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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast (Cont.)


	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

POLITICAL FLAME WARS

It's easy to talk about letting some fires burn. But when the smoke billows, politicians have to answer to a panicked public, and they often seize the opportunity to push a different agenda. The 2000 fire season in particular saw a sharp rise in politicians' tendency to distort what the fire problem is really about. That year's huge blazes offered people like Mark Racicot, then the Republican governor of Montana, a handy way to bludgeon the Clinton-era policies of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who firmly believed that fire policy needed progressive reform.

Things were heading in the right direction with the 2001 unveiling of the Clinton-inspired National Fire Plan, a somewhat flawed $1.6 billion proposal that, to its credit, aimed half its spending at fire research and preventive measures. That same year, a coalition of western governors hammered out the basics of a ten-year plan that seemed to reach even smarter conclusions: encouraging consensus among forest users, emphasizing community protection rather than wholesale suppression, and treating fires as symptoms of unhealthy forests.

President Bush blamed wildfires on environmentalists, and his forest plan shattered a fragile consensus about smarter ways to handle the problem. "The trust is gone now," says former Govenor John Kitzhaber. "Everyone has gone back to their bunkers."

Then, on August 22, 2002, President George W. Bush entered the fray, announcing his so-called Healthy Forests Initiative in Central Point, Oregon, against the backdrop of the still-burning Biscuit Fire. There was no talk of downsizing firefighting that day: Bush trotted out wildland firemen, clad in yellow fireproof Nomex shirts, as a heroic backdrop for his remarks. He also tried to smoke out environmentalists, blaming them for forest fires because they often stand in the way of logging proposals.

"The forest policy of our government is a misguided policy," Bush declared. "We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using common sense."



	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

Thinning forests isn't a bad idea per se, but Bush used fires to attack hard-won forest management laws. He called for thinning in about a dozen national forests, often with little environmental review. He proposed whacking commercially valuable—that is, old and big—trees to pay loggers for rooting out brush. He also stressed his desire to block the "endless litigation" that Racicot and others say prevents effective forest management.

Bush has a point—lawsuits can slow Forest Service efforts to salvage-log burned areas or thin unburned ones—but he grossly exaggerated it. According to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, during 2001 not one of nearly 1,700 proposed thinning treatments was challenged in court.

"Hundreds of legitimate fuel-reduction programs go through the process unscathed," says Jay Watson, 48, the San Francisco-based wildfire program director for the Wilderness Society. "Not only unchallenged, but supported."

Bush's plan stalled last fall in Congress. Still, by late winter of 2003, parts of it had been put in place administratively by Ann Veneman, his agriculture secretary and the head of the Forest Service, along with Gale Norton, his interior secretary. Other chunks found their way into the huge congressional spending bill passed in February. The plan's most controversial aspect—using the sale of big trees to pay for removing little ones—by then had morphed into something called "stewardship contracting." This involves granting loggers ten-year contracts to log trees in national forests, with little chance the cutting could be appealed legally, in exchange for doing the grunt work of thinning.

The Bush proposals fail on several counts. As critics point out, his plan focuses on national forests far from fire-threatened communities, ignoring millions of acres of urban-adjacent woods owned by states, counties, and private timber companies. And its economics are hopeless. The plan assumes that trees in national forests have enormous commercial value, creating a ready fund for thinning, which could cost tens of billions if applied to worst-case estimates of fire-prone acreage.



	Looks bad, but it's natural: This area from 2001-02 fires in Montana and Oregon, will see an explosion of growth and returning wildlife in the years ahead. (Kurt Markus)

But in fact there's too much lumber in the United States, with wood pouring in from Canada, South America, and Europe. The glut has sent domestic lumber prices to their lowest point in more than a decade, despite the enormous boom in housing construction over the past three years. As various studies have shown, it's unlikely that timber companies can make enough money cutting big trees to pay for removing little ones. And half-assed thinning by haphazard loggers is worse than no thinning at all, leaving a forest floor littered with combustible debris.

Perhaps worst of all, Bush has fractured the fragile coalition built by western politicians like John Kitzhaber, a Democrat who until January was governor of Oregon and a prime architect of the ten-year plan. "When Bush got to Oregon, I told him that if he included language removing environmental appeals, the whole thing would blow up," Kitzhaber says. "That's what happened, and that's why he couldn't get it through Congress. The trust is gone now. Everyone has gone back into their bunkers."

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