SOS Forests

Shall the USFS Allow Fires to Incinerate Our National Forests?

Part IX

Conclusion

In this series of essays we have explored the fundamental fallacies of Let It Burn. Allowing catastrophic forest fires to burn unimpeded in unprepared forests has significant deleterious consequences.

We have counted the ways. By way of summary, we now letter them.

A. Let It Burn fires are illegal.

When government land management agencies ignore the laws of the Nation, they destroy their own credibility, mandate, and any trust the public may have placed in them. Laws such as NEPA, NHPA, ESA, NFMA, CWA, and CAA provide the guidelines for government actions that impact the environment.

Let It Burn fires (variously Wildland Fire Use, Wildland Fires Used for Resource Benefit, unsuppressed “suppression” fires, extensive backburns, etc.) are government actions taken absent compliance with federal environmental laws, yet that have enormous and significant environmental impacts.

When government agencies ignore and unilaterally abrogate the established legal framework, our entire basis of democratic self-rule is threatened. The Rule of Law may seem burdensome to agency managers emboldened by situational ethics, but without adherence to establish law we as a nation descend into anarchy or worse, totalitarianism. And thereby the principal virtues of American democracy are lost.

B. Let It Burn fires do NOT benefit natural resources, regardless of the simplistic verbiage used by proponents.

Catastrophic forest fires damage:

- vegetation, especially old-growth forests

- habitat for wildlife, including listed Threatened and Endangered species

- heritage and historical values, including the ecological development pathways that engendered our old-growth forests and special wildlife populations

- soils, leading to extreme wind and water erosion, loss of nutrients, and degradation of basic and essential biological productivity

- water, water quality, and sustained water quantities, perhaps the most precious and essential resource we derive from forests

- air and air quality, by injecting particulates and gaseous pyrolytic compounds into our atmosphere in extreme quantities that dwarf any and all human-generated sources

C. Let It Burn fires are dangerous.

Unchecked forest fires endanger human health and safety, indirectly through air and water pollution and directly via the catastrophic destruction of adjacent homes, towns, and cities, rural and urban alike.

Our forests are in no way remote from humanity and have not been for 10,000 years or more on this continent.

Let It Burn fires place our public safety employees and volunteers at enormous and unnecessary additional risk as well.

D. Let It Burn fires are expensive.

Proponents cite reduced suppression costs per acre but the bottom line is the sum of total costs per fire, not piece-rate cost per acre. Total fire suppression expenses, not piece-rate costs, have broken the budget of the US Forest Service.

Reducing cost per acre is not a solution to anything. This is so intuitively obvious that one wonders how the cost per acre argument ever gained any traction in the first place.

What ought to be just as obvious is that the true costs of catastrophic forest fires are far in excess of suppression expenses. The values associated with destruction of resources, both natural and human-built, are ten times or more than the expenses of putting the fires out.

The losses impact more than agency budgets; they bankrupt regional economies as well.

E. The impacts of Let It Burn fires are cumulative and long-lasting.

Every western state has been punished with megafires over the last 20 years. Vast tracts of pyrophytic brush have now replaced heritage forests. Those conversions are more or less permanent; forests are not being “renewed” but are being extirpated from the landscape.

We now are experiencing megafires burning over areas that have been intensely burned before, such as the Biscuit Fire (1987, 2002) and the Basin/Indians Fire (1977, 2008). There has been no forest recovery in those areas, only repetitive brush fires.

Across the West once vibrant rural economies have sunk into doldrums. Every year insolvent counties beg Congress for more handouts to support unmet basic needs such as schools and roads. There is apparently no light at the end of that tunnel.

F. Let It Burn is political.

The support for Let It Burn emanates not from science, or appreciation of forests, or concern for wildlife, or a commitment to stewardship of watersheds, or respect for heritage, or a desire for the well-being of rural and regional economies, but from darkly conspiratorial political forces motivated by lust for power and control, or worse, by a deep seated hatred for the nation and the American citizenry.

Posturing in support of megafires is not environmentalism; it is the opposite, a cynical attempt to hide malevolence for humanity behind a false front of concern for the environment.

Coda: The Solution is Stewardship

The true and forthright concern for nature and humanity is expressed in the call for stewardship of our priceless, heritage forests.

The motto of the US Forest Service is “Caring for the Land, Serving the People.” Those are worthy goals and an admirable summation of the founding mission of the USFS. Caring for the land means tending our forests, practicing stewardship of the multiple resources therein, providing the basic renewable resources that are necessary for our civilization to function, sustaining wildlife habitat, watersheds, forests, and park lands, actively restoring ecosystems, and managing them for the public good.

Those are the fundamental purposes that underlie and justify public ownership of so much of our forestlands. The question posed by the modern retreat from those purposes is whether public ownership of forests and other landscapes can be successful, sustainable, and beneficial to humanity and nature.

Our modern epidemic of destructive megafires on our public lands suggests otherwise, that public ownership is doomed to failure, and that the ruination of forests is the only outcome we can expect from communal ownership of vast tracts of land.

I believe, or hope at any rate, that such is not the case. Public ownership is not necessarily doomed to failure on first principles. We can do better, as a society and as communal owners, than to incinerate our shared heritage.

The goal, as Dr. Stephen Pyne so nobly puts it, should be to make this a habitable place, habitable for man and beast, for forests and for people. There is no mutual exclusivity in that sentiment. We share this planet with nature, we are of, by, and for nature, we are natural agents, we are by birthright the Caretakers of the Earth.

Stewardship is our birthright and inherited responsibility. We cannot and must not fail to honor that bequest.

Incineration is not stewardship. We all know that. We can do better. We must.