Unrest in the Forest could refer to the seemingly eternal triangle formed by environmentalists, timber companies and US Forest Service (USFS) in the Western US. It could also be part of the opening line of a song by Rush. But in this case, it refers to my bad attitude.
I've spent a lot of time over the last 6 months trying to learn about forests and especially forest fires. I didn't exactly start from zero (but close to it), but I've learned a lot, especially from some very good university and government web sites, and directly from fire ecologists, fire management people at the Federal and state level, and fire fighters, who I've spent a lot of time talking to and (mostly) listening to.
I've wanted to relate the things I've learned to political policy in a diary for the last few weeks, but before I did that, I wanted to round out my research a little by seeing what players in the political arena - especially environmental groups - had to say.
Therein lies the cause of my unrest.
I'm not a fan of logging as it's been traditionally practiced by many loggers (I'm still cleaning up the mess created on my property 15-20 years ago), but I'm not totally opposed to logging either. That seems to put me in a distinct minority among at least those who speak for environmentalists.
I started out reading a few environmental sites where, while the "attitude" annoyed me, the conclusions were largely things I agreed with. But the more sites I visited, and the more I read, the more I felt I was encountering the mirror image of the Bush Administration approach to climate science. I found what I think is sound science ignored, distorted, and in some cases downright misrepresented. And it turns out that irritated me enough that I'd rather write about that than a political prescription for improving forests.
I'm going to begin with a statement from a web site which put up a fact sheet about fires in one particular state (I don't want to pick on a particular group, so I'm not providing a link - I can if someone insists; this site is not exceptional, by any means). Think about this statement:
The 5 most destructive fires --defined as fires which have destroyed homes and other structures-- all 5 are in roaded, logged and developed areas.
That's a single, complete, unedited bullet point. Think about it for a second, and see if you have a "d'oh" moment. If you don't, ask yourself this question: how, by the definition provided, could a "destructive fire" occur anywhere but in an area that's "roaded, logged and developed"? All I can think of is that commercial where the guy steps out his front door, over a cliff and parchutes to his waiting SUV - not many of those in the west.
I ran the sentence past my wife, who is intelligent and reasonably well-informed about wildfire issues. She missed the d'oh part, but had an even better comment: "All it says is those people didn't create a defensible space around their homes - they didn't do their Firewise stuff". Firewise is a government interagency program to help property owners make their property and buildings fire-safe. And in fact, she's more than right.
Here's Jack Cohen, a Forest Service researcher, from the seminal paper on protecting structures from wildfire (Reducing Wildland Fire Threat to Homes - Cohen's more recent papers are linked here).
Extensive wildland vegetation management does not effectively change home ignitability. This should not imply that wildland vegetation management is without a purpose and should not occur for other reasons. However, it does imply the imperative to separate the problem of the wildland fire threat to homes from the problem of ecosystem sustainability due to changes in wildland fuels.
Cohen's conclusion is that the primary determinants of whether or not a home burns in a wildfire are a) the type of construction (eg metal instead of shake shingle roofs) and b) the 10 to 30 meters (33 to 100 feet) surrounding a house. It makes absolutely no difference what happens in the forest outside of that zone - you can have a crown fire (about 46kW/sq meter) 100 feet from your house, and your house won't burn. It makes no difference that the surrounding area was "roaded, logged and developed".
In fact environmental groups are aware of and endorse Cohen's research - so aware that they've seen fit to use it out of context to oppose thinning projects in places like Flagstaff, AZ:
Cohen said he is aware that opponents of the Partnership's restoration plan have been using his research to challenge the project in court. To the extent the Forest Conservation Council and others are taking his urban interface work and applying it to the restoration of undeveloped forest lands, they are using it "out of context," he said.
So whether, as in the original d'oh quote, an area is "roaded, logged and developed" has no bearing on how destructive a fire is to property. That could be a simple mistake on the part of the environmental group that produced the web site, except elsewhere, the Executive Director of the group says:
However, there is one area where firefighting has become increasingly effective: structure protection. In Yellowstone, we did not lose a single high-value structure throughout four months of firefighting in the face of the most extreme fire conditions ever recorded. The key to this success is the thinning of dense fuel accumulations adjacent to structures to create "defensible space."
Clearly, someone at the group knew, from first-hand experience, about the conditions that determine structure survival in a wildfire. The Yellowstone fire, by the way, was in 1988.
