Are we burning the wrong Bushs?

July 27, 2008 about 3 pm...

Here's an interesting article from Natty Geographic from August 15, 2003, about the U.S. Wildfire Policy...

Is U.S. Wildfire Policy a Smoke Screen?
TravelWatch
By Jonathan B. Tourtellot
National Geographic Traveler
Updated August 15, 2003

"Everybody is trying to hijack the fire issue for their own agendas" —Fire historian Stephen Pyne, of Arizona State University"

If you like driving among towering Sierra Nevada ponderosa pines older than the Constitution, or hiking Montana's Bitterroot in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, you may be making one of the year's half billion visits to America's national parks and forests.

Except, of course, to the forests that are on fire. In Montana alone, 19 fires were burning at last report. One has closed part of Glacier National Park.

Wildfires have been getting worse over the years. In response, the government now plans drastic tree-thinning under its Healthy Forests Initiative. Skeptics call it a pretext for logging, one that flies in the face of our forests' overarching value as places to visit and appreciate.

Today's fires can grow unusually fierce because Smokey Bear went overboard. For decades, the well-meaning policy of suppressing all forest fires allowed too much fuel—dead wood, underbrush, small trees—to build up on public lands, especially in the fire-prone West. What might have once been a minor grass fire now turns cataclysmic, like last year's Hayman Fire in Colorado.

All parties generally agree that many forests need tidying up—by cutting, or carefully controlled burning, or both.

There, agreement ends. Citing cost efficiency, the Bush administration will invite loggers to do the thinning and let them cut what they need for profit. Critics say they'll take the best, biggest trees.

To sort it out, I consulted the nation's best-known fire historian, Dr. Stephen Pyne, based at Arizona State.

"I am dismayed that they are coupling fire management with commercial logging," he says of the White House plan. "Usually fire takes the little stuff and leaves the big, while logging takes the big stuff and leaves the little." Logging debris, he adds, is a worse hazard yet.

But both sides, Pyne says, oversimplify. Forests are naturally adapted to fire, but in different ways. The open grass-tree mix typical of ponderosa pine needs frequent, mild grass fires. The bigger trees survive, providing key habitat and pools of cooling shade. Lodgepole pine forests, by contrast, grow thickly and regenerate every century or so from "self-immolating burns," as in the seemingly catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988.

Jim Furnish, a former deputy Forest Service chief, agrees. In Yellowstone today, he points out, "you can see all the young lodgepoles growing the way they're supposed to. Yellowstone is performing exactly as a wild park should." Lodgepole, in fact, relies on fire to open its seed-laden pine cones.

What are national forests for? A faithful political conservative on most matters, Furnish wants "to manage forests for values like wildlife and recreation." Economics back him up: Whether fishing or camping or touring, visitors now account for 78 percent of the national forests' contribution to the overall economy, according to a 2000 Department of Agriculture report. Logging has slipped to only 12 percent.

Furnish offers a way to have both visitors and timber, minus fire: He started demonstration plots in the 1990s to show how loggers can thin second-growth forests, leaving the large trees and using new lumber technologies to get the most out of smaller ones. [Indeed, the market for old-growth timber is declining. Few mills can still handle the big logs, as thick as 50 inches (127 centimeters), but political pressure to cut old growth persists.]

Furnish wants to see forest habitats preserved, not just for that feathered political football, the spotted owl, but for whole ecosystems, including vulnerable salmon streams. Take away the big trees, he says, "and you're taking away the engine that God built."

Geo-savvy tips: To see what a ponderosa forest should look like, check out the one that the logging town of Condon, Montana, created around its Swan visitor center (406-754-3137). In Yellowstone, take a ranger-led tour of the open, now flourishing areas burned in '88. For a taste of logging traditions, many of which are themselves endangered, visit Libby, Montana, next July for Logger Days (406-293-4167).

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More from Stephen J. Pyne of ASU...

"We've lost control," said Stephen J. Pyne, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University and the nation's preeminent fire historian.

This "ecological insurgency," as Pyne calls it, has varied causes. Drought is parching vegetation. Rising temperatures associated with climate change are shrinking mountain snowpacks, giving fire seasons a jump-start by drying out forests earlier in the summer. The spread of invasive grasses that burn more readily than native plants is making parts of the West ever more flammable.

 - LA Times, July 27, 2008