Fostering Better Forest Policy with Science
By Cameron Naficy, New West Unfiltered 10-26-07
A widespread notion is that fire suppression has greatly altered fire regimes across the West and is therefore largely responsible for the large, severe wildfires witnessed in recent years. This logic even lies at the base of national policies such as the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) and Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI) which emphasize widespread logging and prescribed fire to ameliorate the effects of fire suppression and reduce the likelihood of large fires. However, significant scientific debate exists about the extent and historical causes of forest change as well as the best management responses to these changes.
Recent studies have begun to highlight many potential dangers of rushing headfirst into widespread logging and burning practices, as is currently advocated by national policies. Just as fire suppression was thought to be a beneficial policy for forest health and public safety and yet we now find ourselves in part the victim of a century of fire suppression policies, we need to be sure that current thinning and burning policies do not, in the long run, actually worsen the very problem they aim to solve. In order to avoid such an outcome, solid scientific principles must exist as the foundation of management policy and practice. Over the last several years, the WildWest Institute has been working with forest ecologists at the University of Montana to help fill the scientific gap at the base of current national forest policies. The following is a brief review of our research and other relevant scientific findings that should help to form the basis for forest management policies and practices on public lands.
At the heart of the scientific debate about the causes of recent large wildfires is whether they are climate driven or the result of altered forest conditions due to past human influences. With increasing clarity, new studies suggest that climate change is driving wildfire behavior, with warmer springs, earlier snowmelt, and longer, drier fire seasons contributing to the increased size and severity of wildfires. However, for some low and middle elevation dry forests, many scientists have hypothesized that dense forest conditions associated with a century of fire suppression play a significant role in fueling recent large wildfires. While fire suppression has certainly contributed to changes in modern forest conditions, other human activities such as logging and grazing have also contributed to these changes. However, their effects are much less understood.
Our work with University of Montana scientists has attempted to quantify the long term contributions that historical logging has made to forest conditions associated with today’s large fires. We have established a network of study sites throughout Idaho and Montana, scattered throughout the Frank Church/River of No Return, Selway-Bitterroot and Gospel Hump Wilderness Areas, the Salmon River of Idaho, and seven mountain ranges in Montana including the Salish, Swan, Coeur d’ Alene, and Bitterroot Mountains in the west and the Little Belts, Big Belts, and the Little Snowies in eastern Montana. We have measured forest characteristics at each of these sites, now totaling over 60 sample points, comparing logged and unlogged, fire suppressed and fire maintained forests.
Results show that historical logging has greatly exacerbated the effects of fire exclusion in dry forests of Montana and Idaho, contributing to the dense forest conditions which may be partly responsible for large wildfires in some forest types. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, according to Forest Service studies, 99% of old growth ponderosa pine forests in Montana have been logged. This means that only 1% of old growth ponderosa pine forest has experienced fire suppression alone, without the confounding effects of logging. Yet, federal forest policies are based largely on the assumption that fire suppression alone has caused the dense forest conditions that may contribute to the size and severity of wildfires. We have found that this assumption is invalid. Secondly, our research suggests that disturbance associated with many logging methods often results in long term increases in forest density. This finding urges caution in implementing logging techniques for fuels reduction and restoration whose goals are often to reduce stand density. Such caution may be particularly important in previously unlogged forests and roadless areas where logging has not already occurred.
Taken together, the best science-based and economically viable response to large wildfires should include a conservative and targeted approach to fuels reduction and restoration practices. Fuel reduction projects should be placed adjacent to priority communities, where they provide the best protection to human lives and property, can be more easily maintained, and cause the least ecological damage. Ecologically-based forest restoration is a more complicated issue, but it is clear that it should seek to address the full range of human impacts on natural landscapes, not just those associated with fire suppression. Past logging, grazing, roadbuilding, weed invasions, failing culverts, tree planting and the removal of large predators are necessary aspects for restoration to address.
Furthermore, restoration must integrate broad policy changes with project level implementation for it to achieve the best results. For example, forest thinning to restore open forest conditions in areas where forest policy still mandates active fire suppression cannot be considered restoration. This is due, in part, to the fact that ecological restoration must emphasize the return of forest processes, not particular conditions. While structural alterations may be necessary in some cases before natural processes can be restored, if forest policies prevent natural processes from functioning, then these areas should not be priority areas for restoration treatments. Finally, the current push to thin huge swaths of forest may be very unwise, resulting in many negative, long lasting, and unintended side affects. Thinning for restoration should be viewed as a new, experimental, and untested activity that deserves further study and long term monitoring. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in the same position we are now in with failing federal budgets and a burdensome legacy of degraded wildlands, a result of our failure to look before we leap.
