August , 2015:
Wildfires are Back!
More than fifty homes have been burned by a wildfire near
Kamiah, Idaho. More than 100 structures have been destroyed by four fires
burning near Chelan, Washington. The Cabin fire in the Angeles National Forest
in California has been called a “tinderbox,” destroying homes and resulting in at least one human death. Much of the state is burning
up.
And once again smoke fills our valleys here in Missoula, Montana; Wildfires
surround us.
I say “once again” because this has been happening periodically during
summer months for, well . . . for pretty much forever. Yet people still seem
surprised. Some seem upset. I recently met a tourist who had tears in her eyes
as she said, “I’ve always wanted to see Glacier, and now it’s being destroyed
by fire.” (Glacier is, indeed, being
degraded, but not by fire – it is being altered by thousands of gas-guzzling tourists
and a fossil-fuel-driven tourist industry pumping C02 and other greenhouse
gasses into our atmosphere which is warming our planet and resulting in overall
less snow, earlier snow melt, melting glaciers, more drought and, ironically,
drier conditions that contribute to larger and more frequent fires in places
like Glacier National Park.)
When the U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905, there were debates among
early foresters on what to do about wildfires – let them burn, as nature intended, or fight them? Then the “Great Fires of 1910” came along,
also known as the “Big Blowup,” “The Big Burn” and “The Devil’s Broom Fire.”
More than 3 million acres – an area roughly the size of Connecticut – burned throughout
northern Idaho and western Montana, killing 87 people and completely overrunning
and destroying seven towns and severely damaging several others. From then on,
the Forest Service took a militaristic approach to stopping all fires. Fire
became the enemy.
More than 100 years of fire suppression contributed
to altered conditions that now result in wildfires, in some places, that are more frequent
and more intense than what naturally and historically occurred. But not in all places. Various forest types evolved with and adapted to various fire regimes -- varying in the frequency and intensity of fires. In some forest types, such as high-elevation lodgepole pine forests, large,
less frequent, intense wildfires were and are the natural norm. There are known, predictable risks to building
homes in such places, just as there are known, predictable risks to building
homes in floodplains.
It doesn’t help that the media often describes these fires as “devastating” and
“catastrophic” while rarely, if ever, helping inform people about forest ecology. I doesn't help that many politicians often simplify the issue and call for more logging as a solution -- the very type of logging that contributed to more frequent and intense wild fires. Continuing the the same policies that contributed to the problem will not solve the problem no matter how much big timber interests and their lackeys will try and persuade you otherwise with half-truths, distortions and lies.
A lot of environmentalists I know blame
climate change for the fires. A lot of conservatives I know blame forest
management (or what they perceive as lack of management). Although past logging and climate change has
exasperated the frequency and intensity of wildfires in many places, our
western forests evolved with and are adapted to wildfire. Wildfire is as
essential to these forests as air, water and soil. Native Americans who lived close enough to the
land to understand the land knew this well. Many tribes started their own fires
to alter and improve habitat conditions for the deer, elk and bison that
sustained them. It was when European settlers started building permanent homes and
cities that fire became a huge issue. It was around 1910 perhaps a well-intentioned but misguided war on forest fires began. It's an attitude still dangerously and unfortunately entrenched in our culture.
So what can be done? The first step should be for people to
learn about the ecology and history of the forests they live in and near; support policies and management that, in some places, allows for natural and
essential processes or, in other places, mimics natural processes and restores
and enhances the health of these forests, and oppose misguided policies that contribute to
the problem.
More than 50 years ago, a forester, professor and writer named Aldo Leopold put it this way: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise."
A version of the my following article was first published 20
years ago; it is still pertinent today:
 |
| Steve Arno |
July, 1996:
Forests and Wildfires: Logging for Healthy Habitat?
Cutting trees is a sensitive, complex
issue, a difficult act to defend. It can be done well or it can be done poorly.
But what is good logging? Is it logging that makes a profit? Logging that
creates forage for elk? Logging that looks nice to people when it's done?
To Steve Arno, good logging means working within the bounds of natural systems,
emulating natural processes, maintaining all components of a healthy forest,
from elk to the grasses and forbs that sustain them. And given the forestry
practices of the past 100 years or more, a little good logging now may actually
be necessary to restore and maintain healthy forests. This is especially so in
places that evolved with frequent fires, like the ponderosa pine forest around
Steve Arno's home.
