ON THE OPEN RANGE: A Guest Column FROM GEORGE WUERTHNER
Big Burns Vs. Forest Thinning
By Contributing Writer, 3-04-07
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| Caption: ABOVE: George Wuerthner. BELOW: The Derby Fire from the highway near Big Timber, photographed in the early few days of the blaze by Jeremy Lurgio. | |
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One hears continuously from politicians, timber cutting advocates and even some conservation organizations that we can reduce fire hazard and improve forest “health” with an aggressive forest thinning program.
The idea is that if you cut out some of the trees, you will eliminate the fuels that support large blazes and reduce competition for water, sun, and nutrients among trees, thus improve the “health” of the forest. Many of these thinning proposals are, of course, nothing more than timber cutting programs by another name. There are, however, some thinning advocates who are truly interested in improving forest productivity and reducing big blazes—not in padding the timber industry’s pockets.
Let’s consider why even these proposals may be based upon flawed assumptions. Consider the following points.
POINT 1. Most of the acreage burned in any one year occurs in a relatively few large blazes. In other words if you were to put out all the other fires, these few fires would account for the bulk of all acreage burned. This is important because of point 2.
POINT 2. Big blazes are driven primarily by climatic conditions--when there is extended drought, low humidity, and high winds, you get big fires. The 1910 burn that scorched 3.5 million acres of northern Idaho and western Montana is a good example. More than half of the acreage that burned occurred on Black Friday August 22. That day the winds were roaring across North Idaho and into Montana. This leads to point number 3.
POINT 3. When conditions are ripe for a big blaze, and assuming you have an ignition source (lightning or human), you can’t stop the fires. You just have to get out of the way or are out of the way (i.e. do not build your house in the woods).
POINT 4. As consequence of points 1, 2, 3, thinning proposals as “fuels reduction” have little impact on fire spread. Thinning does work to reduce fire severity (how hot it burns), but little to stop the spread of large blazes. This is because high winds blow burning embers as much as a mile or more ahead of any fire front, starting new blazes. Unless you were to thin all the forests in the West (an impossible task to say the least), you are going to have little effect on fire spread on a landscape scale—though there may be some benefit to surgical thinning in very specific and concentrated areas—more on that below.
POINT 5. There is no predicting where a fire will start and burn. So many things affect fire spread including the wind direction, topography, past fire and insect history which shapes present stand age and species composition, The idea that you can thin forests across the landscape in hope that the areas selected will be the same ones that will likely burn is optimistic at best.
POINT 6. Thinning is not a one time treatment. When you thin a forest you release a lot of other trees from competition which rapidly grow to fill holes in the canopy and understory. Unless you are prepared to go back repeatedly and re-thin the forest over and over again, you lose much of the fuel reduction value. Long before any federal or state agencies could finish with their first generation of thinning, they would need to go back and repeat the thinning process again on the earlier thinning projects. Are there realistically the funds to pay for all this thinning—only if you accept the commercial logging of big trees to pay for it all—and that results in unacceptable impacts to the forest. Logging big trees to pay for the cutting of small trees is really a “Vietnam strategy” of destroying the forest to save the forest.
POINT 7. Thinning is not a proven strategy. Most of the evidence to support thinning is anecdotal—but as many places where advocates claim thinning stopped or slowed a fire, there are other examples where fires burned right through thinned stands.
For instance, much of the forest that was charred in the big Derby Fire in Montana last summer were stands of savanna like ponderosa pine. A similar effect was noted in Oregon’s Biscuit Fire where naturally thin (due to special soil that restricts plant growth) Jeffrey pine stands were scorched. In both of these cases, high winds drove flames across the landscape.
Remember even if thinning appears to work under normal fire conditions, it appears to be less effective under severe fire weather. And it’s very difficult to replicate these conditions in an experiment. No scientist can thin a forest, then create a super drought, low humidity and winds in excess of fifty miles an hour and have it burn both the thinned and adjacent unmanipulated forest stand at the same time.
