New DOI and DOA policy to cut overgrown, diseased, dead and burned trees is long overdue
Paul Driessen
President Trump promised to bring fresh ideas and policies to Washington. Now Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue are doing exactly that in a critically important area: forest management and conflagration prevention. Their actions are informed, courageous and long overdue.
Westerners are delighted, and I’ve advocated such reforms since my days on Capitol Hill in the 1980s.
As of September 12, amid this typically long, hot, dry summer out West, 62 major forest fires are burning in nine states, the National Interagency Fire Center reports. The Interior Department and Ag Department’s Forest Service have already spent over $2 billion fighting them. That’s about what they spent in all of 2015, previously the most costly wildfire season ever, and this season has another month or more to go. The states themselves have spent hundreds of millions more battling these conflagrations.
Millions of acres of forest have disappeared in smoke and flames – 1.1 million in Montana alone. All told, acreage larger than New Jersey has burned already. However, even this hides the real tragedies.
The infernos exterminate wildlife habitats, roast eagle and spotted owl fledglings alive in their nests, immolate wildlife that can’t run fast enough, leave surviving animals to starve for lack of food, and incinerate organic matter and nearly every living creature in the thin soils. They turn trout streams into fish boils, minus the veggies and seasonings. Future downpours and rapid snowmelts bring widespread soil erosion into streambeds. Many areas will not grow trees or recover their biodiversity for decades.
Most horrifically, the conflagrations threaten homes and entire communities. They kill fire fighters and families that cannot get away quickly enough, or get trapped by sudden walls of flames.
In 2012, two huge fires near Fort Collins and Colorado Springs, Colorado burned 610 homes, leaving little more than ashes, chimneys and memories. Tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated through smoke and ash that turned daytime into choking night skies. Four people died. A 1994 fire near Glenwood Springs, CO burned 14 young firefighters to death.
These are not “natural” fires of environmentalist lore, or “ordinary” fires like those that occur in state and privately owned and managed forests. Endless layers of laws, regulations, judicial decrees and guidelines for Interior and Forest Service lands have meant that most western forests have been managed like our 109 million acres of designated wilderness: they are hardly managed at all.
Environmentalists abhor timber cutting on federal lands, especially if trees might feed profit-making sawmills. They would rather see trees burn, than let someone cut them. They constantly file lawsuits to block any cutting, and too many judges are all too happy to support their radical ideas and policies.
Thus, even selective cutting to thin dense stands of timber, or remove trees killed by beetles or fires, is rarely permitted. Even fire fighting and suppression are often allowed only if a fire was clearly caused by arson, careless campers or other human action – but not if lightning ignited it. Then it’s allowed to burn, until a raging inferno is roaring over a ridge toward a rural or suburban community.
The result is easy to predict. Thousands of thin trees grow on acreage that should support just a few hundred full-sized mature trees. Tens of billions of these scrawny trees mix with 6.3 billion dead trees that the Forest Service says still stand in eleven western states. Vast forests are little more than big trees amid closely bunched matchsticks and underbrush, drying out in hot, dry western summers and droughts – waiting for lightning bolts, sparks, untended campfires or arsonists to start super-heated conflagrations.
Flames in average fires along managed forest floors might reach several feet in height and temperatures of 1,472° F (800° C), says Wildfire Today. But under extreme conditions of high winds and western tinderboxes, temperatures can exceed 2,192° F (1200° C), flame heights can reach 165 feet (50 meters) or more, and fires can generate a critter-roasting 100,000 kilowatts per meter of fire front. Wood will burst into flame at 572° F. Aluminum melts at 1,220 degrees, silver at 1,762 and gold at 1,948° F!
Most of this heat goes upward, but super-high temperatures incinerate soil organisms and organic matter in thin western soils that afterward can support only stunted, spindly trees for decades.
These fires also emit prodigious quantities of carbon dioxide, fine particulates and other pollutants – including mercury, which is absorbed by tree roots from rocks and soils that contain this metal, and then lofted into the sky when the trees burn.
Rabid greens ignore these hard realities – and divert discussions back to their favorite ideological talking points. The problem isn’t too many trees, they insist. It’s global warming and climate change. That’s why western states are having droughts, long fire seasons, and high winds that send flames past fire breaks.
