Essay by Ed Quillen
Forests – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
There used to be a popular bumper sticker whose message could be translated into Official English as “Events Occur.” But nobody really believes that — in modern America, nothing just happens.
Thus it’s not enough for us to endure smoke and haze, as well as frequent warnings that great tongues of flame might swing toward our homes. We are also expected to participate in the Great American Blame Game: Who’s going to be held responsible for the Western wildfires of 2002?
One common argument blames environmentalists, and it goes like this:
1) Logging reduces the fuel load in national forests, and environmentalists have filed lawsuits against timber sales.
2) Controlled burns also reduce the risk of big fires, and environmentalists have filed suit to block controlled burns on air-quality grounds.
3) Back-country roads can serve as fire lines, and can be used to bring in heavy equipment for fire-fighting, so the environmentalists who oppose more roads are giving aid and comfort to the fires.
From the other side, you hear arguments like this:
1) Our industrial economy has caused more carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere. It’s a “greenhouse gas” that causes the earth to retain more heat, and thus we get global warming and drought which make the forests more susceptible to fire. And since trees need carbon dioxide for their metabolism, the more carbon dioxide our industrial society produces, the more rapidly the trees grow; thus there’s a greater fuel load in the forest.
2) Logging doesn’t help because sawmills want the big trees, not the little ones that are the most likely to burn.
3) Back country roads cause dust pollution and harm wildlife.
How do we sort this out? Or do we even need to?
Perhaps we can start by considering the stupid approaches, the ones that make me embarrassed to be in journalism — or at least involved in the kind of journalism that’s been spawned by our modern celebrity culture.
I haven’t quite figured out the rules for celebrity status. Leonard Gregg is accused of helping start the vast Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona, but he’s not really a celebrity. He was a part-time fire-fighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he supposedly started the fire because he wanted some work.
That’s a fairly straightforward reason that we can understand, even if we don’t approve. It’s not even a novelty. When we lived in Kremmling 25 years ago, I heard old-timers there talk about setting forest fires in Middle Park during the Great Depression, for exactly the same reason: they needed work, and if a forest fire appeared, so did a federal payroll so they could put food on the table.
Even though Leonard Gregg’s actions were criminal, they’re comprehensible. We can understand why a man might set a fire so he could get paid to help put it out, just as we can understand why a corporate executive might fudge earnings statements to make the stock price higher when he cashes out his options. Most of us don’t approve, but we can comprehend the temptations.
But with Terry Barton, we get to guess at her motives, which means she’s front-page news — and doubtless there’s a scriptwriter currently working on a television mini-series with her as the protagonist.
Barton is accused of starting the Hayman Fire in Colorado. She was a Forest Service employee out on fire patrol on June 8, and she duly reported a little fire near Lake George which became a big fire. But her story didn’t fit with the situation that investigators found on the ground, and now she faces trial in federal court.
That’s about all I ever wanted or needed to know about Barton, but she became a celebrity. The July 1 edition of Newsweek presented a two-page spread, which abounded in swill like “If anything can explain Barton’s actions, her friends insist it was the toll of trying to escape a torturous marriage.”
How is that an explanation?
This is pop psychology at its worst. I’ve known any number of women who had torturous marriages, and none of them went out and set forest fires. And while I don’t exactly approve of a tormented wife setting her abusive husband’s bed on fire while he’s sleeping in it, I can at least see the relationship between the provocation and the reaction in that case.
What’s this telling us? That if you can demonstrate that your spouse is a jerk, then you have a license to do anything, and that anyone who calls you to account for those actions is committing the contemporary mortal sin of “blaming the victim”?
The Newsweek piece went on to explain that “For Terry Barton, life was a struggle from the start.” The magazine then explains how her friends think that her abusive drunk husband might have caused her to set the fire.
It’s a normal modern script, I suppose. There’s struggling Terry Barton. If we just took the trouble to understood her, we would see that she’s not a fool or an arsonist, but a Victim, worthy of at least a month or two of discussion on therapeutic talk shows. Indeed, Barton is a big-league Celebrity Victim, since the new Connie Chung show on CNN featured, as one of its major attractions, an interview with Barton’s brother-in-law, which fortunately I missed — at my age, blood pressure becomes a consideration.
The brother-in-law told Chung what his wife had told him that Barton had told her — hearsay about gossip about speculation. It ranks right up there with an interview with Madonna’s housekeeper’s cousin, or someone who met a friend of the mechanic who once fixed Jesse Ventura’s bicycle when he was a kid.
This is modern celebrity journalism, and it’s disgusting because it diverts our attention from the real issue. There’s nothing in Terry Barton’s personality, or Leonard Gregg’s, which will explain why little fires, which are fairly common, became big fires this spring and summer.
In other words, if every fighter of wildfires were given extensive background checks and personality tests to insure that none of them would ever think of starting a fire (except that fighting wildfires often means starting backfires, so that test would be tough to devise), we would still have faced devastating wildfires this summer. An underground coal seam fire came to the surface outside of Glenwood Springs, a load of dumped sod underwent spontaneous combustion, a cigarette butt, an untended barbecue, a bolt of lightning, a signal fire ignited by a lost hiker, sparks from a piece of metal hanging from a car and dragging against the pavement — there are a host of ways that fires start.