Thinning, as a fire hazard reduction strategy, could work under less than severe fire conditions, but fail miserably under the high fire severity climatic conditions.
POINT 8. There is even some evidence that suggests that thinning can actually increase the fire severity and intensity because thinning opens up the forests to more wind and permits greater drying of ground vegetation and the fine fuels that sustains fire spread.
POINT 9. Logging is not a benign activity, nor is it the same selective factor as natural events like fire and beetles. Logging introduces human intrusions into the forest ecosystem. This can disturb sensitive wildlife like wolverine and grizzly bear. Logging can be a vector for the spread of weeds and disease into the forest. Logging almost certainly creates more sedimentation in streams. Logging removes woody debris (dead wood) which has many ecological functions including providing homes for many invertebrates. Logging removes snags, and the potential for future snags—snags are important for many wildlife species, particularly cavity dwellers. Logging can alter nutrient cycles. Logging roads, even closed and “reclaimed” roads, often become new ORVs routes. Furthermore, logging tends to select against early successional species that are favored by fire and beetles, and also skews age classes.
POINT 10. Where thinning may be appropriate is for community protection. I.e. if you thin say within a half mile or less of a community or whatever, AND you can get a big fire fighting force in the area, thinning can sometimes help to slow a fire enough that fire fighters can put it out. However, you have to have a lot of fire fighters on the scene for this to be effective--and the only time you can cost-effectively justify this kind of force is to protect structures. For instance in 1988 in Yellowstone, there were was a massive effort to protect Old Faithful Inn--this worked because you could get hundreds of firefighters in one spot, but you’re not going to get that kind of force to focus on a big fire front that may be miles wide.
POINT 11. Finally, nearly all efforts to reduce big blazes and restore “healthy” forests assume that “healthy” forests are ones with few dead trees and without large fires. This may itself be a flawed assumption. Many ecologists would argue that a “healthy” forest has a good share of dead trees and at some times in the natural course of events, to have a great many dead trees. The same can be said for large fires—large stand replacement blazes may be ecologically important.
The bottom line is that we should seriously question whether we need any manipulation of our forests. I believe the forests are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. After all they have been operating without our aid for a lot longer than we have even existed. They are used to drought, fires, beetles, and even changing climate. In the face of global climate change, protecting large tracts of unmanipulated landscapes may be the real salvation for our forests.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As a photographer, George Wuerthner has amassed 250,000 images of wildlands and wildlife on the continent, most of them in the American West, Canada and Alaska. See some of them at George Wuerthner Photography.
[End of article]On every point, you are right, and, on every point you are wrong. There is no "forest", there are many forests. Some of them function as you have suggested. Some don't.
Comment By Mike Dechter, 3-05-07I think Wuerthner's explanation on the evil's of thinning are a bit overstated and only focus on thinning to prevent mgea-fires. I think the primary purpose of forest thinning is not to prevent mega-fires, but to reduce their likelihood of starting near communities, improve forest health, and allow for further treatments with prescribed fire. In many situations the goal is to return low-intensity fire to the land as a keystone ecosystem process. In most of the ponderosa pine and dry-site mixed conifer forests where I live in New Mexico, this can't be done because applying prescribed fire treatments to forests that are more dense than ever before in known history is simply too dangerous. In these situations, forest thinning is a necessary pre-treatment to returning fire to its natural role on the land. Regular prescribed fire treatments will allow us to reach society's goals of reducing the risk of high intensity or 'catastrophic' fire in ponderosa pine and even mixed conifer ecosystems.
I think this is very important to remember and important tools such as thinning trees through mechanical means should not be taken off the table.
Yawn. Still making the tired argument that forest thinning is a means to 'line industry pockets'? Those concerned and knowledgable about sustainbility into the next century would likely feel lucky if the remaining wood products infrastructure is still around in a decade, let alone turning a profit.
Still contesting what the overwhelmng majority of scientists and practitioners agree is an effective approach to the problem through prioritized active forest management including thinning and prescribed burning? The word 'selective' accurately describes both the techniques of forest management practitioners as they decide what to leave on the landscape as well as this writer's use of information.