Global warming, global cooling and climate change have been part of the Earth and human experience from time immemorial. Natural climate fluctuations brought the multi-decade Anasazi drought, the Dust Bowl and other dry spells to our western states. To suggest that this summer’s heat and drought are somehow due to mankind’s fossil fuel use and related emissions is deliberately delusional nonsense.
Neither these activists nor anyone in Al Gore’s climate chaos consortium can demonstrate or calibrate a human connection to droughts or fires. Rants, rhetoric and CO2-driven computer models do not suffice. And even if manmade (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide does play a role amid the powerful natural forces that have always controlled climate and weather, reducing US fossil fuel use would have zero effect.
China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam alone are building 590 new coal-fired power plants right now, on top of the hundreds they have constructed over the past decade. Overall, more than 1,600 new coal generators are planned or under construction in 62 countries. People in developing countries are also driving far more vehicles and making great strides in improving their health and living standards. They will not stop.
Western conflagrations jump fire breaks because these ferocious fires are fueled by the unprecedented increase in combustibles that radical green policies have created. These monstrous fires generate their own high winds and even mini tornados that carry burning branches high into the air, to be deposited hundreds of feet away, where they ignite new fires. It has nothing to do with climate change.
Remove some of that fuel – and fires won’t get so big, hot, powerful and destructive. We should also do what a few environmentalist groups have called for: manage more areas around buildings and homes – clearing away brush that federal agencies and these same groups have long demanded be left in place.
Finally, we should be using more of the readily available modern technologies like FireIce from GelTech Solutions. They can suppress and extinguish fires, and protect homes, much better than water alone.
The last bogus eco-activist claim is that “fire isn’t destruction; it’s renewal. It creates stronger, more diverse ecosystems.” That may be true in managed forests, timber stands in less tinder-dry states, and forests that have undergone repeated, non-devastating fires. For all the reason presented above, it is not true for government owned and mismanaged forests in our western states.
Over 50 million acres (equal to Minnesota) are at risk of catastrophic wildfires. Right now, we are spending billions of dollars we don’t have, should not have to spend fighting all these monstrous killer blazes, and should have available to improve forests and parks and fund other vital programs.
These forests could and should create jobs and generate revenues in states where far too many lands, timber, oil and minerals have been placed off limits – primarily by urban politicians, judges and radical activists who seem determined to drive people off these western lands, turn them into playgrounds for the wealthy, and roll back other Americans’ living standards and well-being. Cleaning out dead, diseased, burned, overgrown trees would bring countless benefits. It would make our forests healthy again.
Above all, the new Interior-Agriculture approach would demonstrate that Rural Lives Matter.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and other books on the environment.
The ideologies of well to do westerners appears to have consumed whatever common sense once existed amongst the hierarchy. As a result they have created one disaster after another in almost every sphere of life. Is there a solution to this, well perhaps, but it is going to take years of sensible judgement and decision making. Frankly I feel America and Europe lack the numbers of people with these qualities for realism to win, I do hope I am wrong. There seem to be far to many Mr Griff’s.
The current situation is a horrible stew of really bad management decisions influence by many special interests The biggest remaining influence is the standard fire-suppression policy. That protected timber stands for logging interests. Unfortunately it lead to the build up fuel loads and forest structures that are dreadfully subject to fires. Working in the Sierra, there were stretches the fire management officers referred to as fire ladders. The mix of slash, low brush, understory and immature trees with mature trees creates a literal ladder a fire can climb into the forest crown. The practice of clear cutting was a monumental disaster for forest soils and was “remedied” by prescription slash scatter – essentially scatter all that fuel 24 inches or 18 inches deep over the clear cut. It sort of worked, until a fire came along. The truth is that western forest are fire-mediated ecologies and they developed into that apparently through millennia of Indian resource management practice (small scale burning to create clearing and maintain stands of useful plants).
Fully developed “old-growth” forests aren’t much good for anything but occasional spotted owls and timber, really nice timber. Nothing much lives in old growth. The animal biomass is very low. In contrast landslides and burn areas support high diversity, temporary communities that attract deer, elk and bear. The animal species balance shifts are these areas age. Dropping steadily to the low levels of old-growth forests where game mostly simply creates trails from clearing to clearing. More recent “environmental” concerns have combined with earlier economically founded management practices to create a “worst of all worlds” situation, partially through insisting on protecting “climax” forests which are largely mythological.
