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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 23, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
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Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Better forestry needed to avoid bad air
Professional consensus management can
avoid current political-whipsaw mistakes
mericans have looked down
catastrophic Oregon North Coast burns
our noses at the Chinese,
of the 1930s and 1940s, during which
whose dirty air we’ve seen on
much of the Coast Range went up in
television — dreary gray and brown,
smoke.
shrouding ugly streets in a kind of sickly
Aside from being grateful for clean-
twilight. How disheartening it is to find
air rules that began curbing industrial
ourselves dealing with such ugly air here air pollution in the 1970s, what should
in the Pacific Northwest this August.
be our response to forest fires and the
Forest-fire smoke surrounds us. Even
smoke they cause? If the past several
the Pacific Ocean, which ordinarily
years are anything to go by, develop-
can be counted on for pure breezes, is
ing better strategies will become vital
instead delivering thick fumes as the
as our continent’s climate changes. And
atmosphere capriciously curves smoke
although it’s safe to say that almost
into Western Washington and Oregon
everyone is against smoke, dealing with
from the raging fires in
underlying issues will
British Columbia and
be extremely tricky.
‘We in the
east of the Cascades.
It rushes us head-
(For the time being,
long
into controversies
Northwest
conditions are expected
over forest thinning,
don’t want
to be better the rest of
timber harvests, under-
to
have
to
get
this week.)
story maintenance,
controlled burns and
As a result of fires,
used to having
how (or even whether)
air-quality monitor-
dangerous
air.
to regulate residen-
ing systems in the two
tial building within the
states have classified
... We must get
Pacific Northwest’s for-
conditions as unhealthy
ahead
of
the
fires
est interface. All these
across many thou-
before they get
subjects have evoked
sands of square miles of
expensive lawsuits
the Pacific Northwest.
ahead of us.’
and destructive politi-
This comes with warn-
cal battles. To say that
ings about limiting the
there is little trust would be an under-
amount of time spent outdoors and curb-
statement. Circumstances may force
ing physical activities that might cause
the combatants to overcome these dif-
us to breathe in more smoke. It’s a little
ferences, or at least spur less-polarized
like being stuck in a smoky tavern with
middle-of-the-road citizens to begin
no exit — although diluted forest fire
mandating smarter decisions.
chemicals aren’t as injurious as tobacco
So when it comes to avoiding dan-
smoke, thankfully.
gerously destructive forest fires and the
It’s possible our region hasn’t suf-
harms they create, what might smarter
fered such persistently bad air — espe-
management look like?
cially in non-urban areas — since the
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Southwest Oregon has become accustomed to summer wildfire smoke, but the prob-
lem has spread to the entire Pacific Northwest several times in recent years.
Many solutions are likely to entail
seeking and following the advice of pro-
fessional forest managers, rather than
either acquiescing to decisions forced
by environmental lawsuits on the one
hand, or back-room industry manipula-
tions on the other. Forest policies should
be made on a time scale of multiple
decades or centuries, and not change
with presidential administrations.
Neither the environment nor industry
are well-served by a tangled-up political
mess in which strategic decisions are so
hard to make and stick with.
Foresters aren’t guaranteed to agree
with one another, of course. While there
was disagreement within the agency,
National Forest Service policies noto-
riously favored harvest over all other
options during much of the 20th cen-
tury. The same was true of state for-
estry agencies in the Pacific Northwest.
Only with generational change in per-
sonnel was there a gradual shift to more
balance between harvest, thinning, con-
servation and other options. Moving
forward in the 21st century, we should
insist on carefully designed consen-
sus-based management groups, with
mechanisms to protect against political
and judicial manipulation.
The answers won’t be easy to find
or accept. Additional harvest is likely
in many cases to be the most affordable
way to control fire risk, while providing
a useful economic boost to rural areas.
Thinning will be more environmentally
palatable in other places, but tends to be
expensive. Prescribed burns — never
popular — will sometimes be the right
way to go.
