Spring 2004. Forest Service profits from Biscuit. California Chaparral isn’t a Healthy Forest.

Add It Up

There’s one statistic the U.S. Forest Service’s draft environmental impact statement for southern Oregon’s Biscuit Fire salvage plan doesn’t tell the public: how much money the agency will keep when it auctions off the nation’s largest timber sale. So Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics hired forest economist Randal O’Toole (author of Reforming the Forest Service) to do the arithmetic.

The Forest Service can divert timber sale receipts from the Treasury into four off-budget slush funds: the Knutson-Vandenberg, Salvage Sale, Brush Disposal and Cooperative Road Maintenance funds. Although each fund is earmarked for a specific use, the Forest Service skims dollars from the funds to cover employee salaries, office rent, vehicles and the like.

According to O’Toole (and in contrast to the agency’s figures), the Forest Service will pocket more than $60 million from the Biscuit Sale. Over the next four years, Biscuit logging dollars will account for about 25 percent of the budget for the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest. No small wonder the Forest Service is eager to sell these trees from ancient forest reserves and unroaded areas.

The Rogue-Siskiyou timber sale level over the past ten years has plummeted to the lowest level since before World War II. Money is tight, and employees have seen their numbers shrink from nearly 1,000 in the mid-1980s to about 385. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan’s mandate to protect biodiversity has reduced logging by more than 90 percent, which means there is less money for the Forest Service to divert to its off-budget slush funds.

The Biscuit Fire is a golden opportunity for the Rogue-Siskiyou to turn back the clock to the good old days of big timber budgets. But all this timber money on the table raises a financial conflict of interest for the agency. Can it be trusted to fairly decide citizen appeals of its logging plans?

At least one federal judge would probably say no. In a recently decided case, Ninth U.S. Circuit Judge John Noonan (a Reagan appointee) wrote in a nonbinding concurring opinion, “A bureaucracy, protecting its turf and cherishing the number of its employees and the extent of its empire, can have as lively a bias towards its budget as any old-fashioned venal politician might have in his pocketbook.” Noonan explained that government officials who decide between the interests of opposing parties must not have a financial conflict of interest.

The Forest Service is one of few federal agencies that ask their employees to make determinations when interests compete. A 1992 law guarantees the public’s right to appeal logging decisions to a higher-level official. But the 1992 law is silent on who decides those appeals. The Forest Service, when it wrote regulations to implement the 1992 law, chose to appoint its employees as the decision makers for public appeals. Most agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, have public appeals decided by independent administrative law judges who are not beholden to the BLM.

FSEEE believes the public deserves to have its logging concerns decided by officials who are not tainted by a financial conflict of interest. FSEEE will seek to prove that point with the Biscuit Sale over the coming months. —Andy Stahl

Lessons from the California Fires

After the fires in California in October, Congress felt pressed to do something. More than 750,000 acres burned, twenty-three people died and 3,626 homes were destroyed. It was said to be the worst fire disaster in California history.

How ironic that the lawmakers’ response was to rush to pass the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003. The act is touted as a much-needed fix to the wildfire problem in our nation’s forests, yet about 95 percent of the land that burned in the California fires wasn’t forested. It was shrubland. This is a potent reminder that legislative fixes often accomplish less than people expect. This can be especially true for land management issues such as fires, which are best handled by people who appreciate local conditions and the factors that created them and who can apply solutions tailored to the situation.

The California fires are illustrative. They burned through diverse plant communities with different fire regimes. Only 5 percent of the burned area was forested. Mostly ponderosa pine and mixed conifer, these forests were characterized historically by frequent fires that burned the fuel on the ground and left the crowns of the bigger trees untouched. Decades of fire suppression and a buildup of ladder fuels helped set the stage for October’s crown fires in the forests of the San Bernardino Mountains. In addition, severe drought and a widespread beetle outbreak killed or weakened many of the trees even before the fires hit. These conditions left a tinderbox primed for the exceptionally intense fires that affected or threatened dozens of mountain communities.

A different story, however, applies to the other 95 percent of the burned landscape. U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jon Keeley, whose research has focused on the fire regimes of California chaparral and other shrublands, emphasizes that twentieth-century fire suppression isn’t to blame for most of the area burned. He refers to a number of scientific studies, including a 1998 U.S. Forest Service study by Sue Conard and David Weise, as evidence that fire suppression has neither excluded fires nor led to unnatural or excessive fuel.

Keeley believes the fires of October 2003 were actually “a natural event that has been repeated on these landscapes for eons.” The southern California climate—which climatologists are inclined to label as the worst fire climate in the country—is the reason fire suppression has little effect on fire regimes in California shrublands, according to Keeley. Each autumn, hot, dry Santa Ana winds, blowing in from the desert, reach speeds of fifty to sixty miles per hour. These winds follow the summer drought, producing weather and fuel conditions that defy firefighters’ best efforts.

Richard Minnich, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, holds a different view. In 1983, Minnich looked at comparable ecosystems south of the border that have not been subject to fire suppression. He found that fires in Mexico were many and small and those in the United States were few and large. He attributed the difference to fire suppression, and recommended extensive prescribed burning in California shrublands to reduce the fuel and provide for a fire regime more like that found in Baja California.

Keeley, Max Moritz of the University of California, Berkeley and others have tested Minnich’s fire suppression hypothesis. Their examination of fire frequency records indicates that fire suppression has not excluded fire and that large, high-intensity fires are part of the natural fire regime. Weather and climate are such important factors that they tend to overwhelm any effect from the age or spatial pattern of the available fuels.

These findings show that prescription burning at landscape scales would not be effective for stopping shrubland fires during severe weather conditions. Landscape-scale treatments might address fires occurring under moderate weather conditions, but they would probably not be cost effective. Such fires seldom threaten lives and property. Prescribed burning is best used to target urban interface areas in order to enhance firefighter safety.

“We must view these fires the same way we view earthquakes, and the folks in other parts of the country view tornadoes and hurricanes,” says Keeley. “We cannot control their occurrence, but we can learn to live with them and minimize personal harm.”

Given that large shrubland fires may be natural, inevitable and extremely difficult to stop even with technologically advanced firefighting techniques, we are left with the question: Can anything be done to protect communities and people living in these fire-prone areas?

As reported in Forest Magazine (Fall 2002), the research of Forest Service scientist Jack Cohen has shown that home loss due to wildfire is largely preventable. Focusing on the “home ignition zone” within 100 to 200 feet of a structure, says Cohen, is the key. Within this zone, the homeowner should take preventative measures, such as clearing brush and using fire-resistant materials during construction and repair. Nine times out of ten, these actions, properly applied, will save a home from being destroyed no matter how intensely a fire may be burning outside the home ignition zone.

Ventura County, north of Los Angeles, provided a notable success story during the 2003 fires and underscored the value of Cohen’s research. In the chaparral expanses of Ventura County, the fires swept through large areas just as they did elsewhere in southern California—with one important exception. Relatively few homes in the county were destroyed. One reason: strict local ordinances that direct residents to clear brush from within 100 feet of homes. Measures such as these are becoming part of a fundamental rethinking of how we should relate to fire, whether in heavily populated southern California, or in more remote areas throughout the West.

The lessons? Prescribed burning, removal of small trees and other adjustments in land management may be appropriate in places where fire suppression or high-grade logging has created significant problems. However, in lots of ecosystems, both forested and nonforested, past management practices may have contributed little to today’s concerns about fire. In these cases, we must look elsewhere; for example, address risk factors in the home ignition zone. When it comes to fire, be skeptical of one-size-fits-all solutions. —Bob Dale

Forest Magazine | FSEEE