August 19, 2009
The Forest Service seems to be learning some lessons from the fire season of 2008--but it's also reverting to the fire suppression policies which have caused so many problems.
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In some respects, the agency clearly considers the suppression effort to have been a success. However, the tragic death of firefighter Thomas (TJ) Marovich, who fell some 200 feet from a helicopter during a rappelling training exercise on July 21, along with a previous helicopter crash which wrecked a Sikorsky chopper, illuminate one aspect of the risks inherent in the Forest Service's approach to fire management--the danger to firefighters themselves inherent in a highly mechanized fire-suppression program. During the 2008 fires, a Sikorsky helicopter crashed in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, killing nine firefighters in one of the Forest Service's worst fire-related incidents ever.
Similarly, against the backdrop of the long struggle to reform the Forest Service's fire-suppression policies and practices, the agency's handling of the Backbone fire shows both some promising signs of lessons learned from the 2008 fires, and some troubling indications of a reversion to failed policies.
For at least the last half of the 20th century, the Forest Service implemented a policy of fire suppression familiar to everyone who has ever heard of Smokey Bear: fires are bad, put them out. While the policy made a certain kind of sense from a narrow perspective of forestry--the kind that focuses on the potential economic value of wood to the exclusion of other forest values--it ultimately proved both destructive and self-defeating. Where lightning strikes in forests with a history of frequent fire were once easy to extinguish, over the decades the very success of fire suppression has meant that the only fires that do burn are those too large and hot to put out.
Meanwhile, both scientists and the public have come to understand that fire, including high-intensity fire, is a fundamental ecological process essential to the long-term health of the forest ecosystem. Additionally, increasing concerns have focused on some of the environmental effects of standard fire-fighting practices, including the use of fire retardant, which has damaged streams and fish.
Fire is a Critically Important Process in our Forest Ecosystems
Backbone is re-burning the landscape of the 1999 Megram fire, including some areas outside the wilderness area which were the battleground in a series of three hotly contested, but ultimately successful challenges by EPIC to attempts by the US Forest Service to `salvage' log following the Megram fire.
Ironically, as the Backbone fire was growing, a crew of botanists was visiting the Megram fire area, looking for populations of the California globemallow (Iliamna latibracteata), a rare and beautiful plant that follows fire across the landscape, and seems to be the only host for an even rarer native bee. The relationship between the rare plant, its pollinator, and fire highlights one of the key reasons that EPIC and allied groups strongly oppose `salvage' logging in most circumstances: in practice, post-fire logging tends to disrupt critically important ecological processes of succession. When combined with the detrimental effects on soils, water quality, and wildlife habitat, post-fire logging clearly creates substantial environmental impacts well beyond those of the fire itself. Nonetheless, the Forest Service continues to downplay these impacts, routinely attempting to log burned areas under `categorical exclusions' which claim no impact to the environment. Adding insult to injury, the agency often describes its efforts to log burned forests and establish new plantations in their place as `restoration.'
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The Harsh Lessons of 2008
An unusual early-season lightning storm in June 2008 ignited literally thousands of fires across NW California. The Forest Service responded with an enormous, and incredibly expensive, mobilization of fire-fighting equipment and personnel. In the rush to fight so many large fires, a number of serious missteps occurred: in addition to the disastrous Sikorsky crash, there were other deaths of firefighters. Also, key tribal cultural resources, community-protection projects (like shaded fuelbreaks), and natural resources like old-growth trees and wilderness areas were damaged or destroyed by unnecessary fire-suppression practices. In the Hayfork Divide area, hundreds of miles of dozer line now scar the ridges from streamside to mountain-top.
The practice of fighting wildfires with `burnouts'--deliberate, very hot fires in advance of wildfire's path--harmed private lands and property, damaged public resources, and appears to have contributed to heavy smoke, which became a key focus of complaints from the population of the remote Klamath basin communities. One set of burnouts in the Siskiyou Wilderness, as well as associated pre-emptive falling of old-growth trees and snags, became another flashpoint for critics.
All of these issues, and others, were dissected when EPIC and Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center convened at a summit in Orleans in February of 2009 to review the 2008 experiences. Among the key recommendations to emerge from that review were suggestions that the Forest Service implement a management structure that would provide reliable relationships with tribal resource officers and community representatives, and consistent guidance to firefighters, throughout a given fire `incident,' rather than rotating command crews every few weeks.
Does Better Communication = Better Management?
The Forest Service's approach to the Backbone fire does seem to hint at significant changes in the agency's approach. Perhaps the most significant is that the Backbone fire has been managed by a new kind of team--a NIMO, or national incident management organization--which will remain in place `for the duration.' Hoopa, Karuk, and local fire-safe community contacts confirm that their coordination with the Forest Service has been better over Backbone than it was during the 2008 fires. Of course, both the smaller scale and the relatively low intensity of much of the Backbone fire make it easier both to coordinate and to employ lower-impact suppression methods.
While the agency is demonstrating increased responsiveness to community representatives, that doesn't always result in clear benefits from a resource-protection point of view. Among the loudest, best-organized group of local voices are retired Forest Service firefighters, who, together with some very pro-timber industry county commissioners, have been pressing the agency to return to full-tilt fire suppression as the goal of fire management.
One of the most difficult set of policy challenges has to do with the health impacts of smoke produced by wildfire. Indeed, the history of fire suppression in the region has helped to create an expectation--unprecedented in the long history of human habitation of the Klamath region--that summers can be smoke-free. To the extent that the Forest Service responds to calls to return to full suppression, it risks perpetuating practices that now consume nearly half of the agency's overall budget, while also exacerbating the ecological impacts of fire exclusion.
Should the Forest Service Even be Suppressing Fires in Wilderness?
The fact that the Backbone fire burned mostly within the Trinity Alps wilderness area throws these questions of fire suppression into particularly sharp relief. While it is impossible to argue that fire managers should not be concerned with the potential risk to human communities, including Denny on the south, the Hoopa reservation on the west, and the Salmon River communities at risk from extremely high fuel loads to the north of the Backbone fire area, the attempt to extinguish a fundamentally natural fire in a wilderness area is sharply at odds with the Forest Service's mandate to protect both natural communities and natural processes in these last large outposts of relatively intact public forest.
For more information: *wildcalifornia.org*
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TOC for Forest & River News, Summer 2009