Attorney Brenna Bell keeps a worn Trivial Pursuit card on her desk at Bark’s headquarters in Northeast Portland.
The question in the Science & Nature category asks, “Are forest fires good for forests?”
The answer on the back of the card mirrors what ecologists, biologists and conservationists have been saying for decades:
“Yes.”
After this past wildfire season, however, it might be hard for residents of the Pacific Northwest, where many metropolitan areas were engulfed with dangerous levels of smoke, to see wildfires as anything other than bad.
Now the timber industry’s allies in Washington, D.C., are taking advantage of this wildfire season to push forward legislation that would sidestep public oversight and weaken environmental laws in order to streamline large-scale thinning and logging projects on public lands.
U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) has resurrected his Resilient Federal Forests Act, with proponents pivoting their arguments to seize upon what many are misleadingly calling one of the worst fire seasons on record. Their rhetoric suggests wildfires have spiraled out of control, in part due to overgrowth resulting from conservationist policies and lawsuits that have slowed thinning and logging.
On Nov. 1, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the act 232 to 188, largely along party lines. In Oregon, Rep. Kurt Schrader was the only Democrat to vote in favor of the bill, which Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) had helped craft.
While Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley are opposed to the Resilient Federal Forests Act and its companion bill in the Senate, they have joined eight other Democratic senators across the West in asking the White House for $580 million in emergency funding for fire-preventive logging.
“Investing in vital forest thinning and hazardous fuels reduction projects now will make our forests more resilient to catastrophic wildfire in the future,” the senators stated in their letter to the president.
According to peer-reviewed studies on the overall likelihood of a thinned area of forest being hit with fire and on historical fire trends, the argument that thinning is the best way to address future fire seasons like the one we just had is profoundly flawed.
For one, proposals to remove trees, or “fuels,” are based on the idea that fires burn more intensely in unlogged forests, making them more severe and quicker to spread.
But a recently published examination of the intensity of 1,500 forest fires over the past 40 years in 11 Western states found the opposite. Its authors, scientists at the Project Earth Institute, Geos Institute and Earth Island Institute, found fires burned most intensely in previously logged areas. In contrast, in wilderness, parks and roadless areas, the fires burned in mosaic patterns – which maintain healthy, resilient forests.
But thinning can be effective if it is done in a precise way. Additionally, the weather and topography have to cooperate and fire has to strike the thinned area before it becomes overgrown again – usually within a window of 10 to 15 years.
As it turns out, the likeliness of fire hitting a thinned stand of trees during that timeframe is between 2 percent and 8 percent, according to a 2008 study of fires in Ponderosa pine forests across the West.
Last year, researchers at the University of Montana and the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station found that fires have hit only 7 percent of fuel reduction treatment areas within the U.S. since 1999.
That’s because it’s impossible to predict exactly where fire will strike.
At Bark, which serves as an environmental watchdog group for the Mt. Hood National Forest, Bell argues that while the likelihood of fire striking a thinned area is low, those areas treated for thinning are 100 percent likely to be affected by the environmental impacts of the thinning project, which can include lost carbon stores and habitat degradation from road building and the introduction of heavy machinery.
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The Jazz Fire
At least one fire in Mt. Hood National Forest this past summer defied the odds when it struck an area that had been thinned in 2016.
At roughly 50 acres, the Jazz Fire was the largest of more than 50 small fires that burned in the Clackamas River Ranger District this season. The area is located a few miles off of Highway 224, not far from Bagby Hot Springs in the Mt. Hood National Forest.
But something seemed odd about this fire, which ignited Aug. 20 and was contained Aug. 31.
As Michael Krochta, Bark’s Forest Watch coordinator and biologist, pointed out when he took Street Roots to survey the site, the only area that burned was the area that had been thinned.
While the area had not been thinned specifically for fuels reduction, according to the Forest Service, it met a number of the criteria for a fuels reduction treatment.
