Forestry Reform is a Burning Issue

Although many may remember the summer of 2002 for the spate of corporate scandals and bankruptcies, federal mismanagement also has been responsible for a tragedy on at least as grand a scale. Misguided policies, financial mismanagement, and a bloated bureaucracy resulted in fires destroying almost 6 million acres of forests across the nation. Without significant reforms, next year’s fire season may be just as dangerous. In fact, 190 million acres of public lands are at risk unless federal forestry policies are changed.

It is not a mystery that wildfires have become more intense and destructive. Spectacular blazes in the early part of the last century inspired an effort to prevent all forest fires. The result has been that forests have become much denser, with dead or diseased trees providing the fuel necessary for fires that burn with a greater intensity than did fires in less densely covered forests. These fires do considerably more harm to habitat, to families and property owners that live in these areas, and to businesses that rely on timber for their livelihood. In a dry summer, overgrown forests need only a lightning spark to ignite.

Today, scientists understand that zero tolerance was a misguided approach to managing the nation’s forests. In fact, fire is an integral part of a forest’s life. Occasional fires clear out the brush and dead wood and limit the accumulation of fuel to feed even larger wildfires. Unfortunately, for much of the past century such fires were suppressed, and today’s forests are overgrown and laden with the fuel to feed major wildfires. In one instance, the Rodeo Fire in Arizona grew from 800 acres to 46,000 acres in just one day.

Given the state of the nation’s forests, the federal government has three options, as noted by economist Rodger Sedjo of Resources for the Future. The government can continue to fight forest fires as they emerge, expending significant resources to contain large fires; the government can conduct “prescribed burns” to clear out the fuel loads in critical areas; and the government can allow more logging activities to reduce the density of forests and eliminate the fuel that stokes the wildfires. How the government responds is important, because the government owns roughly one-third of the nation’s land, including the Forest Service’s 191 million acres .

Unfortunately, decisions about federal land use tend to be political and made in Washington rather than allowing localities to decide land use patterns. With public lands, the federal government must balance habitat protection and preservation, recreation, and commercial uses such as logging. Special interest groups drive the policy debate, and political clout becomes more important than the needs of local communities. These divisions have been made apparent in the poor land use policies adopted by the federal government. Even the original movement toward fire suppression was a political response to early wildfires that has resulted in overly dense forests.

To address growing concerns over increasing fire risks, the government opted for prescribed burns but has been reluctant to allow increased logging, which can eliminate dead wood and thin out forests. Yet even prescribed burns are controversial and potentially dangerous, as seen in the Los Alamos, New Mexico prescribed burn that destroyed more than 200 buildings Mechanical thinning, or logging, is a practical alternative that can improve the health of the nation’s forests. Logging has advanced from the clear cutting of the past and can be integral component of fire control. By selectively thinning critical areas, local communities can increase employment opportunities while avoiding the adverse environmental and economic impacts of wildfires. Nonetheless, powerful environmental interest groups have thwarted efforts to increase logging despite the urgent need to address the threat of wildfires. As a result, localities have suffered employment losses, habitat destruction, the elimination of recreation areas, and watershed degradation.

The fact that politics and not science drives forestry policies was made all too clear when Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle quietly amended a defense spending bill to allow timber sales and logging as well as other fire prevention policies to protect the forests in his home state of South Dakota. Importantly, Daschle’s amendment aimed to eliminate the red tape and litigation that has allowed environmental interest groups to delay or eliminate any attempts to introduce timber sales into forest management policies. Bureaucratic approvals, environmental assessments, appeals, and lawsuits have provided a powerful tool to environmental groups while making forestry more political and less practical. A recent report notes that between January 2001 and July 2002, 48 percent of all logging proposals were delayed by appeals, and in northern Idaho and Montana, virtually all proposals have been languishing in the appeals process.

Recently, President Bush announced a new initiative to develop a common sense approach to forest management. Rather than seek exemptions and favored treatment for particular forests, the Bush initiative seeks to promote healthy forests across the nation by adopting sensible policies that do not exclude timber sales or logging. The Bush plan calls for reforms to environmental laws to reduce the red tape and litigation that has stymied forest management and endangered our nation’s forests. The plan also strengthens management and oversight of fire prevention efforts, which has been a significant problem in the past. The Government Accounting Office has identified the Forest Service as a high-risk agency due to significant financial management problems, and recently the Forest Service acknowledged that it misplaced over $200 million in fire suppression funding.

The nation’s forests are an important resource that cannot be squandered through bureaucratic ineptitude and special interest politics. Forests provide habitat, recreation, and employment in communities across the country. As steward to the much of the nation’s forests, the federal government can no longer ignore policies that now threaten the health of this valuable resource. Reforms are necessary, and they must include opportunities for mechanically thinning overgrown forests. Red tape, litigation, and financial mismanagement have become endemic in America’s forest policy. The nation’s forests have become overgrown and dangerous and they must be thinned out as part of a comprehensive forest management plan. Before that can happen, however, the federal government needs to thin out the bureaucracy and archaic policies that have endangered the forests in the first place.