Images of people being forced to flee their homes before walls of flame near Los Angeles and San Diego have once again thrust the risk of wildfires into the public view. Truth is, the fire season never went away.
Rather the election, candidate debates and the massive government bailout of Wall Street bumped it from newspaper headlines and evening news broadcasts. While you were occupied during the first week of October, wildfires in five national forests were turning 100,000 acres into ash and cinders.
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While wildfires, per se, are entirely natural, the size, intensity and harm caused annually by the past decade’s forest fires are almost entirely of human origin – federal mismanagement of our national forests are to blame.
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that more than 190 million acres of public land are at risk of catastrophic fires, including 60 percent of our national forests. Too many trees, too much brush, and bureaucratic regulations and lawsuits filed by environmental extremists are to blame.
These regulations and lawsuits have hampered professional foresters’ attempts to properly manage forests. For instance, timber harvests have plunged more than 75 percent from 12 billion board feet per year to less than 4 billion board feet per year.
The result: historically large ponderosa pines which grew in stands of 20-55 trees per acre now grow — and burn — in densities of 300-900 trees per acre. Between 1997 and 2007, in California alone, wildfires burned more than 8,500 square miles — an area larger than New Jersey. Unfortunately, such devastating fires are not unusual anymore.
Twenty years ago, a wildfire exceeding 100,000 acres was deemed to be catastrophic and a sign of an unusually high fire season. Today, such large-scale fires are the rule rather than the exception.
In 1998, for instance, there were 81,043 wildfires, burning 1,329,704 acres; but in 2007, 85,705 fires burned 9,328,045 acres. Four of the nation’s 10 largest wildfires over the last decade, each scorching more than 250,000 acres, occurred in 2007.
The financial costs are substantial. By August of 2008, California had already spent more than $300 million fighting fires, compared to just $44 million per year a decade ago. U.S. Forest Service spending on firefighting rose from $300 million in 1997 to $1.5 billion in 2006 and $1.4 billion in 2007.
The Bush administration inherited this crisis from previous administrations, and responded by strong arming Congress into passing a “Healthy Forests” law. It allowed, on a test case basis, selective logging followed by controlled burns on about 20 million acres of the public forests that posed the greatest threat to human life and property. The plan did not go far enough, but it was a start.
Yet even that was too much for environmentalists who continued to fight salvage logging in court. Even when the courts ruled against them and allowed limited logging to proceed, the delays environmentalists’ lawsuits caused resulted in the massive burns, damage to property and loss of lives that have occurred since the Healthy Forest Act was became law in December of 2003.
There are three ways that excessive fuel can be reduced:
• Mechanical thinning of vegetation or logging.
• Small “controlled” burns which, the Los Alamos fires of 2000 taught us, are inherently risky unless there has been some logging of the site before the fires are set.
• The “Burn baby Burn” option that we are currently witnessing because the other options weren’t used.
Our forests, those who fight the fires and the public who use the forest and pay the bills, deserve a forest policy that places public safety, environmental health, economic well-being and fiscal responsibility above the flawed ideal of “letting nature take its course,” held by powerful environmental lobbyists.
Their vision is a nightmare that has contributed to the current crisis. It’s time for the Government stop fiddling around, and tend to the public good by ending the power of environmentalists to challenge forest management plans in court. Let the logging begin!
Dr. H. Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
