Chainsaw George
Bush Forest Fire Plan: Log It All
by Jeffrey St.
Clair
August 24, 2002
George W. Bush, fresh off a brush clearing operation at his
Crawford ranch, snubbed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg for a trip to Oregon,
where he vowed to fight future forest fires by taking a chainsaw to the
nation's forests and the environmental laws that protect them.
In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to okay the
timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over
the next ten years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from
pesky statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan
"the Healthy Forests Initiative". But it's nothing more than a
giveaway to big timber, that comes at a high price to the taxpayer and forest
ecosystems.
Bush's stump speech was a craven bit of political
opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by his call to open the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a way to help heal the nation after the
attacks of September 11. That plan sputtered around for awhile, but didn't go
anywhere in the end. But count on it: this one will.
Bush is exploiting a primal fear of fire that almost
overwhelms the national anxiety about terrorists. In one of the great
masterstrokes of PR, Americans have been conditioned for the past 60 years that
forest fires are bad...bad for forests. It's no accident that Smokey the Bear
is the most popular icon in the history of advertising, far outdistancing Tony
the Tiger or Capt. Crunch.
But the forests of North America were born out of fires,
not destroyed by them. After Native Americans settled across the continent
following the Wisconsin glaciation, fires became an even more regular event,
reshaping the ecology of the Ponderosa pine and spruce forests of the Interior
West and the mighty Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Coast.
Forest fires became stigmatized only when forests began to
be viewed as a commercial resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. Fire
suppression became an obsession only after the big timber giants laid claim to
the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like Weyerhaeuser and
Georgia-Pacific were loath to see their holdings go up in flames, so they
arm-twisted Congress into pour millions of dollars into Forest Service
fire-fighting programs. The Forest Service was only too happy to oblige because
fire suppression was a sure way to pad their budget: along with the lobbying
might of the timber companies they could literally scare Congress into handing
over a blank check. [For an excellent history of the political economy of
forest fires I highly recommend Stephen Pyne's Fire in America.]
In effect, the Forest Service's fire suppression programs
(and similar operations by state and local governments) have acted as little
more than federally-funded fire insurance policies for the big timber
companies, an ongoing corporate bailout that has totaled tens of billions of
dollars and shows no sign of slowing down. There's an old saying that the
Forest Service fights fires by throwing money at them. And the more money it
spends, the more money it gets from Congress.
"The Forest Service budgetary process rewards forest
managers for losing money on environmentally destructive timber sales and
penalizes them for making money or doing environmentally beneficial
activities," says Randal O'Toole, a forest economist at the Thoreau
Institute in Bandon, Oregon. "Until those incentives are changed, giving
the Forest Service more power to sell or thin trees without environmental
oversight will only create more problems than it solves."
Where did all the money go? It largely went to amass a
fire-fighting infrastructure that rivals the National Guard: helicopters,
tankers, satellites, airplanes and a legion of young men and women who are
thrust, often carelessly, onto the firelines. Hundreds of fire fighters have
perished, often senselessly. For a chilling historical account of how inept
Forest Service fire bureaucrats put young firefighters in harms way read Norman
Maclean's (author of A River Runs Through It) last book, Young
Men and Fire. In this book, Maclean describes how incompetence and hubris by
bureaucrats led to the deaths of 13 firefighters outside Seeley Lake, Montana
in the great fire of 1949. More recently, mismanagement has led to firefighters
being needlessly killed in Washington and Colorado.
Since the 1920s, the Forest Service fire-fighting
establishment has been under orders to attack forest fires within 12 hours of
the time when the fires were first sighted. For decades, there's been a zero
tolerance policy toward wildfires. Even now, after forest ecologists have
proved that most forests not only tolerate but need fire, the agency tries to
suppress 99.7 percent of all wildfires. This industry-driven approach has come
at a terrible economic and ecological price.
With regular fires largely excluded from the forests and
grasslands, thickets of dry timber, small sickly trees and brush began to build
up. This is called fuel loading. These thickets began a breeding ground for insects
and diseases that ravaged healthy forest stands. The regular, low-intensity
fires that have swept through the forests for millennia have now been replaced
by catastrophic blazes that roar with a fury that is without historical or
ecological precedent.
Even so the solution to the fuels problem is burning, not
logging. The Bush plan is the environmental equivalent of looting a bombed out
city and raping the survivors. The last thing a burned over forest needs is an
assault by chainsaws, logging roads and skid trails, to haul out the only
living trees in a scorched landscape. The evidence has been in for decades. The
proof can be found at Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone Park: Unlogged burned
forests recover quickly, feeding off the nutrients left behind dead trees and
shrubs. On the other hand, logged over burned forests rarely recover, but
persist as biological deserts, prone to mudslides, difficult to revegetate and
abandoned by salmon and deep forest birds, such as the spotted owl, goshawk and
marbled murrelet. They exist as desolate islands inside the greater ecosystem.
Even worse, such a plan only encourages future arsonists.
