Winter 2004. FSEEE sues to push for wildland firefighting reform.

Lives on the Line

Too many firefighters die each year in a fruitless and self-defeating war against fire. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has filed the first-ever lawsuit challenging U.S. Forest Service firefighting. It is time for the Forest Service to take a deep breath and assess how fire is to be managed in our national forests.

More than 900 wildland firefighters have died since 1910, the year the Forest Service declared war on fire. This year, at press time, there were thirty firefighting-related deaths.

“Two years ago, my son Devin died while fighting the Thirty Mile Fire,” says Ken Weaver of Moxee, Washington. “His death was needless. That fire threatened nothing, and certainly nothing worth the lives of the four firefighters who perished.” Weaver will testify in the lawsuit, explaining the impact that firefighting has had on his family.

The case, filed in federal district court in Missoula, Montana, asks for an environmental impact statement that assesses the costs and benefits of wildland firefighting. The assessment will also examine alternatives, such as creating fire-resistant homes and communities, says Marc Fink of the Western Environmental Law Center, which is representing FSEEE in the case.

As a part of the lawsuit, FSEEE seeks to inform the public about fires and firefighting. First, firefighters cannot stop all forest fires. Second, the more they try, the more severe future forest fires are going to be. Third, firefighters shouldn’t defend a home that is indefensible. Fourth, no home is worth a firefighter’s life.

The Forest Service has been trying to eradicate fire from forests for 100 years—to no avail. The last ten years, a period of drought in the West, has seen the most expensive fire seasons on record. No matter how much money and how many firefighters the Forest Service throws into the battle, fires burn millions of acres and hundreds of homes each year. Unless the Forest Service changes business as usual, it’s only going to get worse.

Homeowners must bear the primary responsibility for ensuring their structures are not lost to wildfire. Reddy Squirrel, FSEEE’s mascot, teaches homeowners to build homes with fire-resistant materials (a metal or other flame-retardant roof is particularly effective); to keep brush, limbs, tall grass and piles of firewood at least thirty feet from houses; and to thin trees within 100 feet of homes so crowns do not touch. If homeowners take these steps, their houses will not likely become wildfire casualities.

The complaint filed in the case can be read at www.fseee.org/projects/firecomplaint.htm.

The Search for a Sensible Approach to Fire

Hidden behind the public and political debate about wildfire is a surprising fact: we in the United States agree on basic principles.

We agree that fire is a natural process in ecosystems and can be beneficial rather than harmful. We agree that fire suppression has contributed significantly to the forest health problem exhibited in some western forests. We further agree that fighting fire makes sense when wildfire becomes an imminent threat to people and their communities. We also agree that human safety, including firefighter safety, is primary and that threats to ecosystems and even our communities must be secondary when we make decisions about fires. We agree, too, that a one-size-fits-all approach to fire management cannot work given our knowledge that past management of fire, while it has affected many western forests, has not affected all forests the same way.

So why the debate? I suspect it has much to do with hidden or not-so-hidden agendas. An important agenda of the Bush administration has been to negate or render powerless many of our most basic environmental laws. This has led to anti-regulatory campaigns clothed in benign-sounding titles such as the Healthy Forests Initiative.

HR 1904, the House version of the Bush initiative, has little to do with healthy forests and everything to do with hacking away at statutes and regulations intended to protect the environment. It proposes to eliminate environmental review for a large number of logging projects whose stated purpose is to reduce fuel. Never mind that any project that takes a tree out of the woods could be considered fuel reduction. It also proposes to do away with citizen appeals of these projects. Never mind that these same citizens may be deeply and rightly concerned about the ecological integrity of these forests and have reasonable objections about a particular project.

One thing is certain: the extended public debate about wildfire has convinced nearly everyone that we must do something different, that if we change nothing it will be a sign of weakness or indecisiveness. In political circles, this perception has led to interesting results. As I write this, several western Democratic senators have just finished wrangling with the White House and come up with compromise language for HR 1904.

The western senators got it partly right. Additional funding for fuel reduction in and around communities is a good thing—if we set the right priorities for where and how to spend that money. However, it hides an important fact: throwing more money at the fire problem can’t solve it. Lots of money is already being thrown at fire. Half the U.S. Forest Service budget these days goes to fire, most of it to fighting fire. So the question is not how much fire money to give the Forest Service and the other land management agencies. The question is how to redirect the money we already give the agencies to ensure that it is used effectively to protect communities, benefit forests and restore fire as an ecological process.

The hope is that answering this question will lead us back to basic principles—the ones that we agree on. Since we agree that fire suppression has caused significant problems, we can also agree that we need to make judicious decisions about when and where we spend money on fighting fire. The vast majority of the money used to suppress fire is spent on the 1 percent of fires that get away, that race out of control. Fighting these fires does not put them out. Nature puts them out when the rains and snow come with the changing of the seasons. As for the other 99 percent of fires that we successfully put out, fire suppression is not always a good thing. Since we agree that fire is an ecological process that can be beneficial rather than harmful, we can also agree that we should allow a lot more of these smaller fires to burn. The key is to carefully monitor them and ensure that they do not pose an imminent threat to humans and their communities.

Sound simple? It is not. Perhaps the most important fact we must consider in setting policy and in planning our land management activities is that disturbances such as fire effect forests in highly complex, even unpredictable, ways. The changing global climate combined with the large amount of heterogeneity in forest types, ages and structures across the western landscape add additional layers of complexity that tell us that any proposed action must be carefully weighed alongside our knowledge of the current conditions found in each forest. There is no one-size-fits-all solution—again, a basic principle we agree on, but one that has gotten lost in the hidden agendas.

About a year ago, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics sponsored a workshop and convened a panel of scientists and natural resource professionals to work on a national fire plan informed by the best available science. Our hope was that this plan could dispel the hidden agendas, bring more common sense to the debate and unite our leaders and the public behind some long-needed changes in our approach to wildfire in this country. That hope is still there, though the process in getting there has taken awhile. This winter we anticipate having a draft of the plan out for peer review. Stay tuned. —Bob Dale

Forest Magazine | FSEEE