http://ecola.com/go/?f=&r=co&u=www.denverpost.com

Article Published: Thursday, August 21, 2003 - 12:00:00 AM MST


guest commentary
Bush fire plan misguided at best
By Douglas Gantenbein


George Bush is working hard to show his empathy for a West once again wreathed
in smoke from forest fires. Earlier this month he visited Summerhaven, Ariz.,
where in June a fire torched more than 330 homes. This week he heads to Oregon,
where a year ago he unveiled the Healthy Forests Initiative.

Bush's mantra is simple: He wants to see forests thinned, i.e., cleared of
excess brush and trees. In many cases, those trees would be perfectly healthy,
large trees, removed by commercial logging companies in order to finance the
less-sexy work of chopping out brushy stuff that can fuel a new fire.

In some ways, Bush's plan sounds pretty good. Fires have cut a pretty wide
swath in the West in 2000 and 2002 (and 2003 has been hot and smoky as well).
And many fire experts believe that physically removing brush and trees from
some forests may well help control fires.

But taken as a whole, Bush's plan will solve nothing. For one thing, Bush seems
to think that thinning is a natural part of forests. "The best way to \[prevent
fires\] is to listen to the experts, who understand that by thinning out our
forests ... we reduce the risk of catastrophic fire," he said in Arizona,
blaming "decades" of misguided efforts by "well-meaning people" who have
blocked thinning.

Aside from the fact that the "experts" Bush cites are mostly Forest Service
officials, for whom the Healthy Forests Initiative might as well be called the
"Forest Service's Bureaucrat Lifetime Employment Program," the scheme is mostly
nonsense. The real misguided effort has instead been our stubborn and fruitless
attempts to extinguish forest fires. This in turn is what has led to the fuel
buildup that Bush's plan tries to address. In ponderosa pine forests, for
instance, forests once saw fires every five to 10 years, low-intensity blazes
that gobbled up brush, grass and seedlings while leaving the big trees intact.
In the absence of fire, these forests have indeed become badly overcrowded.

Thinning is simply another word for "selective logging." If not done properly,
it can make things worse by leaving piles of sun- dried kindling. If thinning
is necessary at all, that's because another unnatural phenomenon - fire
suppression - was only too successful.

Thinning also can be fruitless. Lodgepole pine forests, for instance, are
pretty much genetically programmed to burn to the ground every 100 years or so.
That happened in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, when a third of the park
was blackened. Today, though, the place has perhaps never looked so good as
seeds released by the fire's heat have flourished. Mixed-conifer forests, such
as those found in Oregon where the Biscuit Fire burned across nearly 500,000
acres last year, also seem to be pre-ordained for occasional "stand-replacing"
fires that take out much of the forest. These fires are natural; plans to thin
the forests to prevent them are not.

Nor is thinning a one-shot deal. Most forest-health experts figure a forest
needs to be thinned every five to 10 years or be thinned once, then allowed to
burn naturally. But Bush seems to be promising that thinning alone will stop
fires forever. What are people to think when a "thinned" plot catches fire in a
few years?

Indeed, any plan to thin forests may look like a woodsy version of our Iraq
involvement. Some people think that as many as 190 million acres need to be
thinned - an area twice the size of Montana. Even if we thin 5 million acres a
year - far more than we do now - it'll take 20 years to make much of a dent.
And by then, the stuff that was thinned first will need to be thinned again.

If Bush is serious about "solving" forest fires, here's what he should do:
Allow money to be spent to thin around communities where fire poses a threat.
Summerhaven, for instance, had been slated for a community-protection thinning
program, but lack of money - not lawsuits - halted the work. Also, Bush should
advocate peeling firefighters off the firelines, where in many cases they
really don't do much good, and put them to work setting prescribed fires that
are more effective at reducing fire risk than thinning.

And he should force Dale Bosworth, head of the Forest Service, to admit
something: Fires are a fact of life, and there really isn't much we can do when
it's hot and dry and a lightning storm passes overhead. But then, that would
require Bush to realize that in the forests (as elsewhere in the world), simple
answers don't always cut it.

Douglas Gantenbein is a correspondent for The Economist and author of "A Season
of Fi Four Months on the Firelines in the American West," which will be
published next week.

Actual URL:

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...581959,00.html