-Burning Agenda- The worst fire season in memory is being used for political purposes.

'All environmental laws, standards and guidelines, regulations, conservation strategies are suspended during fire-suppression incidents.' – Tim Ingalsbee

On the afternoon of Aug. 1, Nancy Lyford and her husband, Gordon, heard on their scanner that the bulldozers were coming.

The couple left their home in the southern Oregon town of O'Brien to watch the fire crews gouge out a new fire road across their neighbor's meadow and their own. The gouge was intended as a last line of defense against a growing wildfire. If the fire line at the top of the mountain didn't stop the flames, and if efforts to burn the back of the mountain didn't help, the crews would burn up the hill from their meadow to try to save their home.

"I was just crying watching them do this," Lyford says. "Just one bulldozer and then another bulldozer and then another ATV… We have a very, very old road that you can see … but they didn't even use that, they went smack through the middle of the meadow."

The Lyfords' home is in one of Oregon's richest ecological regions. Because glaciers never covered the area, there are plants there that exist nowhere else on earth. On the edge of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, near a Forest Service botanical area and a Bureau of Land Management "area of critical environmental concern," the Lyford's 40 acres itself boasts some unique treasures.

For instance, the area's garden club had been active for 50 years or so, keeping an eye out for rare plants. "They have a list of 11 or 12 that they've never been able to find," she explains, including a rare senecio. "And we had a huge patch of these on the mountain on my land."

Someone once told her that silky balsam root could be found on only 400 acres anywhere in the world. "That's hard to believe because I've got a lot of it on my property," she says, "but maybe I'm part of the 400 acres."

Usually, people are very careful of these treasures, even in emergencies. "When we had a fire here before we had a geologist and botanist walking in front of the bulldozer," she says.

Admittedly, it's a crazy fire year, even in the hot, dry Siskiyous. The fire that led crews across Lyford's meadow started seven miles from her home. It was the Sour Biscuit fire, merged with the Florence fire, and then changed its name to the Biscuit fire after residents of the distant coastal town complained.

The 9,000-acre Warner Creek fire east of Oakridge 10 years ago is a patchwork today of greenery, ashes and snags. "I really do appreciate everything (the fire crews have) done," Lyford says. "This thing is outrageous, it's 340,000 acres now. And they've still got backfires to set, so it's going to be bigger by the time it ends."

But the gouge through the rare plants in her meadow could have waited, the neighbors could have been given notice. "And as it turns out … if everything goes as it's been going, it didn't have to be done at all."

The summer of 2002 is the worst wildfire season, during the worst drought, in recent memory. According to The Washington Post, the agency is spending more than $11.5 million each day fighting the fires, and expects to spend $1 billion before the season is through. As of mid August — halfway through the fire season — 54,633 fires have burned or continue to burn on nearly five million acres of mostly public lands around the country. In the 1990, on average, 56,552 fires per year burned about 2.3 million acres. At the fire season's mid point, the burned acreages are already double what was the average for a full year.

But those numbers are misleading, as is most of the reporting and much of the chest thumping. As the West started burning, the politics in damp and distant D.C. over Western forests also ignited. The likely outcome of this fire season — the worst in recent memory but by no means the worst since the Forest Service began suppressing all fires 100 years ago — is federal legislation that will speed the fall of old, fire-resistant trees without even a nod to environmental concerns.

Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth seized on the issue early, when fires in Colorado and Arizona just started to burn. Since he took his office, the new chief had argued that "analysis paralysis" was hampering the agency's tree-cutting mission. The conflagrations lit up his message.

"What's new is he's now claiming analysis paralysis prevented the Forest Service from stopping these fires," explains Andy Stahl, director of the Eugene-based Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "He's trying to use these fires in the media and turn that as a sword to use against the environmental laws and deflect blame from the Forest Service itself."

Bosworth and his boss, Mark Rey, charge that appeals and litigation impede the agency's efforts to thin fire-prone forests and prevent these wildfires.

Stahl says Bosworth argued that "these fires are in fact a direct result of analysis paralysis, a direct result of environmental laws, and not, for example, the fault of Smokey Bear for putting out fires for 100 years as every ecologist knows." That century of fire suppression left forests thick with highly flammable brush, tree limbs and seedlings.

Environmentalists responded with a 2001 General Accounting Office analysis undercutting the agency's assertion. The study considered 1,671 Forest Service projects intended to reduce the hot-burning fuels; the GAO identified those projects by looking at the list under the $205 million budgeted specifically for such "fuels reduction." Only two of those projects were appealed, and none went to court.

The Forest Service rallied fast with its own report to Congress on July 10, considering 326 "mechanical fuel treatment projects" — shorthand for efforts that involve chainsaws rather than prescribed burning, and that often involve commercial sale of merchantable timber. Of that number, offered between 2000 and 2001, 48 percent were appealed by environmental groups and 6 percent went to court.