We in the Northwest don’t want
to have to get used to having danger-
ous air. Nobody should have to become
good at wearing filtration masks, or
interpreting air-quality warnings. We
must get ahead of the fires before they
get ahead of us.
OTHER VIEWS
Excerpts from Oregon
newspaper editorials
Corvallis Gazette-
Times, on memories
of the solar eclipse
W
hat a difference a year makes: This
week, we’re looking at the gray,
dark skies around the mid-valley
and cursing the smoke created by the region’s
wildfires.
But a year ago this week, we gazed into
darkening skies and cheered as a total solar
eclipse — for many of us, a once-in-a-lifetime
experience — worked its way from west to
east across Oregon as it started a remarkable
journey across the United States.
Maybe you just watched it from your
backyard or stepped outside your office,
slapped on your pair of eclipse glasses (the
one essential fashion accessory from the
summer of 2017) and witnessed what turned
out to be an astonishing cosmic spectacle: The
moon passing across the surface of the sun,
plunging the world below into two minutes or
so of darkness.
Although it seems to odd to say this about
a celestial event, the event itself delivered the
goods: In fact, it’s hard to think of any other
event in recent history that generated so much
hype beforehand and then managed to live up
to the hype.
In fact, no matter your location at about
10:15 a.m. last Aug. 21, during the two min-
utes of totality, our hunch is that you could
hear the gasps and cheers from others. Maybe
you joined with the cheers, or maybe you
were stunned into silence. You and millions of
others might have experienced goosebumps,
and it wasn’t because the air suddenly seemed
(and was) cooler.
Our overuse of the word “awesome” has
devalued the word’s meaning; it is not “awe-
some” when the person taking your lunch
order gets it right. On that Monday morning, a
spectacle so much bigger than any of us gave
us a refresher course in the true meaning of
“awesome.” And that’s why those of us lucky
enough to see it will carry it with us.
Well, that and our eclipse glasses, which
we chose not to recycle.
The next total solar eclipse in the conti-
nental United States is scheduled for April 8,
2024; it’ll start down in Texas and work its
way up to Maine. We’re not planning to make
the trip to see the event, but we know people
who already are making plans to do so. A little
more than a year ago, we might have scoffed
at such an ambition. Today, though, as we
recall the memories of Aug. 21, 2017 — the
way the eclipse looked, sounded, felt — we
completely understand the impulse.
Eugene Register-Guard,
on PERS debate in race
for governor
I
n this fall’s gubernatorial campaign, the
candidates, and Oregonians, have an
ideal chance to debate in detail the hugely
expensive Public Employees Retirement
System that is one of the root causes of
Oregon’s protracted crisis over taxes and
public services.
PERS is difficult to talk about for many
reasons:
It is complex and the sums of money are
so large — and pose such a staggering burden
to taxpayers — that they boggle the mind.
Many PERS beneficiaries are defensive.
Many critics are vitriolic.
Plus, legal decisions shield current retirees
in PERS from virtually all clawbacks or cuts,
so any cost-paring must come at the expense
of current and future government employees.
One thing is clear, however: without PERS
reform, public services in the state will con-
tinue to spiral downwards, in the classrooms,
on the streets, in the parks, as tax dollars con-
tinue to be channeled into PERS when they
could be better spent hiring more teachers and
police.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Knute
Buehler has already issued an ambitious
PERS reform plan. Incumbent Gov. Kate
Brown has, predictably, pooh-poohed it. Her
own PERS plans amount to minor tweaks.
Buehler’s plan, on examination,
might prove unfair to current government
employees, or might not even save much
money. Brown’s campaign has said overall
government-employee compensation — pay,
retirement and health benefits — is reasonable
and should not be cut. But at this point, that’s
not the issue. The important element now is to
have a full public airing.
Oregon’s Democratic leadership over the
years has been maddeningly slippery about
curbing the costs of the retirement system.
That’s no surprise given how heavily funded
Democrats are by campaign dollars from
public employee unions.
