A Moral Obligation
The Big Sky Coalition is a new environmental organization in Montana (see [here] and in our Favorite Links). In their own words:
The Big Sky Coalition represents a diverse group of Montanans who believe that current forest management policies are resulting in annual catastrophic fires. These fires present a negative impact on the health and economic interest of Montana citizens.
Representing what we believe to be a silent majority of Montanans with common sense, we hope to become a unified voice of reason that will provide a more balanced approach to environmental issues. We are prepared to be your advocate and fight for your rights!
Our mission is to work with federal and state agencies to bring about changes in the current fire management program.
Last December John Q. Murray, Publisher of the Clark Fork Chronicle, wrote a supportive editorial [here]. He offered this advice:
If they really want to be effective, the Big Sky Coalition should stop looking at the front end of the public policy process and start looking at the back end. The lasting decisions affecting forest management aren’t being made by Congress, but by the courts.
The first staff members they hire should be some sharp attorneys in the mold of Scott Horngren, while also recruiting some dedicated young law school grads who have lived in the West and have seen for themselves the effects of catastrophic wildfires in our parched and overcrowded forests.
That’s good advice, and Murray relates a tale of legal wrangling as evidence of his concern:
At least one local group is not at all interested in the “historic conditions.” The Ecology Center, now the WildWest Institute, argued six ways till Sunday why the U.S. Forest Service should not conduct commercial thinning and prescribed burning operations in an attempt to start restoring the landscape to its historic conditions.
As attorney Tom Woodbury said this week: “‘Historic conditions’ is a canard, significant of nothing.”
Or as he successfully argued at more length before the Ninth Circuit Court in 2005: Changes to the landscape would alter old-growth habitat, possibly harming the old-growth species dependent upon the habitat; information regarding historic conditions is incomplete; altering particular sections of forest in order to achieve “historic” conditions may not make sense when the forest as a whole has already been fundamentally changed; many variables can affect treatment outcomes; and the treatment process is qualitatively different from the “natural” or “historic” processes it was intended to mimic.
As legal arguments maybe those worked, but as scientific assertions they are fundamentally flawed. We refute them one by one:
1. Changes to the landscape that alter old-growth habitat, such as proposed by the USFS, are vital to protecting, maintaining, and perpetuating old-growth.
Old-growth trees grew old under conditions of frequent, regular, anthropogenic fire. Without frequent fire, thickets of second-growth have invaded formerly open and park-like old-growth stands. Nowadays when fire strikes old-growth stands, it explodes into firestorms that kill all the trees, young and old alike. Thinning and prescribed burning are essential treatments required to save existing old-growth and to replicate the historical development pathways that lead to old-growth forests.
2. Historic information is extensive.
The vast bulk of the extensive record indicates that human beings have been living in the Northern Rockies for at least 11,000 years. For at least the last 3,000 to 6,000 years, the cultures encountered by Lewis and Clark were in place. The Corps of Discovery found humanity in every watershed, and indeed were guided and hosted by long-term residents from the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific. They walked on roads and paddled by canoe along routes of travel that had been used for thousands of years. Everywhere they went was roaded, and their constant problem was deciding which road to take.
Everywhere they went, with the exception of high mountain ridges, was burning or had recently been burned by the local residents on purpose. The purposes were many, all associated with subsistence and survival success. The results were a frequent fire landscape with prairies, savannas, and open, park-like forests. Patches of dense thicket forests were rare and ephemeral.
3. Altering particular sections of forest in order to achieve “historic” conditions makes enormous sense.
Better even to alter the majority of our public forestland so that those lands may sustain habitat, watershed, and other environmental values. The “unaltered” forest sections will surely be destroyed in catastrophic fires; it makes little sense to abandon any tracts to holocaust. Recent testimonies to Congress by noteworthy forest scientists called for “aggressive active management” in order to SAVE old-growth, because without restoration treatments our old-growth forests are doomed to incineration.
4. Restoration treatments are not crapshoots.
Professional foresters, loggers, fire specialists, and other woods workers with experience and training can do the job. The outcomes of stewardship in every case are preferable to the outcome of no stewardship, which is destruction.
5. Restoration treatments combine modern science and technology with traditional ecological knowledge.
Removing fuels and controlled burning are exactly what human beings have been doing to the landscape for thousands of years. Modern restoration treatments applied by human beings are qualitatively the same as the historic processes. Those processes were also natural, albeit aided by human stewardship for the entire Holocene.
Stewardship of the land is our birthright and birth-responsibility. The land bears the heritage of countless generations of human inhabitants. We have a moral obligation to respect that heritage, and to pass on to our children a legacy of equal or better care for the land.
The Big Sky Coalition is an important new voice in that quest. They are on the leading edge of a growing movement that seeks stewardship instead of abandonment of our shared landscapes.
