Posted on 06/17/2003 2:45:40 PM PDT by EBUCK
"And now, let the wild rumpus start."
- Max, the boy-king,
in "Where the Wild Things Are"
In the summer of 2000, the call came from Montana.
"Help!"
Wildfires blackened entire watersheds in the Bitterroot Valley. Day turned to night in Darby and Missoula, so thick was the smoke. Subdivisions outside the state capital were evacuated; homes burned to their foundations.
Congress responded with the National Fire Plan, a $1 billion effort to both improve the nation's wildland firefighting capability and reduce the danger of future fires.
Pretty soon, though, most everyone outside of Montana had forgotten the fires of 2000.
Then came the summer of 2002. This time, the calls for help came from Colorado, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. This time, millions of people in Denver and Phoenix looked up and saw ash falling from the sky.
"It was one thing when Missoula was choking back in 2000, but once smoke started pouring into Denver and Phoenix, that really got people's attention," said Todd O'Hair, natural resource policy adviser to Montana Gov. Judy Martz. "Overwhelmingly, people have said that what they saw last summer was unacceptable."
Which is why there will be standing room only this week when the Western Governors' Association comes to Missoula for a Forest Health Summit. Nearly 400 people have paid the $150 registration fee; dozens more hope to, if organizers can squeeze more seats into the meeting room.
"Now all these other states have smelled the smoke and felt the effects of these horrendous fires," Martz said in a telephone interview last week. "Everyone knows the problem. Now we've got to find some solutions that we can all agree upon. We all have to come to the table and give up something, because the forests have already given up more than anything."
As chairwoman of the Western Governors' Association, Martz made forest health and the growing wildfire danger her top priority. At this week's summit, she'll be joined by another governor - Arizona's newly elected Gov. Janet Napolitano - who shares that sense of urgency.
"Last summer was a horrible example of what can happen if we don't address the forest health issue," said Lori Faeth, Napolitano's policy adviser for natural resources. "Unfortunately, it provided an opportunity for Arizona to learn a lot of lessons the hard way. We were blessed in that we didn't lose a single life, and for that we are thankful. But now something needs to happen so we can protect our forests."
In one fire alone, Arizona lost 460,000 acres of timber, Faeth said. Now 800,000 acres are infested with bark beetles. Napolitano has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency assistance funds. FEMA's reply: "Call us when something's on fire."
"Our message is that the emergency is already here. We've already got a disaster," Faeth said. "The forest health crisis is every bit as disastrous as when a tornado rips through a Southern state. It's the same level of emergency. Lives are at risk."
A Democrat, Napolitano will begin work at this week's summit as the new co-lead governor on the wildfire and forest health issue. She'll join Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican, in that effort.
Both Idaho and Arizona have adopted statewide forest health and wildfire preparedness plans, and are at work assessing forests and designing projects. In Arizona, the problem isn't in gaining approval for forest-thinning projects, but in finding the money needed for implementation, Faeth said.
"We have at least 50,000 acres in the wildland-urban interface where we've got approval for fuel reduction, but no money allocated for implementation," she said. "It's very frustrating. It will cost a lot less to take these preventive measures than it would to pay for the aftermath of a fire or to lose a life."
Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado also have lost the infrastructure needed to implement fuel-reduction projects, O'Hair said. They have no sawmills, or too few to handle the expected volume of timber. Everything they cut must be shipped out of state.
On Wednesday, the governors will tour several successful forest management projects in western Montana - at Lubrecht Experimental Forest, the Big Larch Campground and in the upper Clearwater drainage. On Thursday, they'll turn to talk of specific problems and possible solutions.
Along the way, they'll get an earful from the timber industry, environmentalists, federal land managers, community leaders and wildland firefighters. For months, there have been rumors of possible civil disobedience by radical environmental groups. At the least, there'll be dueling press conferences and field trips.
On Monday night, the Sierra Club and the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests will sponsor a panel discussion on how best to protect communities from wildfire, featuring a scientist from the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab in Missoula; the mayor of Roslyn, Wash.; a fire marshal from Kittitas County, Wash.; and the director of a forest restoration project in Oregon.
