Shall the USFS Allow Fires to Incinerate Our National Forests?
Part VII
We continue our discussion in rebuttal to the recent Idaho Statesman series of articles [here], and for good measure, in rebuttal to an excruciatingly incompetent series of articles in support of Let Burn published in the Los Angeles Times [here].
Let It Burn is illegal, destructive of a multitude of forest and human values, is not cost-effective, and is the worst idea that ever came down the forest pike. Let me count the ways.
12. Let It Burn Has Cumulative Impacts
Let It Burn fires damage natural resources including flora, fauna, water, air, and soils. They also damage human resources including recreation, scenery, heritage, and land management agency budgets. The damages are not one time, nor ephemeral. They are lasting and they accumulate.
NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) defines cumulative impacts thusly:
Sec. 1508.7 Cumulative impact.
“Cumulative impact” is the impact on the environment which results from the incremental impact of the action when added to other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future actions regardless of what agency (Federal or non-Federal) or person undertakes such other actions. Cumulative impacts can result from individually minor but collectively significant actions taking place over a period of time. …
The effects of a single Let-It-Burn fire are significant. The effects of numerous such fires accumulate and cause hugely significant effects over time to flora, fauna, historic and cultural resources, water quality and watersheds, air quality and airsheds, recreation, and national and local economies.
In 1987 the Silver Fire burned 100,000 acres of the Siskiyou NF. Fifteen years later the Biscuit Fire burned the exact same ground and an additional 400,000 acres besides. Little or no forest recovery actions were taken following either fire. Instead, fire-type brush was allowed to grow and accumulate fine fuels on top of the dead coarse fuels left after the previous fires. It is reasonable to expect that in another fifteen years (in or near 2017) another catastrophic megafire will burn those same acres and more besides.
Old-growth trees were killed in the Biscuit Fire (2003), some as much as 600 years old. They will never return. Megafires every 15 years will prevent any trees from attaining maturity much less old age. The elimination of old-growth is thus permanent.
Old-growth trees were killed in the B&B Fire (90,000 acres in 2003). Subsequent fires have decimated an accumulated 150,000 acres of old-growth on the Deschutes NF. That habitat is gone. The brush and thickets of young trees that are arising in the aftermath will be incinerated in the next Let It Burn fire, and never again will old-growth trees grace the eastern slope of the Cascades.
Old-growth trees were killed in the Warm WFU Fire (58,000 acres in 2006) on the Kaibab NF. That fire was in direct defiance of a court order NOT to let burn those stands because they were habitat for the Mexican spotted owl. No spotted owls live there now, nor will they ever again.
Hundreds of spotted owl nesting stands have been destroyed in Let It Burn fires in Oregon, California, and Arizona in the last 20 years. That nesting habitat has been permanently removed from the face of the Earth.
In every case, the old-growth trees arose due to a particular forest development pathway: frequent, seasonal, anthropogenic fire over hundreds and thousands of years. That development pathway was quite different from the devastation wrought by Let It Burn, stand replacement megafires.
The cumulative effect of Let It Burn is to destroy existing old-growth and the possibility of old-growth ever developing again. The habitats and ecosystems subjected to megafires have been permanently altered to “early seral” conditions.
Since the first Let It Burn megafire, the Yellowstone Fire of 1988, more than 90,000,000 acres (140,000 square miles) of wildfires have raged across forests and landscapes of the West. That is an area three times the size of the State of Oregon. The total National Forest System covers roughly 190,000,000 acres, thus the wildfires over the last 20 years have consumed an area roughly half that size. Given the desire to Let It Burn that exists in that agency, the entire USFS System will be incinerated in something less than 20 more years. Few trees more than 40 years old will exist in federal forests.
Yellowstone National Park celebrates its megafire. The trees that were killed were “overmature”. The brush that has sprouted back is “nutritious for elk.” What the park spokespeople fail to say is that wholesale alteration of the ecosystem has eliminated habitat for numerous other species that will never return, especially forest animals, including arboreal dwellers such as owls.
Yellowstone has adopted Let It Burn as the centerpiece of “natural regulation,” a bogus biological theory repudiated by modern environmental science. Another megafire is a certainty. It could be the Le Hardy Fire, burning right now in YNP and already 10,000 acres. That fire is not being suppressed. If a significant windstorm arises, much of Yellowstone will burn again in the next few weeks. Any forests at all, much less old forests, will not be a feature of YNP in future decades.
In 1977 the Marble Cone Fire burned 178,000 acres of the Los Padres NF. This year the Basin/Indians Fires burned the same ground and an additional 66,000 acres more. No forest recovery actions were taken, no vegetation or fuels management, no preparation of fire trails and roads during the 30 year interim. All those actions were taken during this year’s fire, at huge expense ($120 million), in a haphazard and rushed manner, and they failed for the most part to stop the fires. A 20-mile fire trail was bulldozed on the west side of the Indians Fire. The Basin Fire subsequently burned up to it from the west, so the expensive emergency trail sits there with charred landscape on both sides of it for miles to the west and east. More money will be spent to “restore” the trail so that it will be useless again in a few short years.
