Firing the Forest Plan
by Wolfgang Deerkop
In mid-August 2001, lightning struck Wenatchee National Forest in the North Cascades along Rex Creek, 34 miles north of Chelan, Wash. The strike ignited a complex of five fires that burned two structures, consumed 54,000 acres and cost the U.S. Forest Service more than $4.3 million.
Fire ecologists and policy makers blame an early-20th-century federal fire policy for catastrophic fires, like the Rex Creek Complex, as well as those of past fire seasons. In 1910, a fire nicknamed the Big Blowup in Idaho killed 85 people and changed the nation's view of wildfires. Less than a year later, the Forest Service issued a new plan for fighting forest fires. The plan called for total suppression of all wildfires across the nation.
University of Washington fire ecologist Jim Agee said the goal of eliminating wildfire worked - too well.
"We have essentially built a huge biomass bank over the last century," he said.
The bank contains decades worth of tree limbs, needles and brush that have accumulated on the forest floor, Agee said. He said without periodic fires to remove the debris, unintentional fires ignited in these conditions could become uncontrollable.
"Had we done the kinds of fuel treatments (before the Rex Creek fire) we are currently trying to accomplish, I think that it would have made a big difference," said Richy Harrod, a Wenatchee National Forest fire ecologist.
The federal government responded to concerns about fires because of national attention given to last summer's massive fires - primarily in Colorado and Arizona - with the introduction of the Bush Adminstration's Healthy Forest Initiative.
"The forest policy of our government is misguided policy," President George W. Bush said in a speech to residents of Central Point, Ore., a town west of Bend. "It doesn't work. We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense."
The focus of the initiative is to reduce restrictions on fuel reduction treatments - forest thinning to reduce debris - and restoration projects in previously burned areas of the forest.
"If the Bush Administration has their way, which it's unclear that they will, the environmental safeguards will be substantially undercut," said Michael Closson, executive director of Biodiversity Northwest, a Seattle-based environmental organization. "As a result, there could be a significant increase in old-growth logging."
The initiative also includes legislation designed to eliminate administrative appeals and lawsuits that challenge salvage-timber sales and fuel reduction treatments.
Bush said, however, he believes his forest policy is the best way to solve the litigation problems that exist in current forest policy.
"There's a fine balance between people expressing their selves [sic] and their opinions and using litigation to keep the United States of America from enacting common sense forest policy," Bush said.
To lessen the costs to the federal government, which has already promised $428 million to the program, stewardship contracts will be awarded to private timber companies. In exchange for thinning the forest and clearing it of dead wood and brush, the private companies get to keep the harvested wood.
Closson said the stewardship contracts are a problem because large timber companies stand to gain the most from the agreements.
"The way it's set up, the bigger companies get the lion's share of the work and the contracts," he said.
Organizations such as Northwest Ecosystem Alliance and Biodiversity Northwest criticize the plan and compare it to the failed Emergency Salvage Timber Sale Program of 1995. The program focused primarily on removal of fire-damaged trees from the disastrous 1994 fire season.
"There are some real similarities," Closson said. "They come from the same motivation."
Like the Bush initiative, the 1995 program limited legal appeals of timber sales.
The program remained in operation until July 1996 when the Clinton Administration stopped using it and allowed its mandate to run out. Former Vice President Al Gore later admitted that approving the program was the worst mistake the Clinton Administration made during its first term.
"(The Healthy Forest Initiative) is a clear attempt to erode the conservation and environmental regulations that have been established in the last 30 years," Closson said. "You could almost say it's logging without laws returned."
Junior Wolfgang Deerkop plans to study environmental journalism at Huxley College. This is his first published piece.
