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  • From: "Kirby Fry" <peace@totalaccess.net>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Intense Logging Blamed for Wildfires
  • Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 09:11:46 -0500

Hi All,

Here's some more info from the Los Angeles Times on the wildfire situation
and some possible causes...

* * * * *

THE NATION

Intense Logging Blamed for Wildfires

Forests: Legislators in the West say timber laws led to slew of big burns,
but statistics show heavy cutting in '70s, '80s may have caused epidemic.

By BETTINA BOXALL, TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Bush administration's timber-cutting prescription for the West's
wildfire epidemic runs counter to the record of the last half century, when
large forest fires erupted on the heels of the heaviest logging ever
conducted by the U.S. Forest Service.

In an initiative that could come up for a Senate vote any day, the
administration is seeking to waive environmental reviews to speed up
tree-cutting on up to 10 million acres of federal land at high risk of
wildfire.

While administration officials say the work is urgently needed to thin out
forests jammed with fire-prone, dense growth, the Forest Service's own
statistics show that the modern era of big burns began not in the 1990s,
during a period of declining logging, but in the 1980s, when trucks groaning
with public timber headed for the mills.

In 1950, when about 3 billion board-feet were logged, a quarter of a million
acres of federal forests burned. Nearly six times that amount went up in
flames in 1988, when the harvest had climbed to nearly 12 billion
board-feet.

In California, two forests now considered especially vulnerable to fire by
the Forest Service--Lassen and Plumas northeast of Sacramento--also were
among the state's most heavily logged during the 1970s and '80s.

"There's no reduction in wildfire from past logging. We haven't seen it,"
said Leon Neuenschwander, a fire ecologist who taught for 25 years at the
University of Idaho.

Many experts say that by removing the largest and most fire-resistant trees
and replacing them with dense young growth, conventional logging and tree
planting practices helped create the conditions that stoke wildfires.

"Partial cutting done historically typically aggravated the fire hazard and
made things worse when fire came along," said C. Phillip Weatherspoon, an
emeritus research forester with the Forest Service who has written
extensively on fire.

That is not to say that he and Neuenschwander believe chainsaws should be
banished from the woods. They don't.

But "cutting is not always the same by a long shot," Weatherspoon said.

He is one of many experts who advocate the removal of brush and dense
thickets of small trees as well as the use of deliberately set, controlled
fires to lessen the risks of major conflagrations in western wild lands.

*

Cutting the Old Growth

Administration officials speak of the same need. But they also argue that
the taxpayer expense of such work could be offset if contractors were
allowed to take larger, marketable trees.

The Bush proposal targets 10 million acres at high risk of fire, including
land that is near communities, that is in municipal watersheds, or that is
full of trees affected by disease or insects.

It contains no limits on the size of trees that can be cut and waives
environmental reviews and appeals that have been used by conservationists to
halt the logging of large old-growth trees.

If the timber-cutting projects are challenged in court, the proposal bars
judges from temporarily stopping the work while a case is under review.

At the same time, in separate action in California, Forest Service officials
are reviewing new environmental protections in the Sierra Nevada, contending
the logging limits, adopted in the waning days of the Clinton
administration, hamper their ability to lessen the fire hazard.

The latest proposals are unfolding during a season of mammoth wildfires for
which some Western lawmakers and politicians have angrily blamed
environmentalists and timber-harvest limits.

"The policies that are coming from the East Coast--that are coming from the
environmentalists that say we don't need to log, we don't need to thin our
forests--are absolutely ridiculous," Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull said after
nearly half a million acres of her state were scorched.

"Nobody on the East Coast knows how to manage these fires, and I for one
have had it."

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist and
the architect of the administration proposal, said he was not blaming
environmentalists for the fire problem, nor did he believe it had been
created by logging.

"I don't think it's any more accurate to say that our current fire situation
is caused by the sharp logging reduction in the Clinton administration than
it is to say commercial logging is the primary reason for the wildfire
situation."

The scope of the summer's raging wildfires, he said, are a consequence of
drought, expanding communities at the forest edge that drain firefighting
resources from the backcountry, and nearly a century of fire
suppression--the policy of putting out fires as quickly as possible.

Rey insisted that the current proposals are aimed at reducing the fire
hazard, not clearing the way for massive logging. But he said he didn't
believe Congress should be telling forest managers what size trees to cut.

Will Hart, a spokesman for Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), who is sponsoring
the administration's initiative, also said it is important to give forest
managers flexibility and not tie their hands with tree size restrictions. He
added that Craig's legislation includes language that "not less than 10 of
the largest trees per acre" be maintained in areas thinned under the fuel
reduction projects.

That would still allow extensive cutting, as the administration's own
briefing papers cite forest density of about 500 trees or more per acre in
some fire-prone areas.

Critics contend the administration proposal is so broad it would let the
Forest Service cut just about anything, big or little, on forested land at
high fire risk.

"It virtually encourages the removal of large trees," said Jude McCartin,
spokeswoman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), who is promoting an alternative
proposal requiring that most fire hazard work be done within a half-mile of
communities or in key municipal watersheds.

*

Product of Tree Harvests

In addition to fire suppression, a number of researchers say the increased
wildfire risk is the product of commercial timber harvests that promoted
changes in the composition of Western forests, leaving them more vulnerable
to wildfire.

In taking out the biggest, most valuable trees, they maintain, logging in
national forests removed those most resistant to fire.

Clear-cutting, widely used by the Forest Service before the late 1980s,
created large, sunny openings that subsequently filled with thick new
growth. Logged areas were often reseeded to create tree plantations, again
promoting heavy young growth.

Timber harvesting also created massive amounts of slash debris--the limbs
and treetops stripped from logs before they are loaded onto trucks. If left
in the woods to dry, the slash can act like huge piles of kindling, ready to
feed any blaze that runs through the woods.

"Almost all of the large damaging wild land fires in American history up
until recent decades were associated with logging and land clearing," said
Stephen J. Pyne, one of the nation's preeminent fire historians.

"The reason is you leave huge amounts of fuel behind."

University of Washington forest ecologist James K. Agee, the author of
various journal articles on fire, said there are good and bad ways to thin.

"On public lands, in particular, we ought to be focusing on leaving the
largest trees and thinning out the smaller ones and making sure the slash
that is created on those operations is cleaned up.

"It really boils down to the Forest Service doing a good job of this in a
sustainable fashion," he said.

"They know how to do it. The question is, given the chance, will they?"

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times





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