Initially, the report did not identify the individual projects. On Aug. 2, Bosworth submitted a list of the appealed projects only, saying that the information was dispersed and that the fires slowed the compilation. (All of the appealed projects in Oregon were in the southern or eastern parts of the state.)

Environmentalists say the two reports don't conflict. The GAO report supports their contention that legitimate projects are left alone; timber sales wrapped in the fire suppression flag — which they say comprise the second, smaller list the Forest Service used — are stopped or altered.

Fire has always been part of the agency's mission. What's new is the mushrooming costs of fire fighting. Critics sees the current situation as evidence that the agency wants two things: to log at any cost and get as much money from Congress as possible.

Libertarian economist Randal O'Toole, of the Bandon-based Thoreau Institute, is best known for book on the economic incentives that drive federal logging, Reforming the Forest Service. Late last month, he released a new report, also on economic incentives: Reforming the Fire Service.

The crux of his argument is this: For decades, the structure of Forest Service provided economic incentives to cut as much timber as possible. When timber receipts plummeted in the 1990s, the agency had to find a way to support a staff that had built up during the boom years.

"The decline in the national forest timber sale program, which paid for much of the Forest Service's overhead, led the agency to search for a new mission that could keep it fully funded," O'Toole writes. "Fire turned out to be that mission."

Generally speaking, Congress for years has been giving the Forest Service the same amount of money for fighting fires. (Appropriations have actually fallen over the past couple of years, from $510 million in 2000 to $321 in 2002, according to the Forest Service.)

Historically, Congress gave the agency a blank check for wildfires. That changed in the 1970s, but in recent years wildfire fighting has inexorably led to emergency appropriations. That de facto blank check, O'Toole argues, provides incentive to fight fires in the biggest, most expensive way possible. Citing agency figures, O'Toole found that Forest Service budgets — including emergency appropriations — increased six-fold between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, from $415 million to $1.8 billion.

To Patti Rodgers at the Willamette National Forest, O'Toole's arguments about her agency's motivations don't make much sense.

"Given the number of acres burned so far, the money that was appropriated for fire fighting in this agency has run out," she says. "We're not getting more. We're not going to stop fighting fire. What we're stopping is any noncritical spending."

"It means I can't go out and purchase a box of pens. Literally. It has to be health and safety related. It has to be something already obligated," like payment on an existing contract. In nearly 30 years with the agency, Rodgers says, "I don't recall ever being in the situation where we've shut down all noncritical spending."

O'Toole would argue that Congress will make sure the Forest Service gets its money back, but Rodgers isn't so sure. "We don't know," she says. "There's no indication that we will."

Chris West, of the American Forest Resources Council, a Portland-based industry group, thinks O'Toole's argument goes too far.

"I'm not that cynical," he says. "I do believe there have been philosophical shifts in the Forest Service because of social and political pressure." Fighting fire has been a significant part of the Forest Service's mission since its inception. "It's just that the forests today are in a condition that's making it a bigger deal. I'm not so cynical to say that the powers that be in the agency are focused on capturing the money. I think that it's been political and social situations that have led them down this path and they're being responsive to those."

According to fire historians, Americans have grown more fearful of fire as the population moved to cities and away from areas where fire was the norm. O'Toole and others argue that this fear, along with the threat of built-up fuels after a century of fire suppression, now provides political cover for anything that can in any way be tied to preventing fires from getting out of control. On the ground this translates into practices that can be harmful to the environmental values many of those same urbanites want to protect.

Stahl, of FSEEE, says fighting fires leads to bigger ones in the future. Further, he says, fighting forest fires can do more harm than the fire alone would have. For instance, many of the chemicals the agencies now use include toxins like cyanide. The bulldozers can harm fragile soils and vegetation, as in Nancy Lyford's meadow. Fire camps, housing hundreds of firefighters, also have an impact on the land.

"Although fire fighting is the single biggest activity the Forest Service engages in today — far surpassing logging — the Forest Service has never done an environmental impact statement on fire fighting, anywhere in the nation," Stahl says. The Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service do prepare such analyses, he says.

Tim Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology Center in Eugene, says most Forest Service fire fighting happens outside of environmental laws.

"All environmental laws, standards and guidelines, regulations, conservation strategies are suspended during fire-suppression incidents," he says. "So the agency is completely fiscally and environmentally unaccountable. That's a fact. It answers to nobody. Not to Congress or the courts or the American people."