The easiest way to clearcut an ancient forest is to set fire to it first. Take
a look at the major fire of the west this summer: the big blazes in Arizona and
Colorado were set by Forest Service employees and seasonal fire-fighters,
another big fire in California was started by a marijuana suppression
operation, fires in Oregon, Washington and Montana have been started by humans.
In Oregon more than 45,000 acres of prime ancient forest in
the Siskiyou Mountains were torched by the Forest Service's firefighting crews
to start a backfire in order to "save" a town that wasn't threatened
to begin with. The fires were ignited by shooting ping-pong balls filled with
napalm into the forest of giant Douglas-firs. By one estimate, more than a
third of the acres burned this summer were ignited by the Forest Service as
backfires. That's good news for the timber industry since they get to log
nearly all those acres for next to nothing.
Far from acting as a curative, a century of unrestrained
logging has vastly increased the intensity and frequency of wildfires,
particularly in the West. The Bush plan promises only more of the same at an
accelerated and uninhibited pace. When combined with global warming, persistent
droughts, and invasions by alien insects species (such as the Asian-long-horned
beetle) and diseases, the future for American forests looks very bleak indeed.
Predictably, the Bush scheme was met with howls of protest
from the big environmental groups. This is part of Bush's irresponsible
anti-environmental Agenda," said Bill Meadows, president of the Wilderness
Society. "The truth is that waiving environmental laws will not protect
homes and lives from wildfire."
But they only have themselves to blame. They helped lay the
political groundwork for the Bush plan long ago. And now the Administration,
and its backers in Big Timber, have seized the day and put the
environmentalists on the run.
The environmentalists have connived with the
logging-to-prevent-fires scam for political reasons. First came a deal to
jettison a federal court injunction against logging in the Montana's Bitterroot
National Forest designed to appease Senator Max Baucus, friend of Robert
Redford and a ranking Democrat. Then last month came a similar deal brokered by
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that allows the timber industry to begin
logging the Black Hills, sacred land of the Sioux, totally unfettered by any
environmental constraints.
Grassroots greens warned that such dealmaking with
Democrats would soon become a model for a national legislation backed by Bush
and Republican legislators that would dramatically escalate logging on all
national forests and exempt the clearcuts from compliance with environmental
laws. We've now reached that point.
And there's no sign the big greens have learned their
lesson.
The latest proposal comes courtesy of the Oregon Natural
Resources Council and the Sierra Club. It's rather timidly called the
"Environmentalist New Vision".There's nothing new about the plan,
except that it is being endorsed by a claque of politically intimidated green
groups instead of Boise-Cascade. It calls for thinning ( i.e., logging) operations
near homes in the forest/suburb interface. This is a pathetic and dangerous
approach that sends two wrong messages in one package: that thinning reduces
fire risk and that it's okay to build houses in forested environments.
In fact, there's no evidence that thinning will reduce
fires in these situations and it may provide a false sense of security when
there are other measures that are more effective and less damaging to the
environment.
"Forest Service fire researcher Jack Cohen has found
that homes and other structures will be safe from fire if their roof and
landscaping within 150 feet of the structures are fireproofed," says
O'Toole. "A Forest Service report says there are 1.9 million high-risk
acres in the wildland-urban interface, of which 1.5 million are private.
Treating these acres, not the 210 million federal acres, will protect homes.
Firebreaks along federal land boundaries, not treatments of lands within those
boundaries, will protect other private property. Once private lands are
protected, the Forest Service can let most fires on federal lands burn."
As it stands, the Sierra Club's scheme will only result in
more logging, more subdivisions in wildlands and, predictably, more fires. Any
environmental outfit with a conscience would call for an immediate thinning of
subdivisions on urban/wildland interface, not forests. Don't hold your breath.
Too many big-time contributors to environmental groups own huge houses inside
burn-prone forests in places Black Butte Ranch, Oregon, Flagstaff, Arizona and Vail,
Colorado.
Of course, there's still resistance to these schemes. When
Bush arrived in Portland to make official his handout to big timber, he was
greeted by nearly a thousand protesters. On the streets of the Rose City, Earth
First!ers and anti-war activists shouted down Bush and his plans for war on
Iraq and the environment. The riot police soon arrived in their Darth Vader
gear. The demonstrators, old and young alike, were beaten, gassed, and shot at
with plastic bullets. They even pepper sprayed children. Dozens were arrested;
others were bloodied by bullets and nightsticks.
This is a portent of things to come. When the laws have
been suspended, the only option to protect forests will be direct action:
bodies barricaded against bulldozers, young women suspended in trees, impromptu
encampments in the deep snows of the Cascades and Rockies.
Not long ago, the occupation of cutting down the big trees
ranked as one of the most dangerous around. Now, thanks to the connivance of
Bush, Daschle and the big enviro groups, the job of protecting them will be
fraught with even more peril.
Those brave young forest defenders, forced into the woods
as a thin green line against the chainsaws, should send their bail requests to
the Sierra Club and their medical bills to the Wilderness Society. They can
afford it.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-author of A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys with James Ridgeway, and is a
co-editor of Counterpunch, the nation’s best muckraking newsletter.