Strategic Fire Fuel Management

By Fred D. Hodgeboom

Retired Forester, Bigfork, MT.

The fires of 2002 have sparked a national debate on management of federal lands. Each fire season confirms what forest and fire ecologists have been warning us about for decades.

Due to effective fire suppression and a lack of access with timber management on federal lands, there is massive overstocking of trees and loss of natural diversity that was previously maintained by Native American burning and natural wildfires. The continuous canopy of excess biomass predisposes tens of millions of acres to catastrophic wildfires that cannot be controlled.

What we continue to see this year are fires that, despite all our technology and mechanization, exceed the largest fires on record for the region. What is incredible is the obstruction of any significant progress on ameliorating the problem by the so-called “conservation” and “environmental” lobby. How can these organizations see the effects of these fires on watersheds, soils, wildlife, habitat, timber resources, government treasuries, communities, and people’s lives, then sabotage solutions?

We probably only have to look at their source of funding. Many national and local conservation organizations started out legitimately representing their members. Now these organizations have been captured by big money foundations that have extreme political agendas that have little to do with on the ground conservation. A few of these foundations are Cinnabar, Brainerd, Bullitt, Kongsgaard-Goldman, Patagonia, Rockefeller, Turner, Wilberforce. When out-of-state foundations finance the largest percentage of the organizations’ budget, who is represented, the foundations or dues paying members?

Following are some sound bytes distributed by every tax-exempt preservation organization’s paid lobbyist/propagandist:  

• Science shows that only a 40-meter area next to homes needs treatment; concentrate on urban interface boundaries. This is propagandist use of some fact to tell a lie. A study was done on the distance various housing materials ignited from a hot crown fire. However the study is conducted under nearly ideal calm wind conditions and no research has been done in 30-50 mph winds that are typical of conditions when lives and property are lost in real holocaust type fires. People who advocate treating a few hundred feet along a federal boundary as a solution have not seen a large fire that is releasing energy at the rate of an atomic bomb every 5 minutes. When a 2000-degree convection column is blown by high winds, life and property damage will occur for thousands of feet. The real solution is to manage the forest fuels in more natural diverse patterns that preclude the A-bomb type of fire from developing.

• No large fire-resistant trees should be cut; only the undergrowth and small trees should be removed. There are some large trees that have more fire resistance than others, but being a large tree does not make it fire resistant. The crowns of large trees burn with greater intensity and flame length than small trees and when the crowns of large trees are overlapped with no open space in between they will carry a catastrophic crown fire. How large is large? Forests are too diverse to write a legislated prescription. Federal agencies have professional foresters on staff to determine the on-the-ground treatment needed to accomplish a desired condition. To specify some limit or write a prescription in legislation is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It is very poor stewardship to have loggers in the woods thinning and then have to leave a beetle infested tree to hatch its brood because some imposed rule prohibits harvest of a tree over a certain size.

• Thinning is too expensive to treat the large area needed; where is the money going to come from? If forest thinning is done as proposed by the Sierra Club and all the related tax-exempt preservation corporations, then the statement is true. The preservation lobby attempt to legislatively exempt “big” trees is just one of the ways they work to make thinning the forest uneconomical. The fact is that most of the forests at risk are “commercial forests” where most of the trees forming the forest canopy have commercial value. A recent University of Montana study uses real timber inventory and timber value data to model the benefits and costs of various thinning prescriptions in Montana. The study shows that the “thin from below” preservation lobby prescription is extremely expensive, had little effect on crown fire potential, and that the tiny benefit to fire control was short lived. In comparison a “comprehensive” prescription that removed larger trees in addition to the small ones would return an average of $624/acre statewide, practically eliminated the possibility of a crown fire, and that fuel reduction was effective for more than thirty years. The financial benefit was based on the sawtimber market alone. If a sustained market for pulpwood and biomass (limbs and trees too small to chip) were available, the total benefit would be even greater.

• President Bush’s thinning plan is a return to logging without laws; citizens rights are being eliminated; loggers will be turned loose in Federal Forests. None of these slogans are true. There never has and never will be logging without laws. Appeals are simply administrative procedures, not a “right” granted by law. Even if the appeal procedures were suspended, the courts are still available, so no citizen rights would be lost. Loggers have never been “turned loose” in Federal Forests. All the logging that has ever been done is done under contract with strict specifications and supervision by government foresters. This would not change under the President’s plan.

What is really needed is for the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) provisions allowing non-profit corporations to litigate free of any financial risk to be modified. EAJA is the real reason that tax-exempt preservation corporations have been able to wrest all authority from land management agencies by bludgeoning them with lawsuits while enriching their coffers at taxpayer expense. The no-risk litigation factor is why the agencies are in “analysis paralysis” and no effective management of the federal forests is being implemented. Leveling the playing field for non-profits would not eliminate any citizen rights, only require responsibility.

Only by electing people to public office with the fortitude to reject preservationist funds and attached strings can the current pitiful situation in federal forests be turned around. Is it going to take another 1910 fire?