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Wildfire management for our woods: Two views
BRYAN BIRD
Commentary
Bryan Bird
is a spokesman for the Santa Fe-based Forest
Guardians.
Community planning crucial to
fire-proofing
Fifteen years ago,
as a fledgling fire technician at Sequoia National Park, I was handed a
canister filled with a diesel-fuel mixture spouting flame at its tip. A crew
leader casually directed me to a towering heap of dried
branches and needles and, contrary to my indoctrination by Smokey the Bear, I
started a forest fire.
While the U.S.
National Park Service has long realized the utility of
fire, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is playing catch-up.
The visionary National Fire Plan, adopted in 2000 by the USDA, recognizes the
essential ecological role of fire and sets direction for safeguarding
forestinterface communities while allowing more fires to burn in backcountry
forests, thereby protecting the lives of firefighters, saving taxpayer
dollars, restoring forest ecosystems, and protecting communities.
However, a comprehensive Forest
Guardians’ review of the fire-management plans and
fuel-treatment programs of the Forest Service in the Southwest shows that
outdated, Smokey the Bear fire management is alive and well. In fact, the
Forest Service continues to suppress the overwhelming majority of natural
fires. Since 1999, the Forest Service has spent nearly a half a billion
dollars fighting fires in the southwest alone.
In the same way that President Eisenhower warned of the
military industrial complex, we believe there is a similar and rapidly
growing fireindustrial complex. Lucrative private contracts for aircraft,
heavy equipment and labor — coupled with everexpanding housing
developments — threaten to drive a detrimental policy of fire
suppression at all costs.
Although the Forest Service has produced consistent fire
plans that do consider wildland-fire use, many forests are failing to
implement those plans and still spend hundreds of millions
of dollars on unwarranted fire suppression: wasting tax dollars, ignoring
science and promoting unhealthy forests.
Since 2001, the Forest Service spent as much as $146
million and an average of $99 million per year to suppress 98 percent of
wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico.
Despite fire management plans calling for the use of
wildland fire as a management tool, only two of 11 forests have ever done so.
The Gila National Forest, a pioneer in fire
use, is just one of three national forests that even consider the use of
wildland fire outside of designated wilderness.
Fire suppression is only expensive; in the last two years
the Forest Service spent an average of $32 million on mechanical fuels
treatments. Prescribed burning can be 20 times more cost efficient and much
less damaging to water quality and wildlife habitat.
The Deputy Regional Forester recently suggested that
thinning might cost as much as $70 million annually; prescribed burning could
reduce this figure to under $5 million.
Southwestern forest ecosystems, the wildlife they sustain
and the abundant clean water they provide are seriously threatened by
government fire and fuels management practices.
Fire will always visit our forests. We cannot fireproof
them, but we can fireproof our communities. Similar to flood plains, there
are places where fire is certain and foreseeable: States and counties must
adopt zoning and ordinances that deter building in the “fire
plain” so as to avoid preventable disasters and enormous taxpayer
bailouts.
Although I no longer manage forest fires for a living,
there are people who do and more could, creating much needed rural jobs and
income. Rather than perpetuate an outdated fire-suppression paradigm, Forest Guardians calls on the government to
consider more stringent fire zoning, allow fire to reassert its natural role
in backcountry forests and use prescribed fire closer to home.
The Forest Guardians’
report on fire use in the Southwest is available on the Web at
www.fguardians.org.
RON CURRY AND GILBERT ZEPEDA
Commentary
Ron
Curry is secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department. Gilbert Zepeda
is supervisor of the Santa Fe
National Forest.
Controlled burning a balancing act
Like many
environmental issues, controlled burning is a balancing act for state and federal
officials. Our joint challenges include the need to keep the fuel level in
our forests low to reduce fire danger — especially in
areas near homes and watersheds — and to protect human health from the
soot and smoke these controlled fires create.
We share the concern expressed in your July 14 editorial,
“From Santa Fe Watershed, a fiery warning,”
that we need to reduce the fuel load in the Santa Fe watershed to head off the
possibility of a catastrophic fire. We also need to reduce the fuel load to
minimize the effects of unmanageable smoke from uncontrolled fires.
One of the best ways to do this is through controlled
burning, but, as these treatments increase, so does the potential for human
exposure to unhealthy smoke levels.
The New Mexico Environment Department has never ordered
prescribed burning in the Santa Fe Watershed stopped, but we have met with
the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service to get better information
on how the smoke is being managed and to work together to develop creative
solutions for minimizing smoke impacts.
NMED’s Air Quality Bureau has worked intensively with
federal land managers and others to develop smoke regulations that provide
the flexibility to burn and assure that the burn methods will reduce smoke as
much as possible. This sensible and reasoned approach resulted in
requirements that the materials to be burned are ignited only when the smoke
will be dispersed; that burning methods that minimize smoke are used; and
that the public be informed of these burn activities.
The Environment Department and the Forest Service will
continue to work collaboratively to help ensure healthy forest stewardship
while at the same time taking reasonable steps to protect air quality.
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