Fire prevention, economics at heart of debate on forests

By Juliet Eilperin
The Washington Post

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"I see something like this, I think, what are they doing?" she said, standing in a clearing where towering old-growth trees soared skyward amid hundreds of stumps — blunt testimony to past logging.

The proposed auction of new logging rights here reflects a shift in the federal government's forest-management priorities that disturbs environmentalists, who say it is giving the timber industry access to previously off-limits forests under the guise of reducing the danger of wildfires. And although the timber sales produce revenue for the Treasury, the cost of administering the auctions is forcing the U.S. Forest Service to defer some conservation projects.

In its environmental assessment of the proposed auction here, an area dubbed East Rim because it rises from the eastern borders of the Grand Canyon, the Forest Service cited the fire threat as a main reason for going ahead: "The existing dead and live fuels have a definite potential to feed a destructive wildfire, endangering firefighters and the public alike and possibly consuming facilities and valuable wildlife habitat." It did not mention that the closest real residential community is 48 miles away.

Late last year, Congress made such timber sales easier when it passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which will speed up approval of projects that are aimed at reducing "hazardous fuels" on federal lands. The measure won bipartisan support after two years of devastating forest fires that alarmed lawmakers and citizens alike, and it has been embraced by the Bush administration.

	Sen. Diane Feinstein has changed her stance.

By 2000, forest fires had reached historic proportions. That year and 2002 rank as two of the worst wildfire seasons in 50 years. In 2002 alone, 88,458 fires burned roughly 7 million acres, destroying more than 800 structures and killing 23 firefighters.

For years, federal and state policy had been to prevent fires on public land, suppressing naturally occurring forest fires to protect wildlife habitat and nearby communities. Over time, smaller trees sprang up and served as a natural conduit for bigger fires. The forests became more tightly packed, leaving little room for wildlife to roam and for intermittent fires to exhaust themselves. Years of drought exacerbated the problem.

This century of fire suppression was, in the words of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who supported the restoration act, "a failed policy."

Galbreath, executive director of the Southwest Forest Alliance, said the best fire-prevention policy would be to clear out trees immediately adjacent to residential communities and to log only the smallest trees in national forests.

Until recently, Democrats had been fighting the Bush administration's efforts to accelerate logging on public lands in the name of forest-fire prevention. But under pressure from constituents worried about fires, senators such as Feinstein have found common ground with Republicans on the issue, reaching an accord that will make it easier to log 20 million federal acres over the next five years.

"You've got to go in and clear out the forests," Feinstein said. "Environmentalists didn't like the bill. They do not want the trees cut."

The consensus in Washington, D.C., on how to reduce the risk of fire on federal land does not reach to such places as the Grand Canyon or the Klamath-Siskiyou region of southern Oregon, where environmentalists are fighting to halt pending sales that will fell tens of thousands of trees. Bush administration officials call these protests misguided.

"We're engaged in an effort to return the forests and rangelands to a point of ecological sustainability at which fire can play a more natural role," said Mark Rey, Agriculture Department undersecretary for natural resources and environment. "In order to do that successfully, we have to reduce the amount of woody material in many of these areas."

But while both sides support removing the small trees that are the least fire resistant and ecologically valuable, federal officials face a problem. The logging industry has little interest in taking only skinny trees of little value to them.

Jim Matson, a southwest-area consultant for the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, said the timber industry "can't afford to subsidize the nation's forests."

These timber sales come at a cost: The Forest Service's timber-sale program lost $947 million between 1992 and 2001, says the public watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Federal officials are scaling back elsewhere: Just this month they decided to postpone a yearlong project aimed at protecting the Anderson Mesa in Arizona's Coconino National Forest because they did not have the money.

A General Accounting Office report this month said the Forest Service and Interior Department took more than $2.7 billion from other programs to fund fire suppression over the past five years, which "resulted in canceled and delayed projects, strained relationships with state and local agency partners, and difficulties in managing programs."

Sean Cosgrove, the Sierra Club's land-protection program's representative in Washington, D.C., and other environmental advocates like to cite the work of Forest Service scientist Jack Cohen, who concluded after many experiments that the best fire prevention consists of clearing a quarter-mile area around people's homes. Cohen argues that if government officials pursued this course, they would stop fires from burning residential areas because there would be no fuel to feed the flames.

But many politicians reject this idea, saying forest fires have become so big that they stretch for miles regardless of the fuel in their path. And some Forest Service officials say that even if human communities survive fires, these natural disasters can destroy critical habitat and must be fought, no matter what.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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