guest commentary

Working Toward Forest Restoration, Community Fire Protection

By Matthew Koehler , Guest Writer, 8-23-07

As predicable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, some people are again using wildfire season as an excuse for more logging and roadbuilding in our national forests.

And just like attempts in years past, such claims ignore the fact that many of the most significant fires threatening homes and communities are burning through heavily logged and roaded landscapes and even grasslands without any trees.

The Jocko Lakes Fire near Seeley Lake has ripped through Plum Creek Timber Company lands that are among the most heavily logged and roaded in western Montana.  Likewise for Montana’s largest wildfire, the Chippy Creek Fire north of Plains, burning on lands managed by Plum Creek, Forest Service, Montana DNRC and the Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Furthermore, much of the total acreage burned isn’t even forested, such as the 653,000 acre Murphy Complex that earlier this year raced through southwestern Idaho’s sagebrush and grassland country with nary a tree in sight or the 362,000 acre Milford Flat Fire, the largest in Utah’s history. Clearly more logging would have had zero impact on these wildfires that rate as the nation’s two largest fires of 2007 and currently account for over 15% of all fire acres nationally.  The same can be said for the nearly one million acres that have burned through the swamps of Florida and Georgia this year.

It’s also important to recognize that fires are an important part of our fire-dependent ecosystems and with prolonged drought and record-shattering temperatures it didn’t exactly take a genius to see the potential for an active fire season.

Add to this millions of new homes built in the wildland urban interface, the fact that the west’s typical fire season has been extended nearly three months due to global warming and sprinkle in past - and in some cases current - land-management abuses and clearly we have all the ingredients for wildfire’s equivalent of a “perfect storm.”

In fact, as I write, it’s amazing to see the success our firefighters have had keeping home loses in Montana remarkably low, and for that we all owe our gratitude and sincere thanks.

While it’s no secret that national forest logging levels have rightfully decreased since the record high cut levels of the late 1980s - a direct result of the Forest Service and logging industry’s wholly unsustainable practices - the extensive ecological damage caused during the logging frenzy still remains on the landscape, having never been addressed.

For example, here in Montana we have 32,000 miles of roads on our national forests with a regional maintenance backlog over $1 billion. An estimated 50% of riparian areas on national forests require restoration due to logging, road building, grazing, mining, and off-road vehicles and regionally the Forest Service estimates that 85% of culverts are currently impassible to fish due to mismanagement.

Fortunately, these problems create a tremendous opportunity. That’s why the WildWest Institute is working with community members, county commissioners and business leaders from Lincoln County, Montana to Lemhi County, Idaho – and points in between – to help craft positive, sustainable solutions that create jobs in the woods restoring watersheds and forests while also protecting our communities from wildfire through careful and strategic fuel reduction projects.

This past year WildWest helped form FireSafe Montana, which serves as a clearinghouse for homeowners seeking information, resources and assistance on community wildfire protection. And for the past two years we have literally rolled up our sleeves and joined forces with the West End Volunteer Fire Department in DeBorgia for successful community wildfire protection workweeks utilizing “Firewise” principles to create defensible space around the homes of elderly members of the community and along key roads in town.

While some people dismiss the effectiveness of such “Firewise” treatments in their zeal to promote more logging in the backcountry, as reported in the Clark Fork Chronicle, we need look no further than the Black Cat Fire near Frenchtown to see just how effective “Firewise” treatments by homeowners can be when protecting homes and ensuring firefighter safety.

During the 2007 Montana legislative session we worked together with a Restore Montana partnership that we helped found to get $6 million in new money passed through the legislature for restoration work in Montana. One of the most exciting aspects of that funding is the establishment of a state-wide Restoration Office, to be housed in the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

We’ve also worked together with conservation partners and the Forest Service on an ambitious, multi-million dollar watershed restoration and road removal project in the Lolo Creek drainage along the Idaho/Montana border to use the skills of the local workforce to improve fish habitat.  Ironically, a lobbyist for the logging industry has panned this project because it doesn’t include industrial logging.

On the national level, together with other conservation groups and community based forestry advocates, we have delivered to Congress a national restoration platform, which we hope will be used as a blueprint for a federal commitment to restore our public lands.

Meanwhile, Cameron Naficy, our staff ecologist, has been conducting research in conjunction with the University of Montana’s Biological Sciences Department looking at the impacts of past logging and fire suppression on ponderosa pine/Douglas fir forests in the Northern Rockies.  Preliminary results of this research were recently presented at the International Fire Ecology and Management Congress and at the joint annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America and Society for Ecological Restoration.

WildWest also remains devoted in our work to protect our intact, native forests, clean water and wildlife when the U.S. government fails to follow the law or use the best available science when managing our public lands.

While powerful special interests from the resource extraction industries might criticize our efforts, WildWest’s tremendous overall success rate in the courts is a testament that our lawsuits have merit and are preventing the government from breaking the law or implementing misguided projects.

In fact, during the past year we have had numerous precedent-setting legal victories protecting old-growth forests, roadless wildlands, wildlife habitat and the public process on national forests here in the Northern Rockies.

One of our successful cases from 2007 issued a major blow to the Bush Administration’s attempts to illegally rewrite the rules for managing our national forests.  Together with fourteen other conservation groups, our lawsuit will have a lasting, positive impact on the overall management of 192 million acres of federally owned forests and grasslands.

Another positive result of a successful WildWest lawsuit, which made it all the way to the US Supreme Court earlier in the year, has been the Forest Service finally being forced to monitor past and current management activities to ensure the long-term viability of birds and animals dependent on old-growth forest habitat throughout the Northern Rockies.

As you can see, the WildWest Institute is successfully working on many different levels to protect and restore our public lands, protect communities from wildfire and put Montana and our region on a path towards a more sustainable future.

While some people will continue using every wildfire season to perpetuate the “blame game” and indiscriminately call for more logging and roadbuilding, I’m confident that working together we can and will create jobs in the woods restoring our forests and watersheds and protecting our communities from wildfire.

Matthew Koehler is executive director of the WildWest Institute (www.wildwestinstitute.org).  He is also a former wildland firefighter, wood products worker and an avid backcountry hunter and morel mushroom picker.

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