Page 10
Street Roots • Nov. 17-23, 2017
News
FOREST FIRES, from page 5
words like “catastrophic,” “disastrous” and
“horrific.”
were the same roads that granted human
While the recent fire-caused deaths in
access to that area of the forest - likely
Santa Rosa were unmistakably tragic, many
leading to the ignition of the fire.
of the other wildfires given these labels
While the fire’s cause is officially
were actually part of a healthy forest’s life
unknown, Groce, the Forest Service ranger,
cycle, DellaSala said.
said there hadn’t been any reported
The Eagle Creek Fire, for example, while
lightning in the area, leading the Forest
seen as destructive to many Portland
Service to believe it was human-caused.
residents, was actually beneficial to the
But Groce said the Forest Service is not
Columbia Gorge’s
directed to decommission
ecological health, he said.
roads as a fire-prevention
"The kl»d ©I habitat
The latest wildfire
tactic.
that exists after a fire Is season also seemed
“We have roads for a
so rare ©si the landscape especially apocalyptic
variety of purposes,” she
that yea really shealtf »*! given the extreme amount
said. “We have been very
of smoke that blanketed
active in trying to right-
be Hiessiag w ith It,
urban areas. But DellaSala
size our transportation
There's way less post-
said that had more to do
system, but we still need
lire
habitat
that
exists
with the location of the
to provide public access to
©a HatioBal forests the» fires burning than the
enjoy forests, manage
number of acres burned.
there used t© he/*
forests and suppress fires.
Additionally, smoke is
While yes, it’s true that
M IC H A E L K R O C H TA ,
B A R K 'S F O R E S T W A T C H
going to be unavoidable
people access the forest
C O O R D IN A T O R
some years when you live
through our road system
in a fire-prone region of
and sometimes start fires,
the country.
that is an illegal activity.”
Other misleading rhetoric includes calling
In what Bark considers a partial win, the
recent fire seasons “record breaking.”
Forest Service recently agreed to reduce
Just one of many examples was Nov. 1,
the number of roads it was planning to build
when Merkley’s office announced the 11
for a fuels reduction project on the eastern
Western senators’ letter to the president
side of Mt. Hood National Forest, known as
asking for fire prevention dollars. It stated
the Polallie Cooper timber thinning and
the request was being made on the heels of
fuels reduction area.
a “record-shattering fire season.”
“It’s for fuels reduction,” Krochta said of
The only thing “record shattering” about
the project, “but would have built miles and
this year’s fire season, DellaSala said, was
miles of roads in back country, which
fire suppression, or firefighting, spending.
heightens the risk of fire.”
Most comparisons deeming the 2015 and
T h e d e c is io n to r e d u c e th e ~ n u rn b e T o f
2017 fire seasons “record breaking” look
roads was part of a resolution the Forest
only as far back as the 1980s. But in terms
Service reached with Bark, which has been
of fire ecology, that isn’t long enough to put
fighting the sale since it was first introduced
recent fire seasons in proper context.
in 1999. Bark had successfully argued that
DellaSala pointed to fire seasons in the early
by building more roads, the Forest Service
1900s that burned 10 times as many acres
was undermining the very objective of the
as fires we’ve seen in recent years.
project: to reduce fire risk.
He said looking back 2,000 years,
scientists know fire seasons are tightly
Not quite ‘record-shattering’
correlated with droughts. Wildfires coincide
Another point of contention among
with regional weather patterns that follow
conservationists and some fire ecologists is
global climate forces, such as the recurring
the rhetoric commonly used in the media
pattern known as Pacific Decadal
and by politicians around wildfires, such as
Oscillation, or PDO. Right now, that PDO is
OOUCHNUT
ramping up again like it was in the early
1900s, and fires are increasing along with it.
DellaSala said we’re actually making up
for a fire deficit.
“You gotta pull back and look at it on a
bigger scale, both a time scale and a global
scale,” he said.
“So when the delegation puts out an
announcement that we’ve got catastrophic
fire and all we need to do is reduce fuel
hazards and everything will be OK, they are
missing the link to these larger-scale
processes that determine fire activity
because they govern the kind of fire weather
we’ll get in a particular season.”
Reasoning with Congress
DellaSala took these arguments to
Washington, D.C., where he testified Sept.
27 before the House Natural Resources
Committee’s oversight subcommittee.
Westerman, the chief sponsor of the
Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017 (H.R.
2936), chaired the committee.
Proponents of the bill, such as Oregon’s
Walden, argue that it would give foresters
and firefighters new tools to protect the
forests, but conservationists say those tools
would cripple their ability to intervene in
environmentally unsound projects.
Groups such as Bark often challenge
timber sales on public lands using provisions
of the National Environmental Policy Act.
This law mandates that the federal
government conduct assessments of how a
project would affect watersheds, the
ecosystem and species in the project area.
This process includes opening up its
analysis for public view and comment. This
is the point in the process where
conservationists have an opportunity to
point out flaws in the plan, where the
agency might have made mistakes or
overlooked impacts, and then make
comment and alert the public to do the
same.
The Resilient Federal Forests Act would
allow the government to exempt from this
public process logging projects covering less
than 10,000 acres - which accounts for most
logging projects.
Also mixed into the fire-logging debates is
the practice of salvage logging after a burn
has come through, and these projects would
also be exempted from environmental
review under Westerman’s bill.
On Sept. 8, Walden introduced a bill to
allow salvage logging in the Eagle Creek
Fire area. But many conservation groups,
including Friends of the Columbia River
Gorge, are outraged, saying it would harm
the ecosystem, not help it.
Krochta said the only objective to salvage
logging is getting the trees out of a burn
area while they still have monetary value.
They are often weakened by a fire, which
can make way for beetle infestations that
ultimately kill them, making them worthless
to timber companies.
But salvage logging a post-fire habitat is
one of the worst things for it, he said.
“For one, driving heavy machinery on soil
that’s this exposed, it really takes a while for
the vegetation to come back, to stabilize it,”
he said. “The kind of habitat that exists
after a fire is so rare on the landscape that
you really shouldn’t be messing with it.
There’s way less post-fire habitat that exists
on national forests than there used to be.”
He said there are species that “really
specifically” rely on these areas, such as the
black-backed woodpecker, whose back is
black because it’s adapted to foraging on
burnt tree trunks.
While thinning projects and salvage
logging will not prevent another fire season
like the Pacific Northwest just saw, what
we’re doing about climate change can affect
the frequency of such seasons, DellaSala
said.
“That’s the real causative agent here,” he
said. “If we don’t get our heads around
doing something about reducing fossil fuel
emissions, we could very well see more
active fire seasons like this producing more
smoke. We keep avoiding the main issue
here, which is these fires are being
exacerbated by a climate signal that we’re
not paying attention to. Instead we’re trying
to treat the symptom, rather than the
cause.”
emily@streetroots.org; Twitter @greenwrites
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