As we walked up a steep slope and around the perimeter of the fire, the ground beneath our feet was burned down to the mineral soil, black and soft. Logging slash left behind to prevent erosion and provide nutrients to the soil had acted as fuel.
Slash is the piles of twigs, needles and premature trees that are left behind on the ground after a logging project.
Just two months after the fire’s containment, vine maple and ferns were already popping up at the base of trees, and the sounds of woodpeckers and songbirds could be heard overhead.
Wide spaces between the young, homogenous trees that were not removed during the thin let plenty of sunlight through to bathe a slope covered with the barren stumps of many older, larger trees.
“Unlogged forests that have lots of big trees, wood on the ground and a closed canopy – the humidity is a lot higher. All these things factor into creating a forest stand that’s more resilient to the effects of forest fires,” Krochta said, as we trudged up the hill.
Jackie Groce, a U.S. Forest Service ranger in that district, also took interest in the Jazz Fire site. She led a team of experts, including soil scientists, foresters, wildlife biologists, silviculturists and fuels planners, on a field trip to take a closer look at what had happened.
She said the reason the fire stopped abruptly at the edges of the thinned area was because that’s where firefighters had contained it.
“We chose to construct a handline in a particular area, and that’s what stopped the fire; it wasn’t a change in vegetation,” she said.
The fire had also been contained on two sides from roads that served as fire breaks and access points for firefighters.
Groce said her team came to the conclusion that “the treatment was really effective in keeping a crown fire from happening,” meaning the fire stayed close to the ground and not in the canopy, aside from in a couple small areas. This was, in part, because during the thinning project, ladder fuel – fuel that would help the fire move upward – had been removed. What they did learn, she said, was that there were opportunities to manage the slash left behind differently. In the future, she said, the Forest Service may find ways to move the slash away from roads from which firefighters are trying to contain the fire.
She said it’s about finding a balance between too much slash, which can pose a fire risk, and too little, which can allow for erosion and poor soil quality.
“Our sense was that we really wouldn’t do much dramatically different,” she said about her team of experts’ conclusion.
Both sides of the thinning debate frequently point to one-off incidents, such as what happened with the Jazz Fire, to show how thinning either is or is not effective.
“You have to be careful about anecdotal information,” warned Dominick DellaSala, a renowned fire ecologist and chief scientist at the Geos Institute. “Wind speed can change, humidity levels can change, and if you don’t account for all those factors, you could conclude either way. Either the thinning helped, or the thinning didn’t help, depending on what was going on with the fire climate.”
The Geos Institute, based in Ashland, works with government agencies and landowners in applying science to climate-change planning and forest management. DellaSala has published peer-reviewed journal articles on fire ecology and climate change and has been on the faculties of Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University.
He said he develops his conclusions based on peer-reviewed science.
“The studies that have been done on this, and there have been many of them, show that if you do thinning in an appropriate way and under certain conditions, you can lower fire intensity.”
However, he continued, that comes with a “long list of caveats.”
For one, you must have average fire weather, without high winds, with lower temperatures and without low humidity – all factors that are exacerbated by climate change, potentially making thinning less effective.
“If you have average weather conditions, if you’ve done thinning so that you don’t take out too many of the big, fire resistant, overstory of trees, and you don’t open up the canopy too much, you can actually lower fire intensity. And, you have to follow it with prescribed fire,” he said. “And, you have to keep going back, because the vegetation keeps growing back. And so if you don’t continue to thin, because the vegetation is going to grow back rapidly when you open up the canopy to more sunlight, you can raise your fire hazards.”
He said that even if you put all the right management techniques in place, when you combine it with extreme fire weather, it doesn’t make much of a difference.
“We’re headed into a new fire climate era, and we cannot thin or log our way out of it,” DellaSala said.
Bell suggests policymakers and forest managers are asking the wrong question: They shouldn’t be asking how to stop fires, which are good for the forest and difficult to predict or manage. They should be asking how to protect homes.
For one, DellaSala said, we should stop building in what he calls firesheds.