Reference to Yellowstone brings up another annoying habit of environmentalists - the fact that they often refer to it to prove points about forest issues. The Yellowstone fire was a tremendous learning experience for firefighters, fire ecologists and forest managers. Unfortunately, the Yellowstone fire occurred in a predominantly lodgepole pine forest which naturally experiences fires every few hundred years. Many of its lessons don't apply to dry forests, like Ponderosa Pine forests which are the most common in the west and have fire return intervals in the 5 to 35 year range, or to wet coastal forests, where Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar and Red Alder dominate.
The other annoying thing about the website the original quote was taken from involves human caused fires and roadless areas. I'm not opposed to roadless areas but I get the feeling the only reason environmentalists like them is they prevent logging (actually - they don't; it's economically feasible to log old growth forests without roads, using helicopters, for example).
Statistically it's probably true that most fires are human caused (by a small margin in our area - something like 55% for humans vs. 45% for lightning). So the reasoning goes - no roads, no humans, no fires. Sounds good, right?
Not really. The site in question lists the major fires in the state for one season. Of 19 major fires listed, 6 were human caused (and it's questionable whether roads even made a difference - some were caused by wheat harvesting). The even more important statistic was that of the acres involved in wildfires, 70% were from lightning caused fires, 30% from human causes. And, as every environmental group will tell you, fires are good for forests (sometimes true, sometimes not). Trees don't know whether a fire was started by lightning, a drip-torch in a controlled burn, or a cigarette tossed out a window - the outcome of a fire has almost nothing to do with its cause.
Humans and roads do cause more fires - they just tend to be only a few acres in size because roads also give fire fighters quick access to the fire. The really big fires most often (but not always) start with lightning strikes in backcountry where fires are often not detected or can't be contained by crews who parachute, rappel or hike in with limited equipment and resources.
Update:We have two medium-sized fires in our area right now (about 4500 acres each). One is a backcountry fire started by lightning, which is being managed as a beneficial fire. The other was a human caused fire which threatened the town of Stehekin at one point. The Sheriff just charged a woman backpacker with letting an illegal campfire (at an illegal campsite) get out of control. She could do jail time and get the bill for firefighting - $millions.
She was camped in a roadless area 5 or 6 miles from the nearest road, along a backpacking trail. And that nearest road is only accessible if you barge your car 50 miles up-lake.
The last thing that really annoys me (and almost everybody does this, not just environmentalists) is the "acres burned" number. For example, "the Biscuit Fire burned nearly 500,000 acres" (the Biscuit Fire was a huge fire in S OR/N CA in 2002). But it didn't burn 500,000 acres. Here's a breakdown (from an environmental site too, the Wilderness Society):
Despite being technically the largest fire of 2002, much of the area was unscathed. "There is a lot of unburned area, and there's a lot that burned at a very low intensity," said Greg Clevenger, Rogue River and Siskiyou National Forests resource staff officer. In fact, the initial post-fire assessment classified approximately 61% of lands within the burn perimeter as unburned or low burn severity. Only 16% of the fire was classified as high severity, where crown fire consumed foliage. A subsequent assessment found that less than half of the fire area suffered > 75% mortality.
So roughly 300,000 acres of a 500,000 acre fire
perimeter was either unburned or suffered a fire that was of the type of low intensity, beneficial, natural fire that western forests have been adapted to for thousands of years. 61% virtually undamaged may be exceptionally good, but in virtually no fire will all of the acreage within the fire perimeter be burned. Yet environmentalists (and their opposites too) will continue to make emotional fund-raising and political appeals citing "millions of acres destroyed by fire" because of "logging and fire suppression" (if you're on the environmental side) or "banning logging and inadequate fire supression" (if you're on the timber side). Both sides are lying and know it.
The outright lying, in the end, is what galls me. I live in a National Forest - I don't want to see it raped, over-logged, clearcut, or burned to the ground. But, like a lot of people I know, I'm damned tired of people on both sides twisting and misrepresenting the facts.
I thought the goals of the environmental movement were the preservation of forests through the application of sound scientific principles. I guess if I want to call myself an environmentalist, I have to oppose logging and roads, and to hell with the science, or ultimately, to hell with preserving the forests - we have money to raise and enemies to destroy. That pisses me off.