The issue is not how fires start, but how and why they spread and how much damage they cause. And this journalistic focus on Terry Barton’s troubled marriage doesn’t tell us diddly squat about that.
Granted, it’s a lot easier to gossip about Celebrity Victims than it is to examine what happens when dubious real estate development trends combine with a century’s worth of questionable forest management policies to feed a disaster.
But the easy way isn’t the right way. Eliminating torturous marriages will not reduce the fire danger, even if Connie Chung and Newsweek seem to think otherwise. And our fire problems won’t be resolved by locking Barton and Gregg in jail, either.
What would reduce the fire danger?
The Wall Street Journal certainly isn’t the only conservative editorial page to blame environmentalists (Salida’s own Mountain Mail rides that bandwagon, too), but since the Journal is at hand, I’ll quote from its July 2 lead editorial:
“This no-human philosophy lies behind the Big Green litigation and lobbying that opposed the very thinning and road-building that would clean up forests to protect them from fire. The result is that this fire year is now shaping up as the worst on record: Some 2.7 million acres have already burned, nearly three times the average acreage for this time of year.”
So it is thinning and road-building that protect forests from fire — according to an anonymous editorial writer in New Jersey. Now look at the maps of the two biggest recent wildfires in Colorado: Hayman and Missionary Ridge.
By the Journal’s logic, the Hayman Fire on the east side of South Park should have roared northward once it got near the boundary of the Lost Creek Wilderness Area, since road-building and forest-thinning are forbidden in wilderness areas. Instead, it petered out in that area.
Similarly, if the Missionary Ridge fire had been following the Journal’s instructions, it would have raced into the vast Weminuche Wilderness Area at its border, rather than devastating an area full of roads where there had been considerable logging in the past. But as I write this, the Weminuche is almost untouched, although the fire certainly could spread into it.
But the evidence at hand demonstrates that the lack of roads and thinning does not make a forest more fire-prone. If anything, this year’s wildfires seem to show the opposite — wilderness is less likely to invite a major fire than our “managed” forests.
Conservative critics point out, correctly, that big private forests, like those in Maine and in the South, seldom suffer major fires, unlike the public forests in the West.
That’s true, but it misses an important distinction. The private forests are managed for one purpose — to produce timber, either for lumbering or for pulpwood to make paper. National forests are supposed to be managed for “multiple use” — timber production is only one use amid many others, like grazing, camping, hiking, wildlife habitat, watershed protection, hunting, fishing, etc.
A forest ranger I knew years ago explained the problems. “I’m a pro. I can make a forest serve one purpose pretty well. You want timber, I can give you good timber production. You want wildlife habitat, I can give you that. You want recreation, I can build trails and campsites.
“But we have to try to do a little bit of everything, and that means compromise. Our forests aren’t going to produce as much timber as they theoretically could, because we’ve got to worry about wildlife and people’s downstream water rights. They’re not going to be the best possible wildlife habitat, either, because that can’t be the only thing we manage for.”
That sounded pretty sensible to me then, and it does now. What we expect from our national forests — a multitude of uses — means that their management can never be aimed at one goal, like private forests and their timber production. And some of the uses we manage for (leaving wildlife habitat in place, or allowing campers with their fires) necessarily increase the risk and intensity of fire.
That said, what about another conservative criticism of environmentalists — that the Forest Service wants to do thinning and controlled burns, but is often thwarted by lawsuits filed by environmentalists.
First off, there aren’t that many lawsuits. A General Accounting Office study found that of 1,671 timber sales in the year 2000, only 20 inspired lawsuits.
In some ways, that is misleading, though. After all, out of the hundreds of thousands of magazine articles published last year, perhaps only a couple dozen inspired a libel suit. And yet, the fear of such litigation is a constant factor in making decisions — the influence of lawsuits is much greater than their numbers suggest.
But the forest lawsuits are all based on the premise that there are certain laws and procedures that the Forest Service must follow in making a timber sale, and the suits allege that the Forest Service failed to follow the law.
It would appear to me that if the laws are such that the Forest Service cannot meet its responsibilities, then we need to change the laws, rather than encourage a federal agency to either ignore those laws or to treat citizens as pariahs when they seek to have those laws enforced.
So, whom should we blame for the fires this summer? This is America, after all, where things don’t just happen, so we have to blame someone or something. But we can start with the drought.
Colorado hasn’t had a normal month of precipitation since last August. At this point, live trees have a lower water content than the milled stuff you buy at the lumber yard. So the trees are more likely to burn, and to burn fiercely with leaping high flames that soar 50 or 100 feet into the sooty sky.
To the drought, we can add wind, which intensifies the flames and carries embers past fire lines. Those two factors are beyond human control. But maybe forest fires are, too.
Consider the scenarios that have been advanced in recent years. One is that a century of fire suppression has led to a big build-up of fuel in the forest. According to this argument, if we had let the small fires do their thing over the years, then there wouldn’t have been a fuel accumulation to produce the big fires we’ve seen this summer.
