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CounterPunch
August
24, 2002
Bush
Forest Fire Plan: Log It All
Chainsaw George
by Jeffrey St. Clair
George W. Bush, fresh off a brush clearing operation
at his Crawford ranch, snubbed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg
for a trip to Oregon, where he vowed to fight future forest fires
by taking a chainsaw to the nation's forests and the environmental
laws that protect them.
In the name of fire prevention, Bush
wants to okay the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million
acres of federal forest over the next ten years. He wants it
done quickly and without any interference from pesky statutes
such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan "the
Healthy Forests Initiative". But it's nothing more than
a giveaway to big timber, that comes at a high price to the taxpayer
and forest ecosystems.
Bush's stump speech was a craven bit
of political opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by his call
to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling
as a way to help heal the nation after the attacks of September
11. That plan sputtered around for awhile, but didn't go anywhere
in the end. But count on it: this one will.
Bush is exploiting a primal fear of fire
that almost overwhelms the national anxiety about terrorists.
In one of the great masterstrokes of PR, Americans have been
conditioned for the past 60 years that forest fires are bad...bad
for forests. It's no accident that Smokey the Bear is the most
popular icon in the history of advertising, far outdistancing
Tony the Tiger or Capt. Crunch.
But the forests of North America were
born out of fires, not destroyed by them. After Native Americans
settled across the continent following the Wisconsin glaciation,
fires became an even more regular event, reshaping the ecology
of the Ponderosa pine and spruce forests of the Interior West
and the mighty Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Coast.
Forest fires became stigmatized only
when forests began to be viewed as a commercial resource rather
than an obstacle to settlement. Fire suppression became an obsession
only after the big timber giants laid claim to the vast forests
of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific
were loath to see their holdings go up in flames, so they arm-twisted
Congress into pour millions of dollars into Forest Service fire-fighting
programs. The Forest Service was only too happy to oblige because
fire suppression was a sure way to pad their budget: along with
the lobbying might of the timber companies they could literally
scare Congress into handing over a blank check. [For an excellent
history of the political economy of forest fires I highly recommend
Stephen Pyne's Fire in America.]
In effect, the Forest Service's fire
suppression programs (and similar operations by state and local
governments) have acted as little more than federally-funded
fire insurance policies for the big timber companies, an ongoing
corporate bailout that has totaled tens of billions of dollars
and shows no sign of slowing down. There's an old saying that
the Forest Service fights fires by throwing money at them. And
the more money it spends, the more money it gets from Congress.
"The Forest Service budgetary process
rewards forest managers for losing money on environmentally destructive
timber sales and penalizes them for making money or doing environmentally
beneficial activities," says Randal O'Toole, a forest economist
at the Thoreau Institute in Bandon, Oregon. "Until those
incentives are changed, giving the Forest Service more power
to sell or thin trees without environmental oversight will only
create more problems than it solves."
Where did all the money go? It largely
went to amass a fire-fighting infrastructure that rivals the
National Guard: helicopters, tankers, satellites, airplanes and
a legion of young men and women who are thrust, often carelessly,
onto the firelines. Hundreds of fire fighters have perished,
often senselessly. For a chilling historical account of how inept
Forest Service fire bureaucrats put young firefighters in harms
way read Norman Maclean's (author of A River Runs Through It)
last book, Young Men and Fire. In this book, Maclean describes
how incompetence and hubris by bureaucrats led to the deaths
of 13 firefighters outside Seeley Lake, Montana in the great
fire of 1949. More recently, mismanagement has led to firefighters
being needlessly killed in Washington and Colorado.
Since the 1920s, the Forest Service fire-fighting
establishment has been under orders to attack forest fires within
12 hours of the time when the fires were first sighted. For decades,
there's been a zero tolerance policy toward wildfires. Even now,
after forest ecologists have proved that most forests not only
tolerate but need fire, the agency tries to suppress 99.7 percent
of all wildfires. This industry-driven approach has come at a
terrible economic and ecological price.
With regular fires largely excluded from
the forests and grasslands, thickets of dry timber, small sickly
trees and brush began to build up. This is called fuel loading.
These thickets began a breeding ground for insects and diseases
that ravaged healthy forest stands. The regular, low-intensity
fires that have swept through the forests for millennia have
now been replaced by catastrophic blazes that roar with a fury
that is without historical or ecological precedent.
Even so the solution to the fuels problem
is burning, not logging. The Bush plan is the environmental equivalent
of looting a bombed out city and raping the survivors. The last
thing a burned over forest needs is an assault by chainsaws,
logging roads and skid trails, to haul out the only living trees
in a scorched landscape. The evidence has been in for decades.
The proof can be found at Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone Park:
Unlogged burned forests recover quickly, feeding off the nutrients
left behind dead trees and shrubs. On the other hand, logged
over burned forests rarely recover, but persist as biological
deserts, prone to mudslides, difficult to revegetate and abandoned
by salmon and deep forest birds, such as the spotted owl, goshawk
and marbled murrelet. They exist as desolate islands inside the
greater ecosystem.