Arno, a retired researcher with the Forest Service's Intermountain Fire
sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana, has studied the ecology of forests
and fires for more than 40 years. During that time, he's helped hone methods to
restore and maintain healthy forests using logging and fire. His own land -- 60
acres in the foothills of Montana's Bitterroot Mountains -- provides a showcase
for these ideas.
An open stand of ponderosa pines now towers over a forest floor covered with
grass and scattered clumps of willow and Douglas fir. But Arno's land wasn't
always that way. When he bought the place in 1971, it looked like some adjacent
lands still do -- a thick tangle of firs and scrawny pines, with little or no
grasses or shrubs poking through a dense blanket of needles and dead branches.
"This is a preservationist's Shangri-La," Arno says of the
neighboring forest. "It's remained the same for years, nothing's growing.
It's preserved, for a while, but in the context of thousands of years of
constant change, it's pretty bizarre."
Rotting stumps of ancient ponderosas stand testament to what this forest once
was a grassy savanna of giant pines, where early settlers reported riding two
abreast on horseback, and where elk grazed on bunchgrasses and scattered
willows. Today, it's difficult to penetrate the thicket, and tough for deer and
elk to find food. Why the change? The clues lie in the stumps themselves.
Turn-of-the-century high-grading -- the practice of cutting only the best, most
valuable timber -- left these great skeletons to slowly decay back into the
earth.
About the same time the huge pines were heading for the
mills, the government began aggressively fighting wildfires. Meanwhile,
settler's cattle and sheep grazed down grasses and forbs that once fueled
frequent fires, ignited by lightning and Native Americans. For millennia, these
fires licked through the forest in a predictable pattern still documented by
thin, black scars which appear along annual growth rings in the old stumps at
intervals of five to 20 years.
Like predators thinning elk herds, these fires once kept trees in check -- killing
some, sparing others, recycling nutrients, rejuvenating grasses, shrubs and
trees. Without fire, the trees grew dense, overcrowded, more prone to drought,
insects and disease. As competition for water and nutrients increased, so did
mortality. The forest grew feeble. Now few healthy pines remain. Douglas firs
grow shoulder to shoulder, many dead or dying from mistletoe, bark beetles,
root rot and other maladies. Forty-year-old ponderosas that should be 25 to 45
feet tall stand no higher than a person, deformed and crippled by comandra
blister rust, a parasitic canker sapping life from the pines.
"These trees didn't evolve to defend themselves from this," Arno
says. "Historically, fires did not allow large areas of stagnated saplings
to develop. Fires thinned the saplings and did not offer a major breeding
ground for the disease."
Without fire to keep stands open and reduce competition from firs, opening the
forest canopy, allowing sunlight to reach the ground and replenish nutrients,
pines don't have a chance. Trees need
healthy habitat. Fire is as essential as sun and rain.
"Forests are processes, not just trees and plants," Arno says.
"And these forests can't survive and remain healthy without processes such
as fire."
He explains it this way: "Imagine having an old grandfather clock with a
glass front exposing the internal gears. You don't like the looks of one of the
gears, so you remove it. Of course, you can't remove the gear and expect the
clock to work, yet people expect nature to work without fire."
It hasn't. Throughout the West, fire exclusion, logging and grazing have
converted open ponderosa pine forests to fir thickets. As more and more people
build homes in these forests, they see the immense stumps of ponderosas that
once grew there and shake their heads in wistful disbelief. But most of them
intuitively reject the idea that burning and logging could actually help bring
back those great pines.
When Arno looked at the monolithic old stumps on his place, he saw more than
relics of a bygone era. He saw a compelling history -- and a guide to the future.
Listening to the stumps, Arno began by cutting Douglas firs and sickly pines,
leaving the larger, healthier pines, simulating as best he could fire's predation.
In the process, he made some income, selling firewood, and pulp and saw logs to
local mills. This logging and burning slash in hand-built piles reduced fuels
that had accumulated during nearly a century of fire exclusion, fuels that
could feed fires far larger and more intense than the frequent surface fires
that once occurred, the kind of conflagrations that can damage soils,
vegetation and wildlife. Then he brought back fire, torching low clumps of dead
willows and stagnant aspen. Arno's land
is now green with pinegrass, bunchgrass, willows, snowbrush and aspen suckers.