“We don’t build on volcanoes, but we build in floodplains and burn plains,” he said.
He said Congress should spend its limited fire budget to work with homeowners to do defensible space management.
“The studies that are out there show that when you thin the vegetation around a radius of 50 to 64 feet, in that range, if you thin around the home, you build with fire-resistant materials, you make sure there are no branches touching the roof, your gutters are screened, your vents are screened, you don’t have any firewood on your deck, you’ve got about a 90 percent chance of that home surviving a wildfire,” he said. “Nothing you do outside that circle of influence changes the odds to that home.”
Why wildfires have increased
Politicians and loggers often blame environmental laws for overgrown public forests ripe for severe fires, but there are many other contributing factors.
“We now have the phenomenon of a human-caused fire season on top of a changing climate,” DellaSala said. “Those two variables are driving most of the change that we’re seeing in wildfire activity today.”
In a peer-reviewed paper published one year ago, scientists at Columbia University and the University of Idaho found that since the 1970s, human-caused climate change has decreased moisture in forests across the Western United States. They concluded that climate change, in addition to fire suppression, human settlement and natural climate variability, was responsible for increased fire activity in recent decades.
According to another paper, published earlier this year, researchers at the University of Colorado found that we’re now living in an age where 84 percent of wildfires are human caused. This includes fires ignited by cigarette butts, campfires, fireworks, target shooting and other human activities.
The human-caused fire season lasts two months longer than the lightning-caused fire season, DellaSala said.
In another study a decade ago, Peter Morrison, a former Forest Service employee, forest ecologist and founding director of Pacific Biodiversity Institute, determined 88 percent of wildfires were human caused.
Of those human-caused fires, Morrison found that 95 percent occurred within a half-mile of a road.
“The most effective thing the Forest Service could be doing (to prevent fires) is to limit road construction and decommission roads,” Bark’s Krochta said.
Ironically, at the site of the Jazz Fire in Mt. Hood National Forest, the roads that served as a fire break and allowed firefighters to effectively battle the blaze were the same roads that granted human access to that area of the forest – likely leading to the ignition of the fire.
While the fire’s cause is officially unknown, Groce, the Forest Service ranger, said there hadn’t been any reported lightning in the area, leading the Forest Service to believe it was human-caused.
But Groce said the Forest Service is not directed to decommission roads as a fire-prevention tactic.
“We have roads for a variety of purposes,” she said. “We have been very active in trying to right-size our transportation system, but we still need to provide public access to enjoy forests, manage forests and suppress fires. While yes, it’s true that people access the forest through our road system and sometimes start fires, that is an illegal activity.”
In what Bark considers a partial win, the Forest Service recently agreed to reduce the number of roads it was planning to build for a fuels reduction project on the eastern side of Mt. Hood National Forest, known as the Polallie Cooper timber thinning and fuels reduction area.
“It’s for fuels reduction,” Krochta said of the project, “but would have built miles and miles of roads in back country, which heightens the risk of fire.”
The decision to reduce the number of roads was part of a resolution the Forest Service reached with Bark, which has been fighting the sale since it was first introduced in 1999. Bark had successfully argued that by building more roads, the Forest Service was undermining the very objective of the project: to reduce fire risk.
Not quite ‘record-shattering’
Another point of contention among conservationists and some fire ecologists is the rhetoric commonly used in the media and by politicians around wildfires, such as words like “catastrophic,” “disastrous” and “horrific.”
While the recent fire-caused deaths in Santa Rosa were unmistakably tragic, many of the other wildfires given these labels were actually part of a healthy forest’s life cycle, DellaSala said.
The Eagle Creek Fire, for example, while seen as destructive to many Portland residents, was actually beneficial to the Columbia Gorge’s ecological health, he said.
The latest wildfire season also seemed especially apocalyptic given the extreme amount of smoke that blanketed urban areas. But DellaSala said that had more to do with the location of the fires burning than the number of acres burned. Additionally, smoke is going to be unavoidable some years when you live in a fire-prone region of the country.