That argument sounds logical, but history tells us that Colorado was swept by huge wildfires in the summer of 1879. The Utes were accused of setting the fires to drive white settlers off the Western Slope, much of which had been granted to them as a reservation for as long as the rivers ran and the skies were blue. (Perhaps the government had this summer in mind as the treaty termination date, since many streams aren’t running and the skies have been orange.)
The Utes used fire to manage the landscape, but there’s no real evidence that they used it as an implement of warfare then. And even if they had set the fires for that purpose, why did the fires get so big so fast?
It had been a dry year with a windy summer. You can’t blame Forest Service fire-suppression policies for that, since it was 1879 and there were no federal fire-suppression policies. The federal government was not in the business of protecting forests then. In those days, there were no slurry bombers and helicopter buckets or shovel-and-pulaski crews to extinguish little fires before they became big fires. And the Utes, who had been in the mountains for at least half of a millennium, were a nomadic people who just moved on when wildfires threatened; they weren’t in the fire-suppression business, either.
So, if there were widespread intense fires before an era of suppression presumably caused the fuel build-up that creates such widespread intense fires, we need to look somewhere else.
But where? How the forests are managed doesn’t seem to make much difference. Untrammeled wilderness burned in 1879. But in 2002, areas that have been logged, grazed, built upon, and criss-crossed with roads burned.
Can we blame those greenhouse gases? Since the Industrial Revolution began at the start of the 19th century, they might have been a factor in the 1879 fires. But what of the fires before that? Fire archæologists have found centuries of evidence of big hot fires in the Southern Rockies, long before the steam engine was invented.
The same holds for global warming — even though the fire danger will undoubtedly go down if the glaciers return.
But how about the decline in logging? Logging certainly reduces the fuel load.
Yet even if I’m sick of the knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to all logging on public land, in reality, loggers want the big trees, which are the most resistant to fire, not the brush and lodgepoles which fuel conflagrations.
Thus, even though environmentalists occasionally confuse the issue — I have even read that trees are “sentient creatures” — it makes more sense to blame economics, rather than environmentalism, for the decline in logging hereabouts. Our slopes are steep and our trees aren’t very big, so wood is often cheaper if it comes from somewhere else, like the Pacific Northwest. Thus the Rocky Mountains have never been a big part of our nation’s forestry industry.
According to the 2001 edition of Statistical Abstract of the United States, in 1970, the Rocky Mountain region contributed 398 billion board feet (bbf) of sawtimber to the nation’s total of 2,587 — less than 16%, while the Northwest produced 51%. By 1996, we produced 482 bbf, just under 15% of the total of 3,327 bbf.
Note, however, that the total production rose — which means that logging is not in decline in the Rocky Mountain region or elsewhere in the United States, even if there are a lot of environmental regulations and requirements today that were not present in 1970. But even as production rises, the National Forest contribution falls — from 9.2 bbf in 1980 to 3.3 bbf (only 0.1% of total American sawtimber production) in 1998.
The point of all this is that the American timber industry is growing — but the growth isn’t happening around here, because there are cheaper places to get lumber than from the national forests in the Rocky Mountains. Wood prices, like those of other commodities, fluctuate considerably, and sometimes it’s economical to log here and sometimes it isn’t.
Thus, the only way we could get loggers to keep our woods clean is to subsidize them even more. But the tax subsidies they already get, primarily for road construction, have been under attack for years, and any effort to increase them would be a tough sell politically, since both environmentalists and free-market conservatives would be in firm opposition.
So, there’s no evidence that National Forest logging reduces the risk of wildfires, and even if it did, it’s uneconomical and the requisite subsidies are unlikely.
We could pay people to thin the forests and perform controlled burns — indeed, we do that now. But that work happens on only a few thousand of the millions of National Forest acres. Just try to imagine Congress increasing that budget by a hundredfold — I can’t. And try to imagine that controlled burns will never become uncontrolled, as happened near Los Alamos two years ago. Then try to imagine that there would be no complaints about the degradation in air quality from controlled burns.
Of course, the air quality went to hell this spring with the uncontrolled burns, and in ways, I hope it most bothered the people who complain about wood smoke in the winter. Thanks to the laws of chemistry, some of that wood is going to burn at some time or another, and I figure we might as well get some household heat out of the process.
But back to blame. Thanks to the drought and the wind, we would have suffered some big forest fires this summer, even if Terry Barton and Leonard Gregg had never been born. And there doesn’t seem to be any affordable way to manage millions of acres so that they won’t suffer extensive fires in the future, just as they did before white settlement and government management.
Slowly and surely in the last few years, Coloradans have been learning how to build safer, more defensible homes, and we’ve come to accept some controlled burns. But the dangers persist.
It’s a product of the weather. And like the weather, fires are something that we’ll have to learn to live with — because we can’t eliminate them. The Utes endured by migrating when the fires neared, and modern Coloradans have been doing the same thing this summer, except we call it “evacuation.” It’s hard and I wouldn’t want to have to do it, but it’s also the only human response that seems to work.
Although the blame game may be more popular, it doesn’t prevent forest fires, because as the saying doesn’t go, Wildfires Happen.