I don't know if hookers were around when man started burning as a means to manipulate the landscape to create conditions favorable to human survival, so I will postulate that turning tricks is the second oldest profession, and fire starter the oldest.
History does not support the offered idea that forests are a permanent occupant of the landscape. Most "best science" feels forests move as climate and landscape features change. No matter your inclination as to forest use, trees sprout and grow as conditions permit, replacing themselves on suitable sites and abandoning unsuitable sites. There are learned people who now think the hottest of the new fires are not going to be suitable sites for future forests. To lose a forest to a mega-fire, with no reforestation effort, resulting in a frequently burned over brush patch is not going to be acceptable over time to the majority of Americans. In time, our current "best science" will change.
George is going to have to own up, some day, to the collective insanity that his kind proffer as desired policy. Clear cutting Canada to build urban housing in the US while we allow our forests to be fuel for uncontrolled burns that reduce forests to brush fields or stoney barrens, will someday be viewed for the cruel reality it is. Running full blast into ethanol produced from corn as an environmentally viable substitute for crude oil is already doing its unintended harm by literally taking food out of poor Mexicans mouths, and doubling the price of tortillas because NAFTA de-constructed Mexican corn farming and drove the farmers to seek jobs in cities. In the US, corn to fuel cars and trucks is only going to raise meat prices for those who can least afford higher prices, and drive a few millions more Mexicans north to a chance to earn enough to eat and seek shelter. The George Carlin comment that sending 13 million illegal aliens home would qualify as an energy conservation strategy rings truer daily. And, there would be enough corn to feed them at home. What we are doing to the residents of Mexico with NAFTA and now ethanol is cruel conservation, and bad public policy.
Someone asked what my fight was with MegaConservation and MegaPulps, and I guess it is my deep concern for needless human suffering. The Sierra Club nor Weyerhaeuser, nor Mr. Weurthner give a tinker's damn about people, and the impact of their actions on people who are helpless to defend themselves from MegaPulps' predatory business tactics, wage cuts, or non-sustainable forestry locally. The MegaPulps might feign their greeness or sustainability over the whole of their ownership of forest land, but locally they are just absentee landowners with no concern for local economies. MegaConservation is no better. Thinking globally usually screws the locals. It might be a whiz-bang hubba hubba good deal to not cut USFS timber, for any reason, but it hurts real people locally, and twenty years later the economic diversity the likes of Andy Kerr promised has yet be the balm that heals the wound of jobs ripped from the local fabric. For the most part, the MegaConservation promise was empty, and a town killer. It is always fine to lie to and take from helpless people as long as your goal is honorable, and it appears to me that is the policy of MegaConservation.
Mr. Weurthner is part and parcel MegaConservation, joined at the hip to MegaPulps, and their joint interest is to allow no public timber to be cut with any intention of it being allowed to reach to marketplace. MegaPulps don't want market competition, and MegaConservation needs a cause to generate dollars, the fuel of their fiery rhetoric. Neither gives a damn about the people they hurt, daily.
I have watched the iconic salmon discussion my whole life. Never have people quit killing them for sport and for sale. It is always about habitat, and lack thereof. But salmon still are killed every year in the millions. It is wrong to cut public timber but the protectors of that timber still live on what was once farm or forest land, in mostly wood houses, or houses made of materials mined from land that once was farm or forest land, and sending their views over an internet made mostly of precious metals and petroleum products, using vast amounts of electrical power generated by salmon killing dams, air polluting fossil fuels or feared nuclear power.
Our pre-European burners over thousands of years created a forest of large, spatially separated trees containing wonderful clear lumber. Their intent to was have as much open ground as possible, because they and their prey survived on plants using that open space. It was a human created landscape featuring human desired plants and animals. Our foreign ancestors and us stopped that landscape management and now we have no way to regain it. Too much fuel for fire, and too many impediments to removing excess fuel. So the MegaPulps, the MegaConservationists, and George Weurthner want it to burn, and so it will. Someone should bring marshmallows.
