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Politicizing fire: When blowing smoke fans the flames

BY PHILIP RUNDEL

While it is unpleasant to say this, the recent catastrophic wildfires in California, particularly those in our mountain areas, were an inevitable occurrence when public policy ignores the environment in which we live.

It is important now, as we deal with the property damage and loss of life caused by these fires, to keep some perspective and not jump to politicizing the process of fire. Fires are a natural part of our environment, but our modern actions have changed this role. Decades of well-meaning, but ill-conceived, policies to suppress all fires have allowed the accumulation of dense thickets of young trees and dead fuels in forest understories. We have been aware of this issue for many years, but bureaucratic entropy has slowed action in dealing with the problem.

The Bush administration has now used images of burning homes to push passage of the ill-named “Healthy Forest Initiative” (HFI). This bill, which had previously languished in the U.S. Senate for months, is based on the premise that the only effective way to control catastrophic forest fires is to thin forests first with logging. No one argues about the need to thin young forest growth around homes and developments at the wildland/urban interface. But for most of our national forests, prescribed fires — that is, deliberate management fires lit under controlled conditions — provide a cost-effective and ecologically benign way to reduce unnatural accumulations of flammable fuels and restore natural conditions.

The primary purpose of HFI, however, is not to reduce fire, but instead to legislate a fundamental change in our national forest policy under the guise of fire protection. HFI allows any “hazardous fuels” projects to be categorically exempt from environmental review and suspends most public rights to appeal poorly conceived projects. Rather than focus efforts at thinning along the real wildland/urban interface, a zone perhaps a quarter-mile in width around rural communities, the HFI defines this interface so broadly as to include a huge proportion of all U.S. National Forest lands. Since the cost of thinning is high, HFI allows the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to trade merchantable timber to logging companies in return for thinning smaller fuels. Thus, remote forest areas can be declared to contain “hazardous fuels” and opened to logging companies with little or no public notice or review.

HFI’s faulty premise that logging will reduce fire hazards flies in the face of scientific consensus that logging itself has been the cause of much of the increased flammability of our forest environments. Large, old-growth trees are the key to healthy forest regeneration after fires and provide critical wildlife habitat, yet it is many of these trees that will be logged as payment for other fuel reduction.

One of the contributing issues to the severity of the recent fires in the San Bernardino Mountains was the clear-cutting of much of this forest area a century ago. By encouraging unregulated logging in our national forests under the guise of “thinning,” we are passing on a future fire hazard to our children and grandchildren.

Rundel is professor of biology and a member of the Institute of the Environment.