On June 8 you read on Wildfire Today about the study that reported that only 11 percent of fuel reduction projects on federal land are within 1.5 miles of an urban interface. George Ochenski of the Missoula Independent in an article looks at the rest of that study and draws some conclusions about forest and wildfire management.
Remember back when Karl Rove and the clever wordsmiths of the Bush administration came out with the Clear Skies Initiative and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act? Many argued that these policies did exactly the opposite of what their titles suggested, leading to dirtier air and more logging in national forests. Now, a long eight years later, it is hardly a surprise that a new study finds Healthy Forests has indeed failed to achieve its promised results.
No administration in recent memory has used fear as effectively as did the Bush-Cheney cabal—and Healthy Forests was no exception. With some 20 million acres of dead pines in Canada, predictions that Colorado and Wyoming would have no lodge pole forests in five years and enormous swathes of Montana now covered with red or dead trees, it wasn’t hard for Bush and his pals in the logging industry to raise the specter of massive, catastrophic wildfires. Their solution was to fast-track new logging on federal forests under the rubric of “fuels reduction.”
If only we allowed the “forest professionals” to manage the land, we were told, they would undo a century’s worth of mismanagement by, ironically, the forest professionals who had preceded them. It was those mistakes, we were assured, that led to the accumulation of fuels that would now create uncontrollable wildfires unless the logging industry was set free of pesky environmental constraints and the threat of lawsuits by concerned citizens. Those who criticized the new policy for its shortcuts and shortcomings, were dubbed obstructionists, at best, and painted as endangering their fellow citizens and communities at worst.
But now a new study, headed by University of Colorado fire ecologist Tania Schoennagel and published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a hard look at the efficacy of 44,613 “fuel reduction” projects undertaken in Western states since Bush, with backing from timid Democrats, unleashed the chainsaws on what was left of the nation’s Western forests.
Thanks Kelly.
