Budgetary Incentive Drives Forest Service
to Log, Suppress Fires

By Matthew Koehler, Native Forest Network - Special to The Seattle Times, July 20, 2001

With the start of another Western wildfire season, it is important to reflect on the lessons learned from last summer's wildfires.

The wildfires of 2000 received a huge amount of media attention. For a solid month, television crews and reporters traveled the West searching for footage and stories to put on the evening news or in next morning's paper.

Last year's media coverage of the wildfires provided the public with the opportunity to learn some important lessons about forest health and fire ecology. The public learned that wildfires are an essential and natural process - as much a part of the landscape as wind, sun, snow and rain. More than ever, people now realize that wildfires do not destroy a forest, but that logging, roadbuilding, grazing and other heavy-handed management activities are the true source of our forest health problems.

During last summer's wildfires, the Forest Service gave the impression that they were changing their ways. We heard Forest Service spokespeople talk about the need to restore fire into the forest, the problems with past fire-suppression activities and the negative impacts of over 100 years of logging, roadbuilding and grazing on public forests.

Sadly, any conversion the Forest Service may have experienced last summer was short-lived. As another wildfire season approaches, the Forest Service is now playing on the public's fear of fire - often using taxpayer dollars for expensive PR campaigns - to justify massive post-fire logging proposals on burned forests throughout the West.

The Bitterroot National Forest in Montana - site of the nation's largest wildfire in 2000 - is currently proposing to log up to 280 million board feet of timber in the areas burned by last summer's wildfires - enough logs to fill 56,000 log trucks that if lined up end-to-end would stretch for 475 miles! Similar proposals are being planned for national forests around the West.

Bitterroot National Forest officials claim their risky and unproven post-fire salvage logging proposal in the burned areas will reduce the risk of future wildfires - while at the same time the Forest Service talks about the need to restore fire into these fire-dependent forests.

Numerous scientific studies have found that post-fire salvage logging hinders a forest's natural recovery process and has no ecological benefits.

For example, a 1995 report "Wildfire and Salvage Logging" by a team of scientists headed by Robert L. Beschta of Oregon State University stated that while "there is little reason to believe that post-fire salvage logging has any positive ecological benefits... there is considerable evidence that persistent, significant adverse environmental impacts are likely to result from salvage logging."

Furthermore, science does not support the Forest Service's claim that post-fire logging will reduce the possibility of a reburn. A 2000 Forest Service report found "no studies documenting a reduction in fire intensity in a stand that had previously burned and then been logged."

While the Forest Service uses the fear of fire to ratchet up its logging program, the agency also has a virtual blank check courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers to continue its war-like fire-suppression activities.

The recent deaths in Washington of four young firefighters should serve to highlight the futility of spending billions of dollars needlessly placing firefighters' lives at risk waging a war against wildfires that can no more be won than a war against hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes.

This tragedy is further compounded by the fact that fire scientists have known for years the simple-yet-effective precautions homeowners in forested areas must take to adapt to the inevitability of wildfire.

Research shows that effective home protection primarily depends on the home and its immediate surroundings - not on suppressing wildfires or logging deep within the forest. In other words, homeowners living in forested areas need to create safety zones within 200 feet of their homes by mowing grasses, removing fallen leaves and needles and installing a metal roof on their house.

These simple precautions not only dramatically increase the chance that a house will withstand a wildfire, they also increase the success - not to mention safety - of fire departments in protecting the home if fires do reach it.

As the wildfires heat up this summer, we should remember that as long as the Forest Service's budget is driven by logging and fire suppression, officials in the agency will favor these endeavors over effective home protection and scientifically supported ecosystem protection and restoration.

Matthew Koehler is campaign coordinator for the Native Forest Network, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Missoula.