And elk and deer frequent his land once more.
This is the kind of logging Arno would like to see done throughout the
lower-elevation pine forests on private and public lands. "Restoration logging,"
he calls it.
"Forests are constantly changing, dependent on periodic
disturbances," Arno says. "We can mimic those disturbances with
carefully designed harvesting and prescribed fire -- not recreating the original
forests, but learning from nature, using nature as a guide, maintaining
components and processes which these forests evolved with and depend on."
When many people think of logging, they envision denuded
mountainsides webbed with roads. And they know some logging operations are still
managed for short-term profit, not as part of a long-term process to restore
and maintain the health and sustainability of the land. Bad logging inflames
cynicism and mistrust. Many people now protest cutting trees, anywhere,
anytime, no matter the reason. Passion and lack of understanding often fuel
these debates. Not all logging is bad.
Good forestry and wildlife management rest on this fundamental premise: A
surplus can be sustainably used by people. And we Americans do use wood products.
Lots of them. The typical U.S. citizen consumes wood and paper products
equivalent to what can be produced from one 100-foot tree every year. This
figure includes 663 pounds of paper per person each year, as well as wood fiber
in forms as diverse as insulation, rayon, oils, paints and fuels. Small trees
are mulched and glued into particle board, wafer board, laminated lumber . . .
the list goes on.
"We are still hunter-gatherers, we still need to make a living from the
land," Arno says. "We can do so and still maintain wildlife and
aesthetics."
Arno believes that the United States should rely on homegrown trees to meet its
needs rather than importing timber. While U.S. timber companies export 3.3
billion board feet of timber each year, the U.S. imported 17 billion board feet
of processed lumber and raw logs last year. Nearly half of all wood products
consumed in the United States today come from other countries -- mostly
Canada -- and such places don't necessarily practice enlightened forestry. Amo's
vision of "light-on-the-land" logging -- restoring and maintaining
healthy forests, employing local people -- contrasts sharply with this condition.
"We don't need to rob from other societies to support
our consumption," he says, "We can, and need to, manage our own
forests to improve forest health and reduce the risk of severe wildfires."
Logging for healthy forests strikes many people as an oxymoron. Others
cautiously embrace it. But some loggers, foresters and timber companies have
jumped aboard a "forest health" bandwagon, claiming logging can
reduce fire danger and improve forests just about everywhere and anywhere,
distorting science to boost unsustainable greed-based profit.
In the name of a "forest health emergency," the
U.S. Congress enacted legislation in 1996 that expedited timber salvage on
federal lands by exempting salvage sales from administrative appeals, limiting
the time available for judicial review, and easing environmental planning
procedures. The legislation was attached as an amendment to a rescission bill
and became known as the “Salvage Rider.” Despite broad public criticism,
several national forests invoked the salvage bill to build new roads and cut
dead trees -- and live trees, too, if foresters deemed them “unhealthy.” Even
trees blown down by strong winds were quickly salvaged. But dead and decaying
trees are as much a part of healthy forests as fire, wind and rain. Simply
removing them ignores the complexities of forest health and further alienates
people, provoking controversy instead of consensus. Efforts to get people into
the woods and show them sites that demonstrate good forestry are far more
likely to regain public trust.
Forest health problems do, indeed, exist, with serious implications. From the
Cascade Mountains of Oregon to the Front Range of Colorado, land from British
Columbia to Arizona, fire exclusion, logging, grazing and human development
have transformed millions of acres of ponderosa pine savannas. In fact, Wallace
Covington, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, calls
ponderosa pine savannas the most endangered forests in the West.
Covington studies ponderosa pine forests in Arizona, comparing current
conditions to pre-settlement times. On the Coconino National Forest, where pine
and bunchgrass coexisted with fire for two to five million years, there were once
about two dozen trees per acre -- a wide open pine stand with a grassy
understory. Today, roughly 850 trees choke each acre. Where 1,000 pounds of
grasses and forbs once flourished in each acre of land-sustaining great herds of
deer and elk, only about 350 pounds per acre now grow. As the profusion of trees compete
for moisture, nutrients, sun and space, they become increasingly stressed.
