acres), 1969 (6.7 million), 1988 (7.4 million) and 1996 (6.7 million).

Throw money at it

Clearly, bad fire seasons in the past had little to do with the "green obstructionist groups" blamed by Rep. Pombo and others. During the 1960s, logging was not subject to today's federal environmental laws for the simple reason that they did not yet exist. And the really bad years occurred even further in the past: The worst decade of all since records began to be kept was the 1930s, when an average of 39 million acres burned each year. In the 1940s, the annual average was 23 million acres. Even in the 1950s, the average was more than 9.4 million acres a year. (Click here for more fire statistics)

For the most part, the gigantic wildfires of the first half of the 20th century occurred precisely in those areas where logging had been most active: Logging meant roads, which allowed greater forest access for hunters and others prone to accidentally or intentionally set fires, and provided vast quantities of ready fuel in the form of discarded branches and other woody debris.

What has changed is that more people live in or near the woods now than in any previous decade, which has raised the stakes considerably. The West is the fastest-growing region of the United States, and according to the Federal Emergency Management Administration, 38 percent of new homes built in the region today are in or adjacent to the "wildland-urban interface."

And as the population at risk has grown, so has the expense of protecting lives and property from the flames. Total Forest Service fire suppression expenditures, according to economist Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute, have risen sevenfold over the past decade and now exceed $3 billion a year.

The agency, O'Toole and other critics say, misrepresents the true nature of the fire threat in Western forests because it has been given a powerful financial incentive to do so: Funds authorized by Congress for firefighting and fuel treatment have enabled the Forest Service to maintain its size and influence over public land policy even as timber sales — the agency's primary management focus in previous decades — have declined nationwide.

"Congress must realize that it cannot solve problems with a blank check and that it must consider the incentives it creates for federal managers," O'Toole wrote in a report titled "Reforming the Fire Service: An Analysis of Federal Fire Budgets and Incentives," issued this summer.

"Until it does, fire will continue to cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year while it threatens ecosystems, public and private property, and human lives."