January 12, 2004, 8:28 a.m.
Let It Burn (Once in a While)
Total fire suppression is sheer stupidity.

“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree." Joyce Kilmer's poetry is among the best known of all popular verse. Flowering in spring, green in summer, and golden-red-orange and brown in fall, trees and forests have been around for 400 million years. Trees cool us in the summer, shelter us from winter winds, act as filters to remove pollutants from the air, reduce soil erosion, create wildlife habitat, provide us with fuel and construction materials, and add beauty that lifts the spirits.

But as we learned last summer, a forest that has not been properly managed is a disaster waiting to happen.

The catastrophic forest fires that swept through southern California in 2003 burned slightly over half a million acres. Twenty-two deaths resulted, along with 48,000 homes and other buildings destroyed. The total cost of damage was well over half a billion dollars. The cost to fight the fires was more than $250 million.

The southern California fires are only a fraction of the problem. In the last two years 147,049 fires in the U.S. have burned nearly 11 million acres, killing over 50 firefighters.

"Only you can prevent forest fires," Smokey the Bear advised for more than 50 years. But if you ask Smokey why there have been so many fires in recent years, he explains that we have blindly followed "no fire is a good fire" forest management policies, otherwise known as "total fire suppression."

For as long as trees have been around, there have been forest fires. Lightning strikes are a prime cause of many fires in the wild. Without suppression, forest fires can burn large tracts, causing considerable destruction. If you drive past a forest that has recently burned, the black, charred trees, do look desolate, while valuable trees may have been destroyed. But a burned forest is actually a blessing. The ashes from the fire act as a fertilizer, and seeds that have long lain dormant sprout up in the new sunlight, as annuals, perennials, and shrubs — habitat favorable to a much wider variety of species of wildlife that could not grow in the shade under the canopy — quickly grows up.

As forest-fire detection and response improved over the years, it became possible to quickly extinguish many fires. One result was a growing accumulation of flammable materials, which piled up under the trees. The debris that covers the forest floor may create habitat for wood rats and white-footed mice, but they prevent growth of many other plants and are, in fact, the fuel for a disaster waiting to happen.

Contrary to what some so-called "environmental groups" proclaim, logging and controlled burning of forests is actually better for wild things and humans than immediately putting out every forest fire.

Washington has already acted wisely on this front. President Bush recently signed
The Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HR 1904), which passed the House by a vote of 286 to 140 and by a voice vote in the Senate. The act improves the process of environmental-impact review and limits litigation on cutting, which is hamstringing budgets. It also maintains the Senate's authorization of $760 million annually for hazardous-fuel reduction with at least 50 percent of those funds targeting projects near at-risk communities.

The new law will help remove down and diseased timber on federal forest lands, but it does'nt only target remote and wild areas. It also provides badly needed help for forests in and around urban areas.

The 2003 fires in southern California seem monumental, but compare them with the l991 Oakland, California, fire. Only 1,800 acres were burned in the Oakland conflagration, but they were in a densely inhabited urban area. Twenty-five people died in the Oakland fire, 150 were injured, 3,175 homes and apartments were destroyed, and another 65 were left uninhabitable. The estimated damage of the blaze was $1.7 billion, which amounts to $2.2 billion in today's dollars.

There is not a major city on the West Coast that is not at risk for such a fire.

A RIDGE RUNS THROUGH IT

Out my office window there is a verdant ridge, several-hundred feet high. The ridge runs about ten miles from Mount Tamalpais to the Golden Gate. The lower half is a green carpet sprinkled with houses. The rest is a solid-green, dense forest that melts into miles of brush in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Most of the trees in the ridge are towering eucalyptus — exotic, fire-prone imports brought in a century ago from Australia to replace the native oaks and redwoods that were logged out to build San Francisco. Eucalyptus grows tall and fast. Little grows on the ground under the trees because the trees secrete acids that kill off native plants and shrubs, insuring that the eucalyptus produce only more of their own.

And the "eukes" are fast growing and dirty. They readily drop large amounts of leaves, branches, and bark. The piles quickly accumulate on the ground, creating tinder that is ripe for a burn.

I recently met with the Marin County Fire Department's professional forester. The department wants the eucalyptus to go — ASAP — and the Health Forests Restoration Act will provide funds for cutting fire-prone urban forests like the exotic eukes. The forester is already at work writing a grant to apply for funds to clear out the eucalyptus trees that cover our hills so we can get about restoring oaks and redwoods that grow here naturally. The neighborhood is cheering because the cost of removing them is as sky-high as their towering trunks. It costs $500 to $1000 or more for a professional tree cutter to remove a mature eucalyptus around a home. By logging the entire forest, costs per tree can be significantly reduced.

Hopefully support for the Healthy Forests Restoration Act will lead to better management of our urban forests. We can preserve our trees while reducing or eliminating the conditions that too-often result in those beautiful trees becoming time bombs ticking toward devastation.

— James Swan is a contributing editor of ESPNOutdoors.com. He also writes for the Outdoor Channel's Engel's Outdoor Experience, which won a Golden Moose for the category "Best Waterfowl Shows 2002."

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