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Cameron Naficy is the WildWest Institute's Staff Ecologist and Ecosystem Defense Coordinator
Comments
Keeling et al 2006. Effects of fire exclusion on forest structure and composition in unlogged ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir forests. Forest Ecology & Management.
DeLuca & Sala 2006. Frequent fire alters nitrogen transformations in ponderosa pine stands of the inland northwest. Ecology.
These papers refer mainly to the work done in the Selway-Bitterroot and FC-RONR Wilderness areas and examine the role of fire exclusion on various ecosystem properties/characteristics. The data comparing the effects of logging and fire exclusion was collected more recently and is currently being analyzed and written for publication.
Educate yourself, man; don't advertise your ignorance.
If we are to doubt all the best science of yesterday, to embrace the best science of today, should we not do that with caution?
I am a logger who chunked miles of creeks, at great expense, injury to workers, and the end result was that the best science, which was about biological oxygen demand and decay of logging debris starving streams for oxygen, actually destroyed the physical structures of the creeks and seasonal runoff channels. I cannot approach best science without great trepidation.
I also see all this propaganda from the usual suspects about "road obliteration" or "de-commissioning." I built roads the old way (side cast with a dozer using an angle blade) and then the US DOT standards from the '60s on, which was the balanced road, where all excavation was placed in a compacted fill either in the road prism or in a waste area. That is the full bench road of great stability. I want to know how that road prism is re-created, and how many waste areas have been removed to fill in the road being obliterated. None would be an answer. All that is happening is that a large tractor pulls a set of deep ripper teeth down the road bed and a tank trap is built at the road entrance, complete with a high berm. Over time, the culverts fail and slides and slips occur, and of course, the damage is blamed on logging. Meanwhile, access to thin stagnant, over planted, thick stands is limited, and no real fuels removal is accomplished. The infrastructure to remove the material has been obliterated. A valuable asset that cost money to build is destroyed, all in the name of best science. Or urban feel good science to placate the litigators of the trust puppy set and the NGOs, the new silent partners running the government. Haliburton or The Wilderness Society, what's the difference? Neither were elected to represent me.
I have yet to hear mentioned in these fire studies and examinations of "old growth" or "un logged" stands anything about Native American cultural fire, when it occured last, and how often did it happen. I can tell you that my experience and observation over 60 plus years is that the lack of cultural burning, by anyone, has been driving the loss of meadows, fens, wet prairies, south slope grasslands, savannahs, through out the Federal estate. Those areas were produced and maintained over several thousand years by cultural burning, and those historic sites, antiquities if you will, are being lost. I have often wondered if they had, in former times, the job of being fire breaks and places from which to start fires to accomplish goals of survival for the Native Americans, or even be a Norm MacClean type of fire shelter in times of need.
If the whole concept and history of cultural fire in the wildlands of today is not examined in depth, and understood by many more than now even mention it, the exercise of fire cause and effect study is just that, an exercise. We have to understand the extent that a very viable, sustained human population used fire to landscape their world to suit their needs, and the needs of the selected plants and animals that supported them. We also have to know that cultural fire in the West has been around longer than the written history of man in the Fertile Crescent. This is not a new event. It is the event that shaped the very forests we are now concerned about.
The history of the West seems to note that it took about 50 years after the removal of Native Americans for the landscape to grow way too much fuel, and the be consumed by conflagration. In Oregon's Willamette Valley, where I live, the earliest of journals of exploration note with distain the ever present pall of smoke in late summer and fall as the Indians burned to free tar weed seed, burn the leaves off the ground to expose acorns in the oak woods, and to renew the grasses for the coming waterfowl migration. It was an every year event that only ended as the lives of the burners were extinguished or they were banished to clap board living on reservations. And 50 years later, the whole of the central Oregon Coast Range burned in several huge fires, and one of almost a million acres burned in the foothills east of Salem from Crabtree to the Molalla and into the Clackamas drainage. No cultural burning for 50 years, or about that amount of time, and the big fires happened. it was not about weather or water. It is always a drought in summer in western Oregon. It was about fuel. The fuel grew for several decades, and then was eliminated by fire. And it took the older cohorts of the forest as well as the new. Centuries of survival trees gone in one fire. That is what we are now experiencing once again. I wonder if greatly reduced grazing, especially by large bands of sheep, is not a factor resulting in a quick and deadly increase in fuel loading.
I hope a lot more effort is put into understanding fire intensity and frequency, before landmark decisions are made by regulators who can make untimely mistakes. And I hope that the historical impacts of pre-European man and his cultural fire, and the Native American cultural fire witnessed by Europeans will find its way into the journals of inquiry. We can look at man and his impacts in the last 20 years, 100 years, but how do we look at 10,000 years and determine what those results might have been. Perhaps we no longer can get there from here, and maybe should be spending time and effort on taking things in a different direction.