Even worse, such a plan only encourages
future arsonists. The easiest way to clearcut an ancient forest
is to set fire to it first. Take a look at the major fire of
the west this summer: the big blazes in Arizona and Colorado
were set by Forest Service employees and seasonal fire-fighters,
another big fire in California was started by a marijuana suppression
operation, fires in Oregon, Washington and Montana have been
started by humans.
In Oregon more than 45,000 acres of prime
ancient forest in the Siskiyou Mountains were torched by the
Forest Service's firefighting crews to start a backfire in order
to "save" a town that wasn't threatened to begin with.
The fires were ignited by shooting ping-pong balls filled with
napalm into the forest of giant Douglas-firs. By one estimate,
more than a third of the acres burned this summer were ignited
by the Forest Service as backfires. That's good news for the
timber industry since they get to log nearly all those acres
for next to nothing.
Far from acting as a curative, a century
of unrestrained logging has vastly increased the intensity and
frequency of wildfires, particularly in the West. The Bush plan
promises only more of the same at an accelerated and uninhibited
pace. When combined with global warming, persistent droughts,
and invasions by alien insects species (such as the Asian-long-horned
beetle) and diseases, the future for American forests looks very
bleak indeed.
Predictably, the Bush scheme was met
with howls of protest from the big environmental groups. This
is part of Bush's irresponsible anti-environmental Agenda,"
said Bill Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society. "The
truth is that waiving environmental laws will not protect homes
and lives from wildfire."
But they only have themselves to blame.
They helped lay the political groundwork for the Bush plan long
ago. And now the Administration, and its backers in Big Timber,
have seized the day and put the environmentalists on the run.
The environmentalists have connived with
the logging-to-prevent-fires scam for political reasons. First
came a deal to jettison a federal court injunction against logging
in the Montana's Bitterroot National Forest designed to appease
Senator Max Baucus, friend of Robert Redford and a ranking Democrat.
Then last month came a similar deal brokered by Senate Majority
Leader Tom Daschle that allows the timber industry to begin logging
the Black Hills, sacred land of the Sioux, totally unfettered
by any environmental constraints.
Grassroots greens warned that such dealmaking
with Democrats would soon become a model for a national legislation
backed by Bush and Republican legislators that would dramatically
escalate logging on all national forests and exempt the clearcuts
from compliance with environmental laws. We've now reached that
point.
And there's no sign the big greens have
learned their lesson.
The latest proposal comes courtesy of
the Oregon Natural Resources Council and the Sierra Club. It's
rather timidly called the "Environmentalist New Vision".There's
nothing new about the plan, except that it is being endorsed
by a claque of politically intimidated green groups instead of
Boise-Cascade. It calls for thinning ( i.e., logging) operations
near homes in the forest/suburb interface. This is a pathetic
and dangerous approach that sends two wrong messages in one package:
that thinning reduces fire risk and that it's okay to build houses
in forested environments.
In fact, there's no evidence that thinning
will reduce fires in these situations and it may provide a false
sense of security when there are other measures that are more
effective and less damaging to the environment.
"Forest Service fire researcher
Jack Cohen has found that homes and other structures will be
safe from fire if their roof and landscaping within 150 feet
of the structures are fireproofed," says O'Toole. "A
Forest Service report says there are 1.9 million high-risk acres
in the wildland-urban interface, of which 1.5 million are private.
Treating these acres, not the 210 million federal acres, will
protect homes. Firebreaks along federal land boundaries, not
treatments of lands within those boundaries, will protect other
private property. Once private lands are protected, the Forest
Service can let most fires on federal lands burn."
As it stands, the Sierra Club's scheme
will only result in more logging, more subdivisions in wildlands
and, predictably, more fires. Any environmental outfit with a
conscience would call for an immediate thinning of subdivisions
on urban/wildland interface, not forests. Don't hold your breath.
Too many big-time contributors to environmental groups own huge
houses inside burn-prone forests in places Black Butte Ranch,
Oregon, Flagstaff, Arizona and Vail, Colorado.
Of course, there's still resistance to
these schemes. When Bush arrived in Portland to make official
his handout to big timber, he was greeted by nearly a thousand
protesters. On the streets of the Rose City, Earth First!ers
and anti-war activists shouted down Bush and his plans for war
on Iraq and the environment. The riot police soon arrived in
their Darth Vader gear. The demonstrators, old and young alike,
were beaten, gassed, and shot at with plastic bullets. They even
pepper sprayed children. Dozens were arrested; others were bloodied
by bullets and nightsticks.
This is a portent of things to come.
When the laws have been suspended, the only option to protect
forests will be direct action: bodies barricaded against bulldozers,
young women suspended in trees, impromptu encampments in the
deep snows of the Cascades and Rockies.
Not long ago, the occupation of cutting
down the big trees ranked as one of the most dangerous around.
Now, thanks to the connivance of Bush, Daschle and the big enviro
groups, the job of protecting them will be fraught with even
more peril.
Those brave young forest defenders, forced
into the woods as a thin green line against the chainsaws, should
send their bail requests to the Sierra Club and their medical
bills to the Wilderness Society. They can afford it.
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