Using the California Wildfires to Justify the “Healthy Forests” Bill?

By Thomas Michael Power

The "Healthy Forests" legislation sped through the Senate recently, passing almost unanimously. The wildfire storm that was sweeping across southern California at the time, destroying thousands of homes and killing both residents and firefighters, provided the impetus to pass legislation that the authors claim will reduce the threat of such wildfires in the future.

Watching legislation being drafted, amended, and passed is always as stomach churning as watching the making of sausage, but the use of the California fires to pass this legislation is more disturbing than most legislative processes in its disregard for the facts.

First, 90 percent of the lands burned by the southern California wildfires were not forestlands but shrublands dominated by head-high brush, grass, and chaparral. On most of these lands there are few, if any, commercially-valuable trees that can be removed by logging.

Second, the US Geological Survey issued a press release during these wildfires pointing out that it was not past fire suppression and resulting fuel buildup that were the cause of the chaparral shrubland fires in southern California. The researchers also pointed out that thinning these chaparral lands would have no real effect on wildfires.

When 60 mile per hour Santa Ana winds are blowing, the fires sweep through the chaparral in stand-replacing crown fires regardless of whether previous fires had thinned out the vegetation and reduced fuels. Large, intense fires in California’s chaparral were equally common in the late 19th century before widespread fire suppression was attempted.

Third, almost two thirds of the lands burned by the recent California wildfires were on non-federal lands, beyond the reach of the federal "Healthy Forest" legislation.

Protecting homes and human life in these fire prone and fire adapted shrublands depends not on landscape-wide removal of trees from federal lands but on the management of the vegetation immediately adjacent to homes and the construction of homes out of fire resistant materials.

Another focus of the "healthy forest" legislation is to speed up hazardous fuel reduction efforts on public lands by limiting the ability of citizens to appeal government decisions that they see as wrong or dangerous. But just as Congress was voting on this legislation, the General Accounting Office – Congress’ independent, non-partisan research agency – released its fourth analysis in two years on the impact appeals and litigation have on the Forest Service’s fuels reduction activities.

The GAO again found that citizen appeals and litigation were not delaying fuels reduction. The GAO found that on 95 percent of the acres where the Forest Service was trying to reduce fuels, appeals did not prevent the activities from being ready for implementation within the normal 90-day review period. On 98 percent of the acres, there was no litigation.

Even the Forest Service did not claim that appeals and litigation were the primary cause of the delays it experienced. Instead it pointed to bad weather and the diversion of fuel reduction funds into seasonal fire fighting as the primary reasons for delay.

Of those fuels reduction proposals that were appealed 27 percent were modified or abandoned by the Forest Service. Clearly the appeals process was working as intended, allowing the Forest Service to interact with citizens, improve the proposals or agree that some of the proposals were seriously flawed and should go back to the drawing board. Our forests, the Forest Service, and our democracy are better as a result.

If thinning forests far from where people live and shutting down the public involvement that has actually been quite productive will not protect people, homes, and communities, what then is the explanation for the drive to pass this so-called "healthy forests" bill?

It largely comes down to the timber industry seeking to regain the privileged access to the commercially valuable timber on public lands that it had for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The horrible mess the timber industry made of public lands with its sprawling, commercially driven, clearcuts led to a public outcry that shifted forest management back towards the original purpose of our National Forests: protection of the full range of environmental values that natural forests can provide, not just the extraction of commercial products.

The timber industry now seeks to exploit our natural fear of catastrophic wildfire and our desire for healthy forests to renew their private commercial claim on those public forests. The debate in Congress is over whether we are willing to be frightened into yielding our public lands once again to those private claims.

Thomas Michael Power is Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Montana. He is the author of Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place. He may be contacted at (406) 243-4586 or tom.power@mso.umt.edu.