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Burning
Agenda
The
worst fire season in memory is being used for political purposes.
Story by Orna Izakson
Ç Photos by James Johnston
On the afternoon of
Aug. 1, Nancy Lyford and her husband, Gordon, heard on their scanner
that the bulldozers were coming.
The couple left their home in the southern Oregon
town of O'Brien to watch the fire crews gouge out a new fire road
across their neighbor's meadow and their own. The gouge was intended
as a last line of defense against a growing wildfire. If the fire
line at the top of the mountain didn't stop the flames, and if efforts
to burn the back of the mountain didn't help, the crews would burn
up the hill from their meadow to try to save their home.
"I was just crying watching them do this," Lyford
says. "Just one bulldozer and then another bulldozer and then another
ATV… We have a very, very old road that you can see …
but they didn't even use that, they went smack through the middle
of the meadow."
The Lyfords' home is in one of Oregon's richest ecological
regions. Because glaciers never covered the area, there are plants
there that exist nowhere else on earth. On the edge of the Kalmiopsis
Wilderness, near a Forest Service botanical area and a Bureau of Land
Management "area of critical environmental concern," the Lyford's
40 acres itself boasts some unique treasures.
For instance, the area's garden club had been active
for 50 years or so, keeping an eye out for rare plants. "They have
a list of 11 or 12 that they've never been able to find," she explains,
including a rare senecio. "And we had a huge patch of these
on the mountain on my land."
Someone once told her that silky balsam root could
be found on only 400 acres anywhere in the world. "That's hard to
believe because I've got a lot of it on my property," she says, "but
maybe I'm part of the 400 acres."
Usually, people are very careful of these treasures,
even in emergencies. "When we had a fire here before we had a geologist
and botanist walking in front of the bulldozer," she says.
Not this year.
Admittedly, it's a crazy fire year, even in the hot,
dry Siskiyous. The fire that led crews across Lyford's meadow started
seven miles from her home. It was the Sour Biscuit fire, merged with
the Florence fire, and then changed its name to the Biscuit fire after
residents of the distant coastal town complained.
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| The
9,000-acre Warner Creek fire east of Oakridge 10 years ago is
a patchwork today of greenery, ashes and snags. |
"I really do appreciate everything (the fire crews
have) done," Lyford says. "This thing is outrageous, it's 340,000
acres now. And they've still got backfires to set, so it's going to
be bigger by the time it ends."
But the gouge through the rare plants in her meadow
could have waited, the neighbors could have been given notice. "And
as it turns out … if everything goes as it's been going, it
didn't have to be done at all."
The summer of 2002 is the worst wildfire season, during
the worst drought, in recent memory. According to The Washington
Post, the agency is spending more than $11.5 million each day
fighting the fires, and expects to spend $1 billion before the season
is through. As of mid August — halfway through the fire season
— 54,633 fires have burned or continue to burn on nearly five
million acres of mostly public lands around the country. In the 1990,
on average, 56,552 fires per year burned about 2.3 million acres.
At the fire season's mid point, the burned acreages are already double
what was the average for a full year.
But those numbers are misleading, as is most of the
reporting and much of the chest thumping. As the West started burning,
the politics in damp and distant D.C. over Western forests also ignited.
The likely outcome of this fire season — the worst in recent
memory but by no means the worst since the Forest Service began suppressing
all fires 100 years ago — is federal legislation that will speed
the fall of old, fire-resistant trees without even a nod to environmental
concerns.
Pointing fingers
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth seized on
the issue early, when fires in Colorado and Arizona just started to
burn. Since he took his office, the new chief had argued that "analysis
paralysis" was hampering the agency's tree-cutting mission. The conflagrations
lit up his message.
"What's new is he's now claiming analysis paralysis
prevented the Forest Service from stopping these fires," explains
Andy Stahl, director of the Eugene-based Forest Service Employees
for Environmental Ethics. "He's trying to use these fires in the media
and turn that as a sword to use against the environmental laws and
deflect blame from the Forest Service itself."
Bosworth and his boss, Mark Rey, charge that appeals
and litigation impede the agency's efforts to thin fire-prone forests
and prevent these wildfires.
Stahl says Bosworth argued that "these fires are in
fact a direct result of analysis paralysis, a direct result of environmental
laws, and not, for example, the fault of Smokey Bear for putting out
fires for 100 years as every ecologist knows." That century of fire
suppression left forests thick with highly flammable brush, tree limbs
and seedlings.
Environmentalists responded with a 2001 General Accounting
Office analysis undercutting the agency's assertion. The study considered
1,671 Forest Service projects intended to reduce the hot-burning fuels;
the GAO identified those projects by looking at the list under the
$205 million budgeted specifically for such "fuels reduction." Only
two of those projects were appealed, and none went to court.
The Forest Service rallied fast with its own report
to Congress on July 10, considering 326 "mechanical fuel treatment
projects" — shorthand for efforts that involve chainsaws rather
than prescribed burning, and that often involve commercial sale of
merchantable timber. Of that number, offered between 2000 and 2001,
48 percent were appealed by environmental groups and 6 percent went
to court.