Burning won't solve the problems, Covington says. In the absence of fire, a
thick, sterile carpet of duff has crept up the bases of trees. A fire now would
not be like the periodic, low-intensity ground fires that once thinned forests.
It would be a large, intense fire, reaching high into the crowns and deep into
the soils, killing mature pines along with the crowded understory.
That's precisely what happened in a former pine savanna much farther north. On
August 19, 1992, a dozen lightning strikes in the foothills east of Boise,
Idaho, sparked a blaze that burned 257,000 acres of forests and rangelands,
including large pines. The fire scorched one stream to bedrock, wiping out a
population of increasingly rare bull trout. Efforts to protect homes cost more
than $24 million. One area, however, didn't burn. When it reached Tiger Creek,
the blaze lay low and merely burned off the underbrush in a 2,500-acre stand of
ponderosa pines -- the only survivors within miles. The Tiger stand had
previously been logged to remove the understory of fir and reduce fuels, and
prescribed fire had been used to restore and rejuvenate grasses.
Like the pine savannas, great stands of aspens grew in what is now Arizona and
New Mexico. But in the past century, more than half the aspen forests that
existed in pre-settlement times have disappeared. Now, efforts to log tangles
of pinon, juniper and fir -- combined with prescribed fire -- are helping restore
the aspens that are synonymous with elk country in the Southwest. And in the
moist Sitka spruce and hemlock forests along the West Coast, when conditions
were just right every few hundred years, intense fires created expansive
openings of grasses and forbs, providing forage for deer and elk. Here, too,
logging and fire may be essential to maintain healthy elk habitat.
But few logging operations occur without heated debate these days. If nothing
else, forest health issues may serve as a catalyst to bring people together.
"There hasn't been much effort in the past to explain forestry
practices," said Seth Diamond (a friend of mine who was a wildlife program
director for the Intermountain Forest Industry Association before his tragic death
in a plane crash in 1996.) "The public has evolved from not being
involved, to reacting and criticizing, to where they are now getting out in the
woods, learning about forestry and sharing their ideas and concerns.
Unfortunately, logging has polarized and alienated a lot of people--but we need
those people to help us find solutions to complicated problems. People need to
be aware of the consequences and tradeoffs of different options. Yes, there
were large fires historically, but is that acceptable today in all places? And
if not, what do we want to do? These ecosystems evolved with disturbances like
fire, and logging can create similar circumstances."
While logging can reduce fuels and allow managers to safely restore fire, Arno
is quick to point out that logging alone cannot replicate fire. Tom Atzet, a
Forest Service ecologist for southwestern Oregon forests, agrees.
"Some people say logging is a wholesale substitute for
fire," Atzet says. "It isn't. We don't yet understand all of the
physical and chemical properties of fire, or the effects fire has on organisms
within the environment. Logging can help in some places, by reducing fuels, but
as far as nutrient cycling, fire certainly does things that logging
doesn't."
Biologists have demonstrated over and over the critical link between fire and
countless species of birds, mammals and insects. Even some lichens, which cling
to trees and rocks and take their sustenance from air and rain -- coincidentally
serving as key indicators of air quality -- may require fire to survive. Atzet
says recent research suggests lichens may inhale nutrients from wildfire smoke.
In the big picture, we still know very little about the millions of intricate
relationships between fire and forest organisms, but we do understand this
much: fire is essential to healthy forests.
For many, though, fire conjures images of charred homes and Bambi fleeing a
wall of flames. Some people aren't willing to accept the risk of prescribed
fire, or simply don't want to choke on smoke lingering in valleys. Just as many
don't want logging occurring near their homes. But there is risk in doing
nothing as well.
"It's like holding your hand over a dripping hose," Atzet says.
"For a while, you can keep the water from coming out. But the pressure
builds and builds. Eventually, the water bursts out with far more power and
intensity than if you just let it, drip. We've held it back for awhile, but now
fuel loads are high, and forests are ready to explode."