America’s priceless heritage forests are fast disappearing from this continent. The culprit is not forest management but un-management and the embrace of Let It Burn.
In 2006 the Payette NF experienced 70,000 acres of forest incineration. USA Today reported:
In the worst year for wildfires in nearly half a century, it may seem odd to celebrate how well some of them burned. But the Payette National Forest in central Idaho is doing just that.
“It was a real long season, but we got some nice fire effects,” says Sam Hescock, a fire management officer on the 2.3-million-acre forest where more than 150 fires this summer and fall burned about 70,000 acres. “We’re pretty happy with what we got.”
This year’s success in the Payette will multiply in the years to come because the 2006 fires thinned forests and created openings that will help “reduce the size of fires in the future,” Payette forest supervisor Suzanne Rainville says.
Hescock, the fire management officer, sees less arduous fire seasons ahead. “My next four years are going to be real easy,” he says.
Then in 2007 more than 470,500 acres of the Payette burned. It turned out not to be easy.
Unchecked fires are burning on the Payette today; the 2008 fire season is not easy, either. During the last 14 fire seasons 55% of the Payette NF has burned in catastrophic stand replacement fires. At this rate in less than 14 more years the entire 2.3 million acre forest will be “replaced” with something other than forest.
The damage does not disappear after a winter under the snow. Instead the damage accumulates, until there is no forest left to worry about.
Indeed, that is a common logic applied to Let It Burn. If we destroy all our forests, then we need not concern ourselves with forests anymore. Shockingly, that was the gist of the San Diego Declaration On Climate Change and Fire Management issued in 2006 [here]. Burn all our forests to brush in the name of Global Warming, with no regrets.
The accumulating destruction of our forests is regrettable, however. We can do better than to incinerate our heritage landscapes needlessly.
To Be Continued …
by Forrest Grump
by bear bait
First, did you ever see a government agency of today take any course other than one that was the easiest, the path of least political resistance? This “let it burn” idea was from the USFS Office of the Auditor General, and is a bean counting exercise, with all the bean counting justifications. The cheap and easy forest management method. NGOs embrace it because they don’t know any better, and are mostly empty shirt executives in D.C. sucking on a trust teat and puffing chests at cocktail parties.
So we went to Iraq on the cheap. Did the “most with the fewest” kind of military operation. Now we have been there forever, and the light at the end of the tunnel is an al Qaeda train from Afghanistan. Rumsfeld’s Republican miser tactics failed us, and put us in a quagmire of substance in warfare, and the very same mindset in public lands management has us in this very expensive, life consuming tar pit of fire fighting too late with too few resources.
I am convinced, beyond a doubt, that human diversity goals, the gender, race, ethnicity trumps common sense and experience deal, as practiced in the USFS has crippled that agency, and extinguished a century of institutional memory, esprits de corps. You cannot spend twenty years systematically eliminating people who were educated and hired to work there based on a skill set, and then replace them or pass them over at promotion time with people who were hired because of their gender, race, ethnicity. That subtle discrimination destroys any faith that one has in his job, tenure in that job, and care for the common goals. Just keeping a job becomes the number one goal, and keeping it until there is a chance to leave with monetary security and face.
The kind of people that our social engineering is producing are showing up in the home foreclosure process. My Latino boss said his fire chief nephew in L.A. told him that evicted people now are routinely leaving the house with all the upstairs faucets running and drains plugged. Just a little “up yours’ from those losing the home. In Arizona, evidently people leave with anything that can be sold in the second hand market, and the lender ends up taking control of a house without cupboards, sinks, tubs, tile, even windows. An empty shell. Gee, and what a metaphor for the USFS of today: an empty shell. The equipment is still there, if not sold at GSA auction, but the human capital, the institutional memory, is gone, just like the land is still there after the WooFoo, but the reason for it to be there is gone up in smoke, all the trees, the flowers, the critters, all, including the top soil it now appears.
It takes bankrupt public policy carried on without oversight from a Congress of persons intent on making themselves financially whole and their egos larger by arithmetic progression to get into the hole we now find our public lands in. Congress is no more good for this country at this time than a meth head out stealing $100,000 statuary to sell for its metals value, stripping the wires from an irrigation pivot, or stealing the aluminum handline, chopping it into pieces to sell in the scrap markets. Congress is composed of people taking $10,000 from a lobbyist to send a million dollars of profits to their client. For Sale. Government For Sale. And if you don’t believe me, explain it in other terms. How do you amass several million dollars to occupy a job that pays a mere $200,000 a year with expenses? You are bought. Your representation is bought, and forest policy is bought. We are getting WFU because the people who want the forests burned are paying for that result. That it all happens 3000 miles from the fire helps some, too.
Good point, Perfesser.
The USFS is not allowed to see trees as anything more than a liability, a fire source, and so the thinking is to get rid of the dang things as soon as possible, using the only option left to the agency by the courts. Burn, baby, burn.