Initially, the report did not identify the individual
projects. On Aug. 2, Bosworth submitted a list of the appealed projects
only, saying that the information was dispersed and that the fires
slowed the compilation. (All of the appealed projects in Oregon were
in the southern or eastern parts of the state.)
Environmentalists say the two reports don't conflict.
The GAO report supports their contention that legitimate projects
are left alone; timber sales wrapped in the fire suppression flag
— which they say comprise the second, smaller list the Forest
Service used — are stopped or altered.
Reforming the
Fire Service
Fire has always been part of the agency's mission.
What's new is the mushrooming costs of fire fighting. Critics sees
the current situation as evidence that the agency wants two things:
to log at any cost and get as much money from Congress as possible.
Libertarian economist Randal O'Toole, of the Bandon-based
Thoreau Institute, is best known for book on the economic incentives
that drive federal logging, Reforming the Forest Service. Late
last month, he released a new report, also on economic incentives:
Reforming the Fire Service.
The crux of his argument is this: For decades, the
structure of Forest Service provided economic incentives to cut as
much timber as possible. When timber receipts plummeted in the 1990s,
the agency had to find a way to support a staff that had built up
during the boom years.
"The decline in the national forest timber sale program,
which paid for much of the Forest Service's overhead, led the agency
to search for a new mission that could keep it fully funded," O'Toole
writes. "Fire turned out to be that mission."
Generally speaking, Congress for years has been giving
the Forest Service the same amount of money for fighting fires. (Appropriations
have actually fallen over the past couple of years, from $510 million
in 2000 to $321 in 2002, according to the Forest Service.)
Historically, Congress gave the agency a blank check
for wildfires. That changed in the 1970s, but in recent years wildfire
fighting has inexorably led to emergency appropriations. That de facto
blank check, O'Toole argues, provides incentive to fight fires in
the biggest, most expensive way possible. Citing agency figures, O'Toole
found that Forest Service budgets — including emergency appropriations
— increased six-fold between the early 1990s and the early 2000s,
from $415 million to $1.8 billion.
To Patti Rodgers at the Willamette National Forest,
O'Toole's arguments about her agency's motivations don't make much
sense.
"Given the number of acres burned so far, the money
that was appropriated for fire fighting in this agency has run out,"
she says. "We're not getting more. We're not going to stop fighting
fire. What we're stopping is any noncritical spending."
What exactly does that mean?
"It means I can't go out and purchase a box of pens.
Literally. It has to be health and safety related. It has to be something
already obligated," like payment on an existing contract. In nearly
30 years with the agency, Rodgers says, "I don't recall ever being
in the situation where we've shut down all noncritical spending."
O'Toole would argue that Congress will make sure the
Forest Service gets its money back, but Rodgers isn't so sure. "We
don't know," she says. "There's no indication that we will."
Chris West, of the American Forest Resources Council,
a Portland-based industry group, thinks O'Toole's argument goes too
far.
"I'm not that cynical," he says. "I do believe there
have been philosophical shifts in the Forest Service because of social
and political pressure." Fighting fire has been a significant part
of the Forest Service's mission since its inception. "It's just that
the forests today are in a condition that's making it a bigger deal.
I'm not so cynical to say that the powers that be in the agency are
focused on capturing the money. I think that it's been political and
social situations that have led them down this path and they're being
responsive to those."
Ground
Truth
According to fire historians, Americans
have grown more fearful of fire as the population moved to cities
and away from areas where fire was the norm. O'Toole and others argue
that this fear, along with the threat of built-up fuels after a century
of fire suppression, now provides political cover for anything that
can in any way be tied to preventing fires from getting out of control.
On the ground this translates into practices that can be harmful to
the environmental values many of those same urbanites want to protect.
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'All
environmental laws, standards and guidelines, regulations, conservation
strategies are suspended during fire-suppression incidents.'
– Tim Ingalsbee
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Stahl, of FSEEE, says fighting fires leads to bigger
ones in the future. Further, he says, fighting forest fires can do
more harm than the fire alone would have. For instance, many of the
chemicals the agencies now use include toxins like cyanide. The bulldozers
can harm fragile soils and vegetation, as in Nancy Lyford's meadow.
Fire camps, housing hundreds of firefighters, also have an impact
on the land.
"Although fire fighting is the single biggest activity
the Forest Service engages in today — far surpassing logging
— the Forest Service has never done an environmental impact
statement on fire fighting, anywhere in the nation," Stahl says. The
Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service do prepare
such analyses, he says.
Tim Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology
Center in Eugene, says most Forest Service fire fighting happens outside
of environmental laws.
"All environmental laws, standards and guidelines,
regulations, conservation strategies are suspended during fire-suppression
incidents," he says. "So the agency is completely fiscally and environmentally
unaccountable. That's a fact. It answers to nobody. Not to Congress
or the courts or the American people."
