Let the Forest Service do its job

Star Tribune
Jul 7, 2002
Katherine Kersten

There are a number of reasons for the catastrophic wildfires now consuming huge swaths of the American West. Some are well known, while others are rarely discussed.

It's clear, of course, that the West is a fire-prone landscape. In addition, the region is in the grip of a severe drought.

The U.S. Forest Service has also contributed to the conditions behind the infernos. For roughly 80 years, the Forest Service followed a misguided policy of suppressing nearly all fires, even naturally beneficial ones. As a result, today some federally managed forests are more than 10 times denser than in the past. Many are choked with woody undergrowth and dead or diseased trees. With fuel like this, a blaze can quickly become an uncontrollable inferno.

To its credit, the Forest Service has acknowledged its mistakes and worked hard to correct them in recent years. One can't say the same of another major culprit behind today's tinderbox forests: America's environmental movement. Environmental groups like to portray themselves as saviors of the environment. Unfortunately, some have zealously promoted policies that have increased the likelihood of catastrophically destructive wildfires that sweep away wildlife, promote erosion, wreak havoc with water quality and destroy communities and livelihoods.

Beginning in the 1970s and '80s, the environmental movement helped to change public land management in two important ways. First, it championed a new, untested philosophy of forest management (or nonmanagement) that came to be known as "ecosystem management." The goal of this approach, as many groups saw it, was to return forests to their natural state and to protect the forest environment by minimizing human intervention.

Environmental groups worked to impose this new philosophy on federal land managers by using a growing array of legal and policy weapons. They challenged Forest Service efforts to improve forest conditions by initiating administrative appeals and lawsuits. And they advocated and helped to construct a labyrinthine maze of laws, regulations, directives and agency mandates -- some inconsistent -- that made it extraordinarily difficult, expensive and time-consuming for Forest Service officials to plan and execute vital projects.

In a new report entitled The Process Predicament, the Forest Service describes the way these policies have undermined its ability to carry out its mission (http://www.fs.fed.us/projects/index.shtml). The report documents what Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth has called his agency's "analysis paralysis." Today, approximately 40 percent of Forest Service work at the national level involves planning and assessment -- i.e., preparing studies, completing paperwork, consulting with numerous groups and agencies and anticipating lawsuits. Projects aimed at averting catastrophic fires may take years to move forward. They include activities like thinning forests, removing dying or diseased trees, creating fire breaks and setting controlled burns.

Two examples illustrate today's regulatory and legal quagmire. In 1995, a severe storm devastated Six Rivers National Forest in California, leaving 35,000 acres of downed trees in its wake. For three years, the Forest Service strove to remove the perilously high fuel load. But environmental groups and policy requirements stymied the agency's efforts, and eventually only 1,600 acres were treated. In 1999, nature would no longer wait. Massive fires swept through the untreated land and 90,000 additional acres.

Today, officials in Santa Fe, N.M., face a similar scenario. They want to thin the forest on part of the city's 17,000 acre watershed, which is overgrown with thousands of small, tinder-dry trees. After years of planning, an agreement was reached and work was finally begun. But an environmental coalition recently threatened to sue, citing concerns about the Mexican spotted owl. Mayor Larry Delgado says that if a suit delays thinning and fire results, he will lay the consequences at the coalition's feet.

Some environmental groups do support responsible land treatment and prescribed burns. At times, however, local chapters of national groups may reach an agreement with the Forest Service only to find that their national office balks at giving support. Some environmental groups resist much-needed projects because they reflexively tend to view most intervention as a thinly disguised effort to advance the interests of the timber industry.

But Big Timber isn't the boogeyman that environmental groups sometimes claim. Since the 1980s, logging in federal forests has fallen 85 percent, and now accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. timber production. Increasingly, large timber companies are harvesting trees on their own tracts of land, many of which are in the South, not the West. Ironically, some big lumber companies favor closing certain federal forests to logging, to raise the value of their own timber.

The Forest Service is trying to do its job. We must reform federal laws and policies to give it the tools it needs. And we must call environmental groups to account when they stand in the way of responsible federal land management.