Democrats have offered some modest
reforms, some of which were overturned by
the courts. And with a strong hold on the
governor’s office and both chambers of the
Legislature, they’ve declared there’s little else
of substance to be done about PERS.
Buehler challenges that assertion. It may
take an outsider — that is to say a Republican
— to get the message across to Oregon’s
Democratic establishment that public disillu-
sion over PERS, taxes and public services is
heading toward a tipping point.
Medford Mail
Tribune, on smoke
issue from wildfires
I
t’s become monotonous. With only a few
brief interludes of favorable winds to
clear the smoke, Southern Oregonians go
about their daily business in sealed cars and
closed-up houses and workplaces, strapping
breathing masks to their faces if they must be
outside for any length of time.
It’s a normal reaction to these conditions to
look for a fix. Surely something can be done
to limit wildfires and the smoke they produce.
Something can and should be done, but it
won’t be quick and it won’t be cheap.
First, it’s important to understand how we
got to this point.
Longtime residents remember summers
without weeks of choking smoke, a thriving
timber industry and reservoirs brimming with
water from plentiful winter snowpacks. None
of that is coming back, with the possible
exception of less-smoky skies — eventually.
While the timber industry was booming,
clearcuts were replanted with new trees,
which grew into plantations that now help to
fuel the fires that plague our region. Decades
of active fire suppression prevented the
natural, low-intensity fires that burn along the
ground, clearing the forest floor while leaving
big trees to continue growing. Underbrush
— what foresters call “ladder fuels” — now
chokes the forests, turning what could have
been beneficial fires into the “crown fires” that
destroy hundreds of thousands of acres.
At the same time, the climate was gradu-
ally changing, with higher temperatures, less
rain and snowfall and longer fire seasons.
Eight of the 10 hottest summers in Medford
have occurred since the Biscuit fire of 2002.
So what’s to be done?
The most promising plan was developed
by a coalition of federal agencies, conser-
vationists, business and community leaders,
landowners and foresters. The Southern
Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative
produced a detailed plan a year ago, called
the Rogue Basin Cohesive Forest Restoration
Strategy. It calls for mechanical thinning of
overgrown forests, coupled with prescribed
burning in the fall and spring when weather
conditions will keep smoke out of communi-
ties as much as possible.
The plan proposes thinning and fuels
reduction on 25 percent of the Rogue Basin,
or 1.1 million acres, over a period of 20 to 30
years. The group estimates that could reduce
wildfire risk as much as 70 percent, while
putting 1,700 people to work, directly and
indirectly.
Some of those would be logging jobs, but
by no means all of them. Much of the land-
scape that needs to be treated contains little or
no commercially valuable timber.
Those areas that do contain merchantable
timber could produce enough to approach
the annual targets of both the Rogue River-
Siskiyou National Forest and the Medford
District of the Bureau of Land Management,
all without clearcutting or encroaching on
riparian zones. The proceeds could help
defray some, but not all, of the cost of thin-
ning and fuels reduction.
The group estimates the work would
require up to $30 million in federal appropri-
ations every year for 20 years. That’s a lot of
money, but this summer’s firefighting costs
exceeded $135 million two weeks ago, with
no end in sight. And that doesn’t include the
secondary costs in lost tourism revenue and
destroyed property.
Thinning costs average $500 to $600 an
acre, with prescribed burning adding more
cost. But fighting the Garner fire this month
cost $4,900 an acre.
Congress needs to realize that it’s less
expensive in the long run to reduce fire risk by
restoring forests than to fight the catastrophic
fires that result from overgrown, unhealthy
landscapes.
That won’t mean an immediate end to the
smoke we’re now experiencing. And there
always will be some smoke from prescribed
burns in spring and fall, and from the
so-called “good fires” that remove underbrush
and keep the risk of catastrophic fire low. But
doing nothing will only guarantee more years
of unbreathable air and hundreds of millions
in firefighting costs, not to mention lost lives,
property and timber.
Let’s get started.