Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range

Land Use Planning Must Address Wildfire Plain

By George Wuerthner, 6-18-07

A few months ago, five former Chiefs of the Forest Service sent a joint letter to Congress. In that letter, the Chiefs warned Congress about “an untenable financial situation due to the way fire-suppression funding is being handled in the federal budget.” Increasingly, the agency is being asked to pay for fire suppression at the expense of other priorities and needs. Last year fire fighting consumed 45 percent of the agency’s budget, leaving less to spend on campground maintenance, trail work, wildlife and fish habitat restoration, and many other worthwhile programs.

There are, of course, several reasons for this situation. The first is drought. It’s axiom of fire ecology that you get big fires with extreme drought. There is little one can do to control drought. Under drought conditions, fires blaze through all kinds of woodlands—and proposed solutions to reduce fire hazard like thinning forests ultimately has little effect upon fire spread under severe drought conditions.  Under severe drought, especially if coupled with winds, normal fire behavior is thrown out the window. There is evidence that thinning can actually increase fire mortality because it opens up forests to greater wind and drying, exacerbating the effects of drought. 

Not surprisingly we are experiencing some of the largest fires in recent memory, in part, because we are experiencing some of the most severe drought conditions in history. For instance, this past year Southern California has gotten the least amount of precipitation ever recorded. Fires are already being whipped across that landscape and it’s not even the late summer when Santa Anna Winds historically blast out of the desert to propel blazes across the Southern California landscape. In the Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico have experienced the worse drought in 500 years—not since the Anazasi Indians abandoned their pueblos in the canyon country and moved to more permanent water sources along the Rio Grande has the Southwest ever experienced such dry conditions.

But the West has always experienced periodic drought, and large fires are not just a recent phenomenon—during the 1930s Dust Bowl era more than 39 million acres burned on average across the United States and in 1910 one large conflagration blazed across 3.5 million acres of Idaho and Montana in a single month.

Drought, however, does not fully explain the rising costs of fire fighting. What is different today is the preponderance of new homes that are being built outside of established towns and cities throughout the West. Everyone, it seems, wants to have a house in the woods—but then they also expect the government to protect that house from fires. In recent years, the majority of the fire fighting effort has focused on “structure protection.” In other words, fire fighters are no longer fighting the fires themselves, but spending the majority of time and effort defending the randomly located homes created by rural sprawl. Not only is structure protection costly, but it also endangers fire fighters—many of the recent fire fighter deaths are a consequence of trying to save some isolated house or cabin in the woods.

One of the best ways to avoid this cost and risk is to make it illegal to build homes in the hinterlands. Oregon is the only state with state wide zoning that mandates concentrated growth within urban growth boundaries. Although Oregon’s historic state wide planning and land uses were not established to reduce fire fighting costs or save lives, one unintended consequence of urban growth boundaries is that it reduces rural sprawl. Now this historic law is threatened by Measure 37, a voter passed initiative that permits some long time land owners to be compensated for “lost” value of lands if they can not subdivide them or forces counties to let them be developed. Despite Measure 37, any property purchased after 1972 is still under the state land use laws—effectively restricting development beyond urban growth boundaries.

We need to begin looking at fire the way we view rivers. No one should be permitted to construct homes in the “fire plain” any more than we permit home construction in a river flood plain. The flood plain is as much as a part of the river as the normal flow channel. And a similar situation exists for fires.  There are many ecosystems where the likelihood of a fire in a hundred year period is extremely high—building homes in such “hundred year fire plains” is as foolish as building a house in a hundred year river floodway.

The majority of property that is potentially at risk from fires lies on private land, therefore the responsibility for protecting homes and communities lies with county and state officials. County commissioners and state legislators who refuse to bite the bullet and enact land use zoning are directly responsible for the increased tax burden on all citizens who wind up footing the bill for all fire protection costs as well as potentially putting fire fighters are risk. It is time that we limit sprawl and its associated costs, and prevent a lot of unwise home construction in fire plains.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist, writer and photographer with 34 published books. His most recent publication is Wildfire—A Century of Failed Forest Policy.

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