"I certainly don't think there is a forest health crisis," said Mike Bader, an environmental consultant working for the Sierra Club on the wildfire issue. "Our concern is that people are using the threat of wildfire to justify logging the backcountry. There's this broad, one-size-fits-all approach that way overreaches the truth."
The Sierra Club's fear is that the Governors' Association summit will be used as a platform by the Bush administration to push a forest management agenda that goes too far, Bader said. "The administration's emphasis is on waiving environmental safeguards and ramping up what is really just logging - simple, old-fashioned logging."
On Tuesday, the Native Forest Network and Friends of the Bitterroot will sponsor a field trip for media in town for the governors' summit to the Bitterroot National Forest - for what they hope will be an antidote to the successful project summit-goers will see Wednesday on the Lolo National Forest.
"Our field trip will clearly show that logging on the Bitterroot is systematically targeting the largest, most commercially valuable trees, while leaving the smallest trees and logging slash scattered on the forest floor," said the Native Forest Network's Matthew Koehler. "They are actually increasing the fire risk."
Missoula's diversity of loggers, environmentalists, scientists and government agencies was actually the reason why Martz chose to host the forest health summit, O'Hair said. "Missoula has it all. This is where the debate is, so this is where we wanted to be."
"There is a level of rhetoric, though, that is too high," he added. "Our goal will be to lower the noise a few notches. You can talk it to death, you can throw stones at each other, but you'll still have a problem at the end of the day.
"We want to end the week with a few solutions. We want people to leave feeling like they've learned something or that they better understand where their adversaries are coming from. The discussion could get pretty spirited, but that's good if we all walk away educated."
If you're interested
The Sierra Club and the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests will host a panel discussion, "Close to Home: Protecting Communities from Wildfire," at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Holiday Inn Parkside in Missoula. The program is free and open to the public.
Featured speakers include Jack Cohen, research physical scientist, Forest Service Fire Science Lab, Missoula; Ron Wakimoto, fire ecologist, UM; David Gerth, mayor, Roslyn, Wash.; Derald Gaidos, fire marshal, Kittitas County, Wash.; and Oshana Catranides, executive director, Lomakatsi Restoration Project, Ashland, Ore.
In one fire alone, Arizona lost 460,000 acres of timber, Faeth said. Now 800,000 acres are infested with bark beetles. Napolitano has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency assistance funds. FEMA's reply: "Call us when something's on fire."
Ya know, I seem to remember a rare breed of person especially suited to the task of forest clean-up....they were called LOGGERS you friggin dolt!
ROFL!!!...
But, seriously...When it comes to commercial timberland, I suppose loggers are the primary custodians of the forests. We just returned from a vacation to Yellowstone. There is still evidence of the massive fires that swept through about 2/3 of the park in 1988 -- fallen/burnt logs everywhere, but also the scarred land is littered with new pine trees, measuring any where from 6- to-10-feet high. What we were told there was that after the fire, biologists found that the diversity of plant and animal life in the burned-forest increases 3-fold. Fires add nutrients to the soil. It also clears out a forest and permits other kinds of trees to take root their (prior to the fire, Yellowstone was dominated by Lodgepoll Pines -- boring monotony of Lodgepoll Pines; now other trees have taken root). So the biologists are concluding that while man-made structures in the parks need to be protected from fire, the forest itself is benefitted by an occasional "cleansing" firestorm.
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
You and I need to talk.
No, the concept of National Parks it to allow the Fed to hold land as collateral against the national debt. Everything else is just gravy.
It's a nice concept (and is certainly popular), but it doesn't work. People do love to enjoy things for which they feel no accountability, however, you need to learn more about the reality of their condition and history before you conclude that laissez faire is a rational plan. Nature needs care and maintenance, especially when the boundary conditions have changed.
I've been doing habitat managent and restoration for over fourteen years. It's both expensive and physically and intellectually demanding work. A healthy habitat doesn't come for free.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.