Page 4
News
Street Roots • Nov. 17-23, 2017
Where there’s sm oke...
Politicians say thinning forests will help prevent ‘catastrophic’fires. B u t ecologists
say this season w asn’t the worst, and logging won’t stop it from happening again.
A u g u st’s Jazz Fire in M t Hood N ational Forest burned an area that had been thinned. Logging slash acted as fu e l fo r the blaze, yet mu^chof theTanofy was
spared as a result o f the thinning. Both sides o f the thinning debate point to examples like this to show how thinning is either good or bad fo r fire prevention.
BY EMILY GREEN
S E N IO R S T A F F R E P O R T E R
ttorney Brenna Bell keeps a worn
Trivial Pursuit card on her desk at
Bark’s headquarters in Northeast
Portland.
The question in the Science & Nature
category asks, “Are forest fires good for
forests?”
The answer on the back of the card
mirrors what ecologists, biologists and
conservationists have been saying for
decades:
“Yes.”
After this past wildfire season, however, it
might be hard for residents of the Pacific
Northwest, where many metropolitan areas
were engulfed with dangerous levels of
smoke, to see wildfires as anything other
than bad.
Now the timber industry’s allies in
Washington, D.C., are taking advantage of
this wildfire season to push forward
legislation that would sidestep public
oversight and weaken environmental laws in
order to streamline large-scale thinning and
logging projects on public lands.
U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) has
resurrected his Resilient Federal Forests
Act, with proponents pivoting their
A
arguments to seize upon what many are
misleadingly calling one of the worst fire
seasons on record. Their rhetoric suggests
wildfires have spiraled out of control, in part
due to overgrowth resulting from
conservationist policies and lawsuits that
have slowed thinning and logging.
On Nov. 1, the U.S. House of
Representatives passed the act 232 to 188,
largely along party lines. In Oregon, Rep.
Kurt Schrader was the only Democrat to
vote in favor of the bill, which Rep. Greg
Walden (R-Ore.) had helped craft.
While Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden
and Jeff Merkley are opposed to the
Resilient Federal Forests Act and its
companion bill in the Senate, they have
joined eight other Democratic senators
across the West in asking the White House
for $580 million in emergency funding for
fire-preventive logging.
“Investing in vital forest thinning and
hazardous fuels reduction projects now will
make our forests more resilient to
catastrophic wildfire in the future,” the
senators stated in their letter to the
president.
According to peer-reviewed studies on the
overall likelihood of a thinned area of forest
being hit with fire and on historical fire
trends, the argument that thinning is the
best way to address future fire seasons like
the one we just had is profoundly flawed.
For one, proposals to remove trees, or
“fuels,” are based on the idea that fires burn
more intensely in unlogged forests, making
them more severe and quicker to spread.
But a recently published examination of
the intensity of 1,500 forest fires over the
past 40 years in 11 Western states found the
opposite. Its authors, scientists at the
Project Earth Institute, Geos Institute and
Earth Island Institute, found fires burned
most intensely in previously logged areas. In
contrast, in wilderness, parks and roadless
ares, the fires burned in mosaic patterns -
which maintain healthy, resilient forests.
But thinning can be effective if it is done
in a precise way. Additionally, the weather
and topography have to cooperate and fire
has to strike the thinned area before it
becomes overgrown again - usually within a
window of 10 to 15 years.
As it turns out, the likeliness of fire
hitting a thinned stand of trees during that
timeframe is between 2 percent and 8
percent, according to a 2008 study of fires in
Ponderosa pine forests across the West.
Last year, researchers at the University of
Montana and the U.S. Forest Service’s
Rocky Mountain Research Station found
that fires have hit only 7 percent of fuel
reduction treatment areas within the U.S.
since 1999.
That s because it’s impossible to predict
exactly where fire will strike.
At Bark, which serves as an
environmental watchdog group for the Mt.
Hood National Forest, Bell argues that while
the likelihood of fire striking a thinned area
is low, those areas treated for thinning are
100 percent likely to be affected by the
environmental impacts of the thinning
project, which can include lost carbon stores
and habitat degradation from road building
and the introduction of heavy machinery.
The Jazz Fire
At least one fire in Mt. Hood National
Forest this past summer defied the odds
when it struck an area that had been
thinned in 2016.
At roughly 50 acres, the Jazz Fire was the
largest of more than 50 small fires that
burned in the Clackamas River Ranger
District this season. The area is located a
few miles off of Highway 224, not far from
Bagby Hot Springs in the Mt. Hood National
Forest.
But something seemed odd about this
fire, which ignited Aug. 20 and was
See FOREST FIRES, page 5