Reducing Wildfire Risks: Healthy Forests Initiative

President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative originally counted on Congress to enact some legislation for its completion. Congress continues to dally, however, so on December 11, in an effort to allow vital forest health projects to move forward before the 2003 fire season, the Bush Administration announced a series of new administrative steps.

“These actions will reduce unnecessary red tape and needless delays that have too often delayed efforts to reduce the threat devastating wildfires and insect infestations that damage both public and private lands. The new procedures will ensure that needed environmental reviews and public review processes are conducted in the most efficient and effective way possible,” said the Department of the Interior (DOI).

“Current firefighting efforts are often successful, but land managers must do more to reduce the threat of catastrophic fires,” stated the DOI. Federal land management procedures are so complex that they prevent timely action to address ecological crises on public lands.”

Forest Service officials estimate that planning and assessment consume 40% of their time at the national level, costing more than $250 million per year and reducing the resources available for actual forest health projects that will protect local communities from catastrophic wildfires. The administration proposes to:

1. Reinstate categorical exclusions for small projects that do not have adverse environmental effects. This will enable many fuels treatment and forest restoration projects to proceed quickly.

2. Amend the appeals process so that projects can continue while under appeal and so that appeals can be filed only by those who participated in the process in its early stages.

3. Improve Endangered Species Act coordination processes. Processes would include analysis of what would happen to species if their habitat burned as well as the projections of what effects a proposed project could have.

4. Improve processes for Environmental Assessments. “Some of these documents go on for 200 to 300 pages,” said Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey. Rey believes that those documents should instead be about 30 pages, and he thinks that making the documents shorter and simpler will enable more people to understand them better and participate more effectively.

(This administration is at least trying to improve the health of our forests. Please do your part by supporting the Healthy Forests Initiative in letters to the editor and to Congress, and by writing the Administration to express your support. -Ed.)  

Thoughts from the USFS Chief

We know from written accounts and from old photographs that many parts of the West have become densely forested just in the past 100 years. Before that, they were pretty open. Today, we often have a thousand or more trees where previously there were only 20 to 50 per acre.

Fire exclusion has made our forests dense, and that has changed the character of our forests. We have lost a lot of habitat for species that require open woodland... These dense forests don’t support as much diversity as they once did, and they don’t offer as much in the way of scenic quality, either.

In open woodland, fires tend to be relatively cool and low. But in the dense forests we have today, fires become huge infernos. These fires can do great damage to the ecosystem, not to mention the damage they do to human property and the threat they pose to human life.

...(W)e currently estimate that on the national forests alone, about 73 million acres are at risk from wildland fires that could compromise human safety and ecosystem integrity. And fire is not the only risk. On all ownerships, including federal, state, and private lands, about 70 million acres are at higher-than-normal risk from 26 different insects and pathogens....

I want to emphasize that these problems are interlinked. Overcrowding stresses and weakens trees, rendering them more prone to fire and more susceptible to pests, pathogens, and displacement by invasive species. We’ve known about the problem for years, but at the rate we were treating the forests we manage, I’m afraid we were slowly losing ground.

...The key is to restore the historical openness of our forests by removing excess trees. There are only two ways I know of to remove excess trees: You can either burn them up or haul them away.

Burning can be a good choice sometimes, but often the forests are too dense to safely burn until after an initial thinning. Besides, some of the material we need to remove can be used to supply the American people with wood products. It seems ironic that we have all of this material that needs to be removed, yet we rely on imports to meet so much of our need for wood.

The American people need to ask themselves if they want to place the burden of supplying our nation with wood on countries that have fewer regulations for harvesting.

...The cost of removing and destroying trees can be astronomical... run from $150 to $500 per acre... Our nation’s forests desperately need treatment. Our nation’s people need products… When you put these two needs together, it adds up to a great opportunity for people in our local communities. We want our local communities to become part of the process—the part in the middle—of taking excess trees and turning them into useful products—and, in the process, making a living.

We would much rather see Americans using products from our forests and in turn getting jobs out of it than importing the wood, which means exporting both jobs and dollars. We would also much rather see wood used than most substitutes; wood takes far less energy and water to produce, and it is a better insulator than steel or aluminum. Best of all, it is renewable...

(Excerpted from a speech by U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth at Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 11, 2002)

(It’s great to finally see common sense coming out of D.C. Unfortunately, many of our small communities have lost the ability to profit from the removal of excess trees, because the local mills have closed. -Ed.)

(By:Dale Bosworth  | 22 March 2003 | 11:00PM)