On the ground, we’re sure of one thing: wildfires are getting more explosive and less predictable. The last 100 years of successful containment of natural forest fires (by the Forest Service and its growing army of foot soldiers, bulldozers, helicopters and planes) has allowed an accumulation of brush and young, tightly packed trees that have turned our forests into time bombs. Now they burn too hot, and instead of just scarring the big trees a fire consumes them. I’ve walked through countless areas where the fire has “nuked black,” leaving only limbless, charred poles for trees, and ash six inches deep. This is “bad fire,” so hot that 300- to 600-year-old trees and even veteran firefighters do not always survive them. This summer Rick Lupe, a good, competent fire supervisor with more than 20 years of experience, died when a routine procedure of intentionally burning brush and undergrowth (a “prescribed burn”) turned into an unpredictable bad fire. Lupe died in the face of fire behavior and fire models that we’ve never dealt with before.
Earlier this season, I was dispatched with my crew to fight the Divide fire, deep in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest. To contain the blaze, which started with a lightning strike and had burned 5,000 acres, we literally fought fire with fire. This meant setting smaller fires to burn up all the grass, pine needles and shrubs–the “ground fuels”–inside the boundaries of a shallow trench we dug around the main fire. I carried the drip torch, a watering-can-like device that releases a thin stream of fuel past a flaming wick used to light the ground fuels. Once we safely burned the ground fuels, the main fire died when it reached the fire line. Watching two-foot incandescent flames of the burn crackle up the hillside in the deepening gloom of twilight, my supervisor, Dewey Rebbe, turned to me, his face illuminated by the rosy glow, and said with satisfaction, “That’s good fire there.”
We need to bring “good fire” back. Fire was a natural part of the landscape for millions of years, with widespread, less intense forest fires preventing much hotter ones later. A thousand years ago a ponderosa-pine forest would have looked stately and parklike, with a density of about 40 trees per acre. Natural wildfires would wash through every two to three years, consuming the understory but only scarring the mature trees. Now vast tracts of our forests–ones where man has kept fire out–are packed with more than 1,000 trees per acre. The lack of natural fire has left our forests loaded for bad fire.
It is obvious we have to start thinning our forests–some foresters and scientists predict that 30 million to 40 million acres need to be thinned–but the question is how. The issue is contentious and pits the environmentalists, who want the forests left alone, against the timber companies, which want unrestricted logging access. Neither side’s answer is satisfactory. Some logging has to be done, but the kind of logging that prevents fires–cutting down small trees and underbrush, while leaving the strong, healthy trees that can withstand a fire–is not commercial. Logging companies, unfortunately, can’t make much more than particle board from this small stuff, and the labor is intense. A compromise is in order: environmentalists must accept that letting loggers have some of the good trees is necessary to save the forests, and the timber companies need to be more concerned with the long-term picture, especially when they have contracts to log on public land.
The good news is that once areas have been thinned, it’s relatively easy for them to be burned safely every few years to prevent future bad fires. What is needed of the president, Congress, the logging companies, the environmentalist groups and the public is farsightedness (something the inheritors of Manifest Destiny have never been famous for). We need to look at the forests and think about them 100 years from now, 200 years from now–and maybe more. What’s needed are healthy forests in as near a natural state as we can get. One that includes fire.