Since the 1940s, overall deaths related to fire fighting have quadrupled nationwide. But, O'Toole reports, that entire increase is attributable to changes in tactics and the fire-fighting work force. Deaths from fire on the ground have stayed flat for decades, hovering between 38 over the course of the 1940s and 65 over the course of the 1950s. In the 1990s, 54 firefighters died on the ground. The increase, he reports, comes entirely from vehicle collisions and rollovers, aircraft accidents, and health issues such as pneumonia and heart attacks.

Stahl summarizes: "As we've changed to more expensive tactics, we're killing more people."

Similarly, O'Toole finds that fire threats to homes near wildlands are overstated. In 2000, despite tremendous growth of homes near forests, houses across the nation were 50 times more likely to burn for reasons other than wildfire, he says.

Most of the homes that wildfires do burn are in California — 90 percent, for instance, in 1999. Of the fuels-reduction projects the Forest Service says environmentalists slowed or stopped in the past two years, only about a quarter are even in California. Most of the agency's efforts, environmentalists say, is directed far from homes and close to marketable timber.

"It depends on what you're measuring. Worst in terms of cost? Yes, this may be the worst fire season in history in terms of cost. Worst in terms of acres burned? Definitely not. More acres burned at the turn of the century than have burned now. In terms of severity, not certain. That's something the press has hyped, but we won't know what the effects of this fire season are until maybe the fires are out."

Patti Rodgers of the Forest Service says it's naïve to look back that far in history to get a sense of scale.

"We have been … suppressing fires like crazy" since the 1950s, she says. "We have more sophisticated fire-fighting tools. We also have more political pressure on how and where we fight fire. We have more structures around and within these areas that any of these agencies serve. I don't know that looking at 20 years ago gives us a very informed comparison "

"To say that it's a historic year for fires may not have any meaning, either," she continues. "But I can look at these numbers and say over the past 10 years on average we've had 2.3 million acres burns. And this year, midway through the fire season, we're almost at five million acres."

Even that five million acres is not what it seems. Some percentage — environmentalists and industry disagree on how much — is scrub or grassland. Some could be unmaintained fire breaks that have grown up into flammable shrubs, or old clearcuts with tiny trees. A great deal of it is likely the backburning firefighters do to help stop the fire. For instance, about one third of the total acreage burned at Warner Creek in the Willamette National Forest a decade ago was actually lit by firefighters in an effort to stop the blaze.

"These fires are not growing so large and spreading so fast overnight due to weather and fuel alone," Ingalsbee says. "They are the result of intentional acts, planned by the fire bosses."

These backburns are a sort of prescribed burning done in reaction to wildfire at the hottest and most dangerous time of the year. "The no-fire option is not an option," he says. "The two choices are prescribed fire or wildfire."

It was a Democrat who lit the torches this year for the inevitable efforts to "expedite" efforts to prevent fires in the future. Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota tried to sneak through legislation suspending environmental laws to allow thinning on 8,000 acres of the fire-prone Black Hills National Forest. Congressional Republicans at first were outraged, but quickly followed suit. When Congress convenes next month, lawmakers will consider bills in the name of fire prevention that override not only laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, but also the Wilderness Act of 1964, the highest form of protection on public lands.

Such an effort is hardly news to the Pacific Northwest. After fires in 1994 killed more than a dozen Oregon firefighters in Colorado, Congress responded with what came to be known as the Salvage Rider. That law not only exempted logging burned trees from environmental and other laws, but included provisions to release sales in green and old-growth forests stalled by lawsuits and imperiled species.

Chris West, of AFRC, says he supports language like Daschle's, applied only to projects that reduce fuel loads, not to salvage and restoration projects.

"I think that there needs to be a way that projects to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in high-risk areas adjacent to communities and private lands … can actually be accomplished on the ground," he says. "And if that's streamlining process or changing the law to allow expedited procedures and review, that's for the politicians to work out. But the situation today where a group can be play obstructionist because they don't want to see trees cut has got to end."

Ingalsbee says that logging doesn't work. The huge fire near Show Low, Ariz., roared across the cut-over landscape, he says. By contrast, he says, intact forests are much less susceptible to wildfire, especially in the Northwest.

Nancy Lyford, living in the fire zone and therefore one of the potential beneficiaries of efforts that would actually reduce future fires, doesn't approve of the likely new laws.

"I don't like it," she says. "I don't like it because I sat and I watched when Sen. Wyden was here and people were talking about thinning the forest by going in and cutting all trees over 12 inches. We've been thinning our forest. You thin the little trees and the underbrush. You leave the big trees. The big trees don't burn. So they've got the whole thing backwards.

This environmentalist (Nancy Lyford) has it all backwards. Her land management will result in the death of the entire forest.