Other misleading rhetoric includes calling recent fire seasons “record breaking.”
Just one of many examples was Nov. 1, when Merkley’s office announced the 11 Western senators’ letter to the president asking for fire prevention dollars. It stated the request was being made on the heels of a “record-shattering fire season.”
The only thing “record shattering” about this year’s fire season, DellaSala said, was fire suppression, or firefighting, spending. Most comparisons deeming the 2015 and 2017 fire seasons “record breaking” look only as far back as the 1980s. But in terms of fire ecology, that isn’t long enough to put recent fire seasons in proper context. DellaSala pointed to fire seasons in the early 1900s that burned 10 times as many acres as fires we’ve seen in recent years.
He said looking back 2,000 years, scientists know fire seasons are tightly correlated with droughts. Wildfires coincide with regional weather patterns that follow global climate forces, such as the recurring pattern known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. Right now, that PDO is ramping up again like it was in the early 1900s, and fires are increasing along with it.
DellaSala said we’re actually making up for a fire deficit.
“You gotta pull back and look at it on a bigger scale, both a time scale and a global scale,” he said.
“So when the delegation puts out an announcement that we’ve got catastrophic fire and all we need to do is reduce fuel hazards and everything will be OK, they are missing the link to these larger-scale processes that determine fire activity because they govern the kind of fire weather we’ll get in a particular season.”
Reasoning with Congress
DellaSala took these arguments to Washington, D.C., where he testified Sept. 27 before the House Natural Resources Committee’s oversight subcommittee.
Westerman, the chief sponsor of the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017 (H.R. 2936), chaired the committee.
Proponents of the bill, such as Oregon’s Walden, argue that it would give foresters and firefighters new tools to protect the forests, but conservationists say those tools would cripple their ability to intervene in environmentally unsound projects.
Groups such as Bark often challenge timber sales on public lands using provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act. This law mandates that the federal government conduct assessments of how a project would affect watersheds, the ecosystem and species in the project area.
This process includes opening up its analysis for public view and comment. This is the point in the process where conservationists have an opportunity to point out flaws in the plan, where the agency might have made mistakes or overlooked impacts, and then make comment and alert the public to do the same.
The Resilient Federal Forests Act would allow the government to exempt from this public process logging projects covering less than 10,000 acres – which accounts for most logging projects.
Also mixed into the fire-logging debates is the practice of salvage logging after a burn has come through, and these projects would also be exempted from environmental review under Westerman’s bill.
On Sept. 8, Walden introduced a bill to allow salvage logging in the Eagle Creek Fire area. But many conservation groups, including Friends of the Columbia River Gorge, are outraged, saying it would harm the ecosystem, not help it.
Krochta said the only objective to salvage logging is getting the trees out of a burn area while they still have monetary value. They are often weakened by a fire, which can make way for beetle infestations that ultimately kill them, making them worthless to timber companies.
But salvage logging a post-fire habitat is one of the worst things for it, he said.
“For one, driving heavy machinery on soil that’s this exposed, it really takes a while for the vegetation to come back, to stabilize it,” he said. “The kind of habitat that exists after a fire is so rare on the landscape that you really shouldn’t be messing with it. There’s way less post-fire habitat that exists on national forests than there used to be.”
He said there are species that “really specifically” rely on these areas, such as the black-backed woodpecker, whose back is black because it’s adapted to foraging on burnt tree trunks.
While thinning projects and salvage logging will not prevent another fire season like the Pacific Northwest just saw, what we’re doing about climate change can affect the frequency of such seasons, DellaSala said.
“That’s the real causative agent here,” he said. “If we don’t get our heads around doing something about reducing fossil fuel emissions, we could very well see more active fire seasons like this producing more smoke. We keep avoiding the main issue here, which is these fires are being exacerbated by a climate signal that we’re not paying attention to. Instead we’re trying to treat the symptom, rather than the cause.”
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