Backfire
How bad are things, really? Almost all of the
numbers are misleading.
Since the 1940s, overall deaths related to fire fighting
have quadrupled nationwide. But, O'Toole reports, that entire increase
is attributable to changes in tactics and the fire-fighting work force.
Deaths from fire on the ground have stayed flat for decades, hovering
between 38 over the course of the 1940s and 65 over the course of
the 1950s. In the 1990s, 54 firefighters died on the ground. The increase,
he reports, comes entirely from vehicle collisions and rollovers,
aircraft accidents, and health issues such as pneumonia and heart
attacks.
Stahl summarizes: "As we've changed to more expensive
tactics, we're killing more people."
Similarly, O'Toole finds that fire threats to homes
near wildlands are overstated. In 2000, despite tremendous growth
of homes near forests, houses across the nation were 50 times more
likely to burn for reasons other than wildfire, he says.
Most of the homes that wildfires do burn are in California
— 90 percent, for instance, in 1999. Of the fuels-reduction
projects the Forest Service says environmentalists slowed or stopped
in the past two years, only about a quarter are even in California.
Most of the agency's efforts, environmentalists say, is directed far
from homes and close to marketable timber.
Even the assertion that this is "the worst fire year
on record" is shaky.
"It depends on what you're measuring. Worst in terms
of cost? Yes, this may be the worst fire season in history in terms
of cost. Worst in terms of acres burned? Definitely not. More acres
burned at the turn of the century than have burned now. In terms of
severity, not certain. That's something the press has hyped, but we
won't know what the effects of this fire season are until maybe the
fires are out."
Patti Rodgers of the Forest Service says it's naïve
to look back that far in history to get a sense of scale.
"We have been … suppressing fires like crazy"
since the 1950s, she says. "We have more sophisticated fire-fighting
tools. We also have more political pressure on how and where we fight
fire. We have more structures around and within these areas that any
of these agencies serve. I don't know that looking at 20 years ago
gives us a very informed comparison "
"To say that it's a historic year for fires may not
have any meaning, either," she continues. "But I can look at these
numbers and say over the past 10 years on average we've had 2.3 million
acres burns. And this year, midway through the fire season, we're
almost at five million acres."
Even that five million acres is not what it seems.
Some percentage — environmentalists and industry disagree on
how much — is scrub or grassland. Some could be unmaintained
fire breaks that have grown up into flammable shrubs, or old clearcuts
with tiny trees. A great deal of it is likely the backburning firefighters
do to help stop the fire. For instance, about one third of the total
acreage burned at Warner Creek in the Willamette National Forest a
decade ago was actually lit by firefighters in an effort to stop the
blaze.
"These fires are not growing so large and spreading
so fast overnight due to weather and fuel alone," Ingalsbee says.
"They are the result of intentional acts, planned by the fire bosses."
These backburns are a sort of prescribed burning done
in reaction to wildfire at the hottest and most dangerous time of
the year. "The no-fire option is not an option," he says. "The two
choices are prescribed fire or wildfire."
Getting the
Cut Out
It was a Democrat who lit the torches this year
for the inevitable efforts to "expedite" efforts to prevent fires
in the future. Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota tried to sneak through
legislation suspending environmental laws to allow thinning on 8,000
acres of the fire-prone Black Hills National Forest. Congressional
Republicans at first were outraged, but quickly followed suit. When
Congress convenes next month, lawmakers will consider bills in the
name of fire prevention that override not only laws like the National
Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, but also
the Wilderness Act of 1964, the highest form of protection on public
lands.
Such an effort is hardly news to the Pacific Northwest.
After fires in 1994 killed more than a dozen Oregon firefighters in
Colorado, Congress responded with what came to be known as the Salvage
Rider. That law not only exempted logging burned trees from environmental
and other laws, but included provisions to release sales in green
and old-growth forests stalled by lawsuits and imperiled species.
Chris West, of AFRC, says he supports language like
Daschle's, applied only to projects that reduce fuel loads, not to
salvage and restoration projects.
"I think that there needs to be a way that projects
to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in high-risk areas adjacent
to communities and private lands … can actually be accomplished
on the ground," he says. "And if that's streamlining process or changing
the law to allow expedited procedures and review, that's for the politicians
to work out. But the situation today where a group can be play obstructionist
because they don't want to see trees cut has got to end."
Ingalsbee says that logging doesn't work. The huge
fire near Show Low, Ariz., roared across the cut-over landscape, he
says. By contrast, he says, intact forests are much less susceptible
to wildfire, especially in the Northwest.
Nancy Lyford, living in the fire zone and therefore
one of the potential beneficiaries of efforts that would actually
reduce future fires, doesn't approve of the likely new laws.
"I don't like it," she says. "I don't like it because
I sat and I watched when Sen. Wyden was here and people were talking
about thinning the forest by going in and cutting all trees over 12
inches. We've been thinning our forest. You thin the little trees
and the underbrush. You leave the big trees. The big trees don't burn.
So they've got the whole thing backwards.
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