"I don't like it," she says. "I don't like it because I sat and I watched when Sen. Wyden was here and people were talking about thinning the forest by going in and cutting all trees over 12 inches. We've been thinning our forest. You thin the little trees and the underbrush. You leave the big trees. The big trees don't burn. So they've got the whole thing backwards."

The basic principle of sustainable forestry is to thin the big trees, allowing the next generation to take their place. Imagine a distribution curve of trees with numbers on the y axis and age on the x axis. You take the trees on the right hand side and the curve fills in of its own. Even the demographics of the forest are unchanged.

This woman wants to truncate the left hand side of the curve. This is an abomination. What happens when the right hand side of the curve dies from natural causes and old age? Where's your forest then? You might as well create a clear-cut firebreak. Her strategy is akin to culling the calves in your herd because you want to keep viewing the magnificent adults. I never thought to live to see the day when the abortion theory would be applied to timber management.

If you are just thinning, you want to leave large, healthy trees and to take those not in the best shape.

The practice of taking the best is called "high grading." It is a practice that has helped cause disease and insect infestations in the Eastern oregon and Washington forests.

Thinning for fire and logging are not mutually exclusive, but they are definately two different things.

It's past time to repeal and remove the EPA and the ESA !!

Timber is a renewable resource; let's hear the wonderful wail of chainsaws, now !!

Stop the attacks by the wacko, extreme left-wing, lunatic fringe, dirt worshipping Green Jihadist, enviro-nazis terrorist's and their toadies in the media, on our Freedoms !!

Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!

Molon Labe !!

When you take up that "later reading" try to forget that I lost lunch at "When we had a fire here before we had a geologist and botanist walking in front of the bulldozer," and it failed to get any better.

The number of gag inducing quotes in this article is astronomical.

Suffice to say that local tree huggers are complaining heroically about the efforts of anyone, anyone at all, attempting to save their sorry asses.

Suffice that no matter how big the disaster, the left will find a way to blame anyone not in total agreement with their fantasies.

Suffice it to say I hope you get through to the end of the diatribe.

Here is a candid picture of your typical Hug a Tree and never allow any logging Green Toadie.

Just imagine that behind him is/was the former Kalmiopsis Wilderness that will have burnt for months thanks to his and other al Qaeda Greens in Oregon:

This is the end goal of the hug a tree al Qaeda Green Thugs who call themselves friends of the forest. With friends like this, every forest/wilderness is doomed in our life time.

Hey Ebuck, please post the special Grampa Dave award for this thread/article. It is a real stinker!

The basic idea is to thin the forest by removing the underbrush and SOME of the smaller trees,not all of them. This would be with a basic intention of keeping the forest of an uneven aged stand,and reducing small ladder fuels that create prime conditions for fire.I have fought wildland fires and have seen the results of build-up of small fuels. The problem with cutting all the big trees down at the same time and continuing to do so repeatedly is we know how to cut them down a lot faster than they can grow,belive me,I've cut down a lot of trees in my time.Also the Forest service does not have the money to thin all the plantations with small young trees where fires really get hot quickly,as the trees grow too closely together. So by creating a situation where there are all ages of trees in a stand,we mimic natures processes and always have all sizes of trees on hand for all uses,be it studs,beams,pulp,poles,etc. The big trees,especially Douglas Fir,are quite resistant to fire,due to their thick bark(pound for pound more fire resistant than asbestos).

"So by creating a situation where there are all ages of trees in a stand,we mimic natures processes and always have all sizes of trees on hand for all uses,be it studs,beams,pulp,poles,etc.

This is all very well if you have got a proper forest inventory. Maybe they do in these areas. But it seems to me that to carry out your scheme, which souinds pretty good in theory, one must engage in some pretty good marking based on a sound inventory, and this costs. Getting the timber and fuel out without heavy skidding may cost, too. If you are going to put in the cables to get this stuff out without a log of dragging, then the money has got to come from somewhere.

I may be wrong on this score, but the only way to sustainably carry out thinning without dipping into government money is to use the proceeds of the merchantable trees.

Well it sure would be nice if the money could come from somewhere so we could get everybody back to work in the woods. I had to stop working in the woods after the contracts started to dry up,and I know alot of other folks who had to take up other means of supporting themselves too who would like to be doing something out there. Sure doing the inventorys costs money,but It might be worth it to make sure all we end up with isn't 2 1/2 ft. tall trees to mill in 20 yrs. Timber sale units have to be inventoried,whether they are young or older trees,they have to be marked and measured.

The Lyfords' home is in one of Oregon's richest ecological regions. Because glaciers never covered the area, there are plants there that exist nowhere else on earth.

Interesting that she isn't moved to tears over the bulldozing that went into building the house she is so fond of. Like they say:

An environmentalist is someone who built their cabin in the woods last year. A developer is someone who wants to build one this year.

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