Unfortunately, land managers tend to meet the most resistance to logging and
burning where people are building homes. This also happens to be where
ponderosa pine forests are most in need of thinning and burning, where elk and
deer spend harsh winters and require grasses and forbs that can only be restored
and sustained by burning and logging, and where elk and deer have already lost
millions of tons of forage to human sprawl. Only by working together will
people solve such dilemmas.
Atzet has a disabled son, who has been in and out of hospitals for years. At times,
Atzet grows frustrated with doctors who leave him to fidget in waiting rooms,
uninformed.
"They have my son's best interest at heart, but treat me like an
outsider," he says. "Yet I have more interest in my son than anyone
else in the world. It can be that way with forestry. People have a deep
interest in forests, and land managers can be like doctors."
On one occasion when Atzet took his son in for a spinal tap, doctors parted the
heavy curtain of professional medicine and allowed him to join them in the
operating room to watch and help.
"We were working together toward the same goal," he says. "It
can work the same in forest management, by letting people who care join in the
process, to watch and help.
"It's not the science. We're not lacking the science to do a good job in
managing ecosystems. It's the human element--getting people to work together
toward common goals."
July, 1996:
What's Good For The Goose May Kill The Gander
The great pitfall of "forest health" lies in
people's tendency to overgeneralize. What works in one forest may prove
disastrous elsewhere. For example, high-elevation forests like lodgepole pine
evolved with less frequent, more intense wildfires. These burns created a patch
of grass here, a small stand of young lodgepole there, and some dense
old-growth nearby to form a classic mosaic, supporting everything from elk and
deer to pine martens and owls. But years of fire exclusion and logging have
allowed lodgepoles to grow into larger, more uniform stands with little
diversity. Pine beetle epidemics and large wildfires are on the rise.
But thinning and burning the understory would be absurd here. Scattered
clearcuts and more intense prescribed burns would more closely follow historic
natural patterns of fire. In the high country of Idaho's Selway Bitterroot
Wilderness, for instance, large hot fires occasionally burn dry, south-facing
slopes creating huge brushfields, while sparing the spruce and fir on moist
north slopes. Viewed from above, the patchwork of trees and openings is difficult
to distinguish from clearcuts in adjacent logged areasexcept for the roads.
Foresters prescribe distinct treatments to different forests. Clearcutting
ponderosas can be like amputating the leg of a heart attack victim. So can
thinning lodgepole. But when economic and social pressures transcend genuine
forest health considerations, land managers may prescribe the wrong treatment
in the wrong place. That's why clearcuts have a bad name, and why folks think
selective cuts are always best. Clearcuts assault people's senses, while a
selectively thinned forest seldom draws attention. But aesthetics don't always
equate to good forestry. Selective logging has become synonymous with good
forestry, yet if only large, valuable trees are selectively cut, it's nothing
more than high-grading.
Of course, logging plans must account for social and economic factors. Modern
technology allows for logging that's lighter on the land than past practices,
but not without tradeoffs. Helicopter logging can eliminate the need for roads
in some areas, but to make a profit, loggers may have to cut bigger, more
valuable trees, like mature ponderosa pines and larches -- often the very
fire-adapted, fire-dependant species foresters are trying to restore. More
traditional equipment like grapple skidders and feller bunchers costs less, but
requires roads and skid trails.
Some state-of-the-art machinery, like harvesters and forwarders (that together
form a "cut-to-length system" that cuts, limbs and loads trees on the
spot) can range far from roads, reducing the number of roads required. Equipped
with wide, rubber tires, the machines cause less erosion and soil compression
than traditional equipment, and they can process small-diameter fir thickets
that may be impractical to log otherwise. But together they cost about
$700,000.
Every technique has benefits, each has faults. Much depends on the types of
trees to be cut, when they are cut, the nature of the terrain where they grow,
the going price of lumber and pulp, and whether the trees are on public or
private land. Logging on private lands tends to have a more singular focus.
Expensive, time-consuming thinnings and prescribed burns don't boost the bottom
line of timber company ledgers. And timber companies are in business to make money.
If they don't, a lot of their forests could be (and have been) sold and used for other
profit-making ventures -- like subdivisions and resorts.
In contrast, agencies charged with stewardship of public lands may view logging
to restore and maintain healthy forests as essential, even if they have to do
it without making a profit. Like prescribed fire, logging can be an important way
to restore natural vigor to a forest.
