I think we need to be honest with the American people. The forest policy of our government is misguided policy.

It doesn’t work. (Applause)

We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense. (Applause)

We need to understand, if you let kindling build up, and there’s a lightning strike, you’re going to get yourself a big fire. That’s what we’ve got to understand. (Laughter)

—President George W. Bush introducing his Healthy Forests Initiative in Central Point, Oregon, August 22, 2002

When George Bush visited southwestern Oregon in August, he appeared at the country’s biggest wildfire of 2002, the half-million-acre Biscuit Fire, and called for an emergency plan to reduce the fire danger of western forests. The key, the president said, was to go out to the public forests and cut some of the trees to reduce the fire danger to the whole forest. He said that environmental regulations and the people who seek accountability from the federal agencies that administer environmental laws were a dangerous drag on needed fire management projects. He was ready to declare an emergency to get people to embrace “common sense” forest management. Americans, he said, have seen the fires on television and they’re coming around to the idea that the federal government has to do something about them. Thinning the forests is the solution, Bush said, citing a recent appropriation to thin the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. “My attitude is, if it’s good enough for that part of South Dakota, it’s good enough for Oregon,” he told the Central Point crowd to rousing applause.

For Steve Harrington of the New MexicoÐbased Forest Stewards Guild, Bush’s call for common sense was a manipulation of people’s ignorance and fear of fire. Thinning is a catchword for many possible practices, and he bristles at how vague the term has become. “Just stop using the word,” Harrington says.

Thinning public forests is not the blanket solution to fire management in the West, Harrington and others argue. It may be one solution, prescribed for stands that need and can tolerate it, but to place a priority on thinning projects at the expense of other management techniques, or no management, will perpetuate the problems of western forests, people and fire. The tragedy will come when the current vogue to address the problem of fire in the West with lavish appropriations of federal money ends. Fire management is an ongoing process; in fact, the solution is in process, fire experts say. There is no fix in the next year or in the next decade that will solve the problems of fire in the West in perpetuity. “If there isn’t a vision for the Forest Service over the long term, it’s a squandered opportunity,” Harrington says. “You just spent a gazillion dollars to handle a crisis and you’ve done nothing.”

There’s an inverse relationship between the benefit of thinning for fire and the profit from trees harvested. Bigger trees resist fire better than little trees, but bigger trees offer the most commercial value. In forests where mechanically removing fuels offers the most benefit, it’s the smallest stuff that must go: small trees and brush that due to fire suppression or past silviculture have grown up and stress and threaten larger trees in the stand. This is the “kindling” that Bush referred to in his announcement of the Healthy Forests Initiative. It’s small, maybe a few inches in diameter, dead or diseased. There’s not much of a commercial market for this stuff, so to make brush removal profitable, forest managers must sweeten the deal with larger trees that can be milled into lumber. These are trees eleven or twelve inches in diameter and bigger (in the Northwest nowadays, the average saw log is about sixteen inches in diameter), according to U.S. Forest Service economist Richard Haynes. The more of these trees that come out of the forest, the more the contractor profits. Remove too many trees and the forest manager risks letting so much light into the forest floor that a new crop of flammable small fuels sprouts, perpetuating the problem. From a business standpoint, loggers have to thin heavily to make it profitable. If chip prices are up, it’s more feasible to thin smaller trees, Haynes says. It might give forest managers a bit more margin, but it reinforces a crucial point. Thinning won’t pay for itself, and Haynes says there may be a point at which treatment isn’t economically viable. “It might be that it’s too costly to alter the trajectory of a stand,” he says. “It’s extremely expensive if you don’t do it as a timber sale or stewardship contract,” Haynes says.

So there may be a shift in semantics, renaming what is essentially a timber sale as something with more benign connotations. The issue flared up in 2002 when the administration accused environmentalists of holding up fire management projects with appeals and litigation. What’s a timber sale and what’s a valid fuel management project is becoming increasingly fuzzy. “From a classical forester’s standpoint, what they’re doing is more of the same,” Harrington says. “Every harvest that goes on down here is called Ôrestoration thinning.’” Laura McCarthy of the Forest Trust is careful about language when it comes to fire projects. Fire management is action taken to reduce fire occurrence and severity. Fuel reduction projects reduce fuels on a given site, whether by mechanical means or prescribed burning. Restoration is a project to restore natural processes to a landscape. It’s a subtle effort against the approach to fire management that the agencies and administration continue to push. “Legislated thinning,” what McCarthy calls the Bush plan, will do no more good than the “out by 10 A.M.” policy of full fire suppression.