These forests need to burn. Unhappily fire suppression to protect timber and fuel load maintenance to “protect” habitat collectively are the worst possible choices for limiting the scale severity of fires.
We need this in Australia.
It takes the right conditions for an “out-of-control” wildfire. But those conditions will eventually occur. The key to forest management is burning off the undergrowth when conditions are not right for the wildfire. That way when the conditions are ripe, the fuel is missing, and it is like trying to start a fire without kindling.
Common sense has not been used in fire policy, because it is driven by those that live in Washington, and see forest management as “meddling in the natural process”.
The truth of forests is that they HAVE to burn often in order to clear out detritus and for some species of trees to have their seed pods cracked open by the heat of the fire to spread.
This whole “Don’t allow people to cut down deadwood!” was insane as well since clearing out deadwood prevents accidental injuries due to trees falling on hikers, prevents deadwood trees taking down power lines, etc.
In fact many tree species are only supposed to grow for at most 50-100 years and then they start slowly dying from the inside out.
Thus the Greens, sterilizing the planet one forest at a time.
Go to the Website, Sudden Oak Life, and look at the article on Redwood tree fire scars, and the Native Indian responsible fire actions. I remember the fire that burned all the way down the spine of Big Sur , from the back of Carmel, that wiped out the last Redwood stand near San Simeon..State Fire managers wouldn’t allow ranchers to clear burn undergrowth.. Same as what is going on now..
The cold temperatures required to kill the pine beetle don’t actually occur often. During winter, the pine beetle hibernates, changing the water in it’s body to ethanol. To kill the beetle during it’s hibernation requires temps at minus 30 and colder for a contiguous two weeks. These temps are almost never seen in Colorado and other western US states.
Montana and North Dakota may see these temps for an extended period, but most states do not.
The stop all fires from burning policy has had more to do with the spread of the pine beetle than anything. Pine beetles start their borrowing into trees at less then five feet off the ground. This allows them to stay warmer and active in the winter. Preventing fires, particularly ground from spreading has allowed the pine beetle to spread further and faster than their historical range has been.
It might seem like a good idea to stop all fires and minimize their spread and damage, but nature abhors a vacuum and something will find home or food in the unburnt brush and build up which normally is burned away.
Here in Oregon, our Governor Kate Brown, basically let our forests burn down this summer – we’ve been in a smoke haze for going on a month, now.
They just started a recall petition over this very issue.
Fingers crossed.
Where I live, there are patches of undeveloped land that could hold housing, but are allowed to just sit. Those patches are full of what I can rightfully say are invasive species like buckthorn, which is a UK import that spreads like a bad case of black mold. The birds love the seeds, which irritate their intestines, and are dropped everywhere. The undergrowth is so thick that you need a machete if you want to walk into it.
Since this is private land, not owned by the county, the owner has to be responsible for clearing out the trash growth. And whoever the owner is, he’s doing nothing. In a bad, dry summer, it’s a fire hazard. I suppose we can ask the county to clean it out, but the owner should be fined for letting it go.
Several years ago talking with a forester (someone who went to school about forests) about the boreal forest, he said that the life cycle of the boreal forest requires every 80-120 years that the forest must be cut down or burn down. The forest also has a cycle of birth, growth, age, die. On a side note, the local National Park, where I lived at the time, did a wolf study, there were more wolves outside the park in the logging cuts, than inside the park. The wolves followed the moose who preferred the open spaces of the logging cuts with the new growth for eating.
Environmentalists have a mindset where they can only see today. They have no view of the past, and no concept of the future.
“Rural Lives Matter”
Thank you Paul Driessen. I was afraid that no one would pay any attention to the environmentalist mismanagement and burning of the Western forests, until some info babe started telling them it was a problem. And that was not going to happen.
And praise God. We are getting rain after a fire burned 40,000 acres along the Columbia Gorge, in our prettiest and healthiest forests. #EagleCreekFire
Which resulted not from “climate change” but from feral teenagers.
It was teenagers throwing fire crackers. But it was also Oregon fiddling while the fire spread.
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