Wuerthner hits a nerve alright, but it needs to be hit. We may need treatments around our communities. But, unless they are very severe thinning treatments across our landscapes, more thinning than you would really like, they are not going to stop the 1910s or the other major wildfires that historically shaped Western landscapes. In the Rockies, for example, 56,350 fires were recorded on federal lands from 1980-2003, and about 96% of the 8.9 million acres that burned over the 24 years was from the 2% of total fires that were > 500 acres. Indeed, in the Rockies, about half the burned area over the 24 years came from only 50 fires (about 0.1% of the 56,350 total fires), about 2 per year, that were > 37,000 acres. These big fires are the ones that historically did the work in western landscapes. They are, like the grizzly, not really a critter that we can remake as a tame animal that never bites. There is overselling all around, maybe, but the treatment folks are the ones building up an industry around it, an industry that should remind us of New Orleans and the dikes.
Comment By zephyr, 3-05-07George Wuerthner's aricle is an excellent discussion of the problems with fire policy in Forests. Thinning makes sites hoter and drier and more likely toburn as they dry out quicker. Another big consequence of thinning is often introduction of invasive species (on equipment, into disturbed soils, etc.).
And now we have Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation getting in on the thinning game. Instead of focusing on buying private lands to expand habitat, it is signing MOUs with federal agencies to, essentially, log trees to curry favor with loggers (and ranchers who see fewer trees as an opportunity to graze more livestock on any grass that might grow in the understory).
Thinning doesn't have to mean logging. There is equipment out there like the slashbuster ( http://www.slashbuster.com/fuels-reduction.htm) that is capable of mulching the excess trees and leaving it on the forest floor for nutrient recycling and soil moisture retention. Mastication lessens the need for burning and eliminates the conflict of interest loggers may have with wanting to take some of the large fire-resistant trees to make the operation more profitable. In order to be effective they have to treat the debris after a thinning operation anyway, according to this new study by the joint fire science project: http://www.sosforests.com/wp-content/Fuel_treatment_Omi.pdf
I don't think anyone is trying to "fireproof" the forests but rather to increase the likelihood of fire containment, especially in the wildland urban interface.
Last weekend I visited the Bitterroot National Forest's Middle East Fork Logging Project up the East Fork near Sula. You can check out a slideshow from our trip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuQj7BeSizM.
The Middle East Fork Logging Project is one of the first Healthy Forest Restoration Act projects in Montana. About 500 acres was logged earlier in the winter. While we support efforts in that area to reduce fuels near homes (in fact we supported a Forest Service proposal to reduce fuels on 1,600 acres in the area) we believe much of the "fuel reduction" logging the Forest Service proposed would target larger trees.
Last weekend's trip, unfortunately, confirmed this belief. The major themes that emerged from our weekend monitoring efforts were:
* Lots of big Doulgas-fir trees (two to three feet in diameter) have been cut down throughout the logging units we visited, including lots of live, big Douglas-fir. There was lots green needles/logging slash/branches in the logging units. These green needles sure call into question that just dead trees are being logged, as the Forest Service has repeatedly stated.
* We saw lots of elk sign and a few nice herds of elk. We also saw large mule deer herds and bighorn sheep in the area. Wolf tracks and sign was also everywhere in the area we visited. In fact, we heard wolves most of the night.
* The Forest Service has marked "Wildlife" trees (standing snags) in the units with an orange "W." The specifications differ for each logging unit, but the Forest Service is typically required to leave 5 to 10 of these "Wildlife" trees in each acre they log. Without question, we noticed a pattern where the largest, best "Wildlife" trees (ie large, standing snags) have been cut. Meanwhile these huge stumps surrounded by scrawny, dead trees marked with "W". This seems disingenuous at best.
* The areas logged were unquestionably hotter, windier and drier...not a good combo come July and August, especially if the goal is to help protect the community from wildfire.
Again, you can check out a slideshow from our trip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuQj7BeSizM.