By Joseph B. Verrengia,  ASSOCIATED PRESS
 

With wildfires raging out of control in 13 Western states, Rex Wahl has seen enough. Like a peace-loving homesteader who finally reaches for his six-shooter, the influential environmentalist has unholstered his chain saw.

Wahl is ready to cut down trees to save the forest.  The executive director of Forest Guardians, an activist group based in Santa Fe, N.M., had long opposed the removal of any tree for profit or for managing nature.

Then he watched helplessly from his yard as a small, planned fire raged out of control at nearby Los Alamos in May.  It charred 48,000 acres, destroyed 200 homes and caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.

"Wildfires are getting bigger, burning hotter, and the effects are more devastating," Wahl said.  "It's clear we'll have to take mechanical steps like thinning before we can use fire to restore these forests to a more natural regime."

As of Thursday, 85 major wild­fires were burning from Washington to Texas.  More than 4 million acres have been blackened this summer, and eight firefighters have been killed.  It is perhaps the worst fire season in the past 50 years, rivaling 1988 and the great Yellowstone blaze.

In Wyoming, Yellowstone  reopened on Thursday after being closed the day before by a fire in Grand Teton National Park.  People were evacuated from South Dakota's Black Hills on Wednesday and the danger even extended to Alaska.

So far this year, 4.9 million acres have burned nationwide, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.  The wildfires are being blamed in part on a century of conflicting land management policies that researchers say have misunderstood or ignored fire's purpose in nature: 

Commercial loggers have removed many large, fire-resistant trees.  At the same time, environmental restrictions in many areas have prevented timber companies from thinning out overgrown forests and removing dead wood.

• Some homeowners as well as environmentalists who are worried about endangered species  have opposed "controlled burns” that could remove the brush.

As a result of the devastating wildfires of recent years, however, some environmentalists are rethinking their opposition to cutting trees.  Among them is Forest Guardians, which had been one of the most vocal "zero-cut" groups.

Wahl, a biologist, suggested that old environmental dogmas must be abandoned. He is not embracing clear-cutting. Unlike loggers, he wants to save the big trees that are fire-resistant and readily seed new growth.  "Judicious cutting of smaller trees is what's needed," he said.

"I'm still waiting to see a thinning project where they will take only the trees that are causing the problem," said Sharon Galbreath, a Sierra Club spokeswoman in Flagstaff, Ariz.  "They want to take large trees, too."

Wahl's conversion reflects the crisis facing the West's sickly forests.  A century ago, before federal, agencies adopted a military approach to suppressing fires; healthy conifer forests sprouted 25 to 70 mature trees per acre.  Lush meadows filled the gaps.

Little fires swept through the grass and seedlings, but thick bark protected the large trees for hundreds of years.  An added bonus: The fires' heat melted the resins in fallen cones, releasing their seeds.

Lightning ignited many of  these fires.  But tree ring records and other sources suggest many, fires were set by Indians to flush game and encourage plant regrowth.

"Fire is a land management tool that they learned to use well," said Don Despain, an ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey Bozeman, Mont.

Today's forests stand in cadaverous contrast.  After a century of fire suppression, as many as 850 spindly trees per acre clog the same forests.  More than half stand dead, starved for sunlight and strangled by insects that bore into them.

On the ground, overgrazing by cows has compacted the soil and, stripped away the green grass.  Brush and dead limbs have piled up. 

In a dry year, a careless camper, a hot muffler or lightning can spark a catastrophe. In 1988, the Yellowstone fire was out of control within 20 minutes and burned for four months. Temperatures reached 2,000' degrees, melting steel culverts and glass bottles.

What happens after a blowup depends on the landscape and the weather.

Twelve summers after the Yellowstone blaze, surveys suggest plant diversity in the burned areas might be 10 times higher than pre-fire estimates.  But in other locations, the heat from large wildfires has penetrated nearly a foot into the soil,  roasting roots and seeds.  The heat also caramelizes sap and resins into a waxy layer known as hydrophobic soil.  Rain beads up and rolls off the blackened surface.  Plants cannot sprout, and a single thunderstorm can flush away topsoil that took 2,000 years to accumulate.  The sediment, in turn, clogs streams.

National Interagency Fire Center: www.nifc.gov