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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast (Cont.)

WEEDING THE WOODS

Reining in the firefighting apparatus solves only part of the problem; what remain are the millions of acres of fire-prone forest. Almost every fire ecologist agrees that fuel loads in western forests have to be reduced. How is another matter. The options? Cut out the excess fuel, burn it out ourselves, let nature burn it out, or try a little of all three.

Even the cutting advocated by the Bush plan makes sense in some places. His ideas bear the unmistakable fingerprints of Wally Covington, the main brain at the Ecological Restoration Institute, in Flagstaff. Covington has been studying ponderosa pine forests since graduating from Yale with a doctorate in ecosystem sciences in 1976. These forests, more than any other, have been hurt by the removal of natural fire.

When Covington first began studying ponderosas, he bought into the notion that prescribed burns could fix the woods, but he backed off from that when a 1980 fire he set almost escaped. "That scared the pee out of me," he admits.

So Covington decided that before fire could be allowed into most ponderosa forests, excess trees had to be removed. Logged, in effect. By doing so, he argued, forests with more than 1,000 trees per acre could be restored to the 60 to 80 trees per acre typical when fires were more frequent. Once you achieve 19th-century density, Covington believes, fire can be allowed to do its thing.

Thinning can be effective—there's evidence that Colorado's Hayman Fire might have been worse if it hadn't bumped into stretches of forest that were thinned—but it's also expensive, usually costing $1,000 an acre and up. And it's sometimes destructive, since it requires workers with either chain saws or wheeled, pincer-armed loaders that move through the woods snipping trees as they go. There's also the sheer size of the task. Estimates vary, but as many as 190 million acres of western forest need help—this at a time when the Forest Service is hard-pressed to thin even 200,000 acres a year.

Covington, meanwhile, has found vocal critics right in his own backyard. "We tried to duplicate his recommendations in a test plot," says Sharon Galbreath, 47, director of the Southwest Forest Alliance, a Flagstaff-based coalition of 64 green groups. "It sounded really good on paper, but when we tried it, we said to ourselves, Oh, my God—this isn't a good thing." Galbreath thinks that Covington's formula calls for the removal of too many trees, leaving behind woodlands that look more like tree farms than forests.

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