Many forests have suffered from past management, whether it be fire suppression or logging, but the prescription for fixing them is much more complex than what can be accomplished in one sweeping proposal. Low-elevation ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest pose a different set of problems for forest managers than lodgepole pine forests at high elevations in Montana and Idaho. Past management plays a huge role—in some places the effects of logging have a lot more to do with fire danger than the oft-cited crisis resulting from fire suppression.

Some forests might benefit from mechanical treatment if the goal is to reduce fire intensity and perhaps ignitability. In these forests, managing fuels may restore balance to the ecosystem. It’s the “fuels hypothesis,” McCarthy says. Low-elevation ponderosa pine forests that haven’t been allowed to burn in many decades may benefit from mechanical treatment. In addition, mechanical treatment may be the only solution for homeowners who live in a landscape adapted to fire and must manage for its eventual return. To be effective, mechanical treatment prepares for fire’s return. It has to manipulate the forest to burn in a way that is socially acceptable rather than try to prevent fire despite conditions that make it inevitable. Mechanical treatment doesn’t solve the fire problem—even where it might be best prescribed—without a corresponding change in our cultural attitudes about fire.

As Bush hails thinning as the cure-all for western forests, McCarthy points out that the fuels hypothesis doesn’t apply to all stands. Some forests have adapted to burn infrequently, but intensely, and depend on the heat of a stand-replacing fire to function ecologically. These forests burn when climatic conditions are right, and thinning isn’t an option for managing them. The Southwest may have many forests that are out of whack as a result of fire suppression, but farther north and at higher elevations, forests have adapted to different fires, ones that fire suppression has had less influence on.

Few forests are purely one or the other, McCarthy says. Forests are usually mixes of the two regimes, and any management for fire must take this variability into account. The ultimate prescription depends on the location and may involve thinning or prescribed burning or a lighter let-burn approach. Formerly logged stands add another twist to this problem: How do you manage a managed forest for fire? Logged stands tend to be drier and hotter than the surrounding intact forest, and the second growth that sprouts or is planted after the harvest may have little diversity. For many stands that were cut in past decades, Harrington sees a lapse in management. “They never thinned them. There was no follow-through to the commercial timber harvest,” he says. Trees grew back densely, and little was done to continue work that started with the original cut. Unprofitable work like precommercial thinning (cutting to reduce the number of trees per acre when trees aren’t of merchantable size) was ignored, he says. The result was that the forest grew back from earlier harvests in much more dangerous patterns—one species favored over others with little variation in stand height. Variability across the landscape is one of nature’s fire controls. Some places burn hot, others less intensely, and the result is a mosaic of small and large trees, dense and open stands, a diverse landscape. Sustainable forest management, Harrington argues, accomplishes these goals.

Managing public forests—to thin or not to thin—is one surprisingly small piece of the fire management problem. Most wildfires don’t burn on national forests and most don’t burn in forests at all, according to Peter Morrison, executive director of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute. In the last decade, 17 percent of the wildfires in the United States burned on national forests, and annually hundreds of thousands of acres burn in sagebrush, scrub and grassland where thinning isn’t an option. Of the national forest acreage that burned in 2000, thinning would not have been an appropriate treatment or a benefit to most of those stands. The numbers don’t add up to justify a sweeping federal program of thinning on national forests. Morrison says management and money should be directed where problems are most acute—to homeowners, to tribes and to state and local governments. Thinning in the national forests would address only a very small part of fire management in the western United States.

While the choices—from thinning or outright logging to let-burn—may seem simple, the solution isn’t common sense. It requires an understanding of the diversity of public forests, the surrounding lands and the values people place on them. It requires an understanding that the West is a big place and that fires are expensive to fight and expensive to prevent. More than anything, it requires an understanding of time. Wildfires are natural events, and humans have influence but little control.

“We understand that people want to take action,” McCarthy says. But there’s not a lot of cause and effect—we don’t know much about thinning to influence fire behavior and what the long-term effects of it will be. “There’s been little empirical research to test the effectiveness of thinning on fire intensity and severity,” she says.

“Forest management always has to operate in the legacy of the stands you have,” Haynes says. The fire issue lets people masquerade and have a public lands discussion, he says. It’s not so much about fire as it is about land ethics. “Part of the debate at the moment is between active and passive management,” Haynes says. “There are consequences to both. It would be unfair to say it any other way.”