The wildfires that have raged across 13 Western states burned away a large measure of Rex Wahl’s environmental dogmatism as well. Wahl is executive director of Forest Guardians, a radical environmentalist group in New Mexico that has unconditionally opposed logging. This year’s disastrous fire season has prompted Wahl to modify his opinions as millions of acres of forest have been converted into air pollution. In May, Wahl was a witness to the disastrous Cerro Grande wildfire, which began as a federal "controlled burn" and metastasized into an unmanageable inferno that decimated 48,000 acres and inflicted more than $1 billion in damage.

By August, after nearly five million acres (an aggregate area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined) had been devoured by an estimated 64,000 fires — including 85 "major" fires — Wahl announced a stunning departure from his organization’s traditional position. "Wildfires are getting bigger, burning hotter, and the effects are more devastating," Wahl told the August 17th Washington Post. "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."

This is not to say that Wahl has embraced the logic of the marketplace: He still opposes "thinning" operations conducted for profit, and insists that "Judicious cutting of small trees is what’s needed." Even if Wahl’s conversion is less than complete — he seems to have stopped one exit short of the Road to Damascus, as it were — it is still newsworthy that the leader of one of the most militant anti-logging groups has renounced the "zero-cut" dogma that has devastated logging communities throughout the West, and set the stage for this year’s all but unprecedented fire season.

Indeed, Wahl’s group was part of an eco-radical coalition that had helped precipitate this year’s firestorm. The Forest Guardians were among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that sought to shut down logging in New Mexico and several other states in order to protect the Mexican spotted owl. On August 24, 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Muecke — ignoring restrictions on the Endangered Species Act that had just been enacted by Congress — granted an injunction "temporarily" closing down all timber harvesting in the Southwest’s 11 national forests. Judge Muecke ordered the Forest Service to collaborate with representatives of several eco-extremist groups to compose "a list of the activities or categories of activities that may continue as they have ‘no effect’ on the Mexican spotted owl." As New Mexico environmentalist Roberto Mondragon admitted, the eco-activists who drove this process "went ahead with their legal strategy without ever asking for input from the people who would be most affected."

The economic consequences of Judge Muecke’s ruling were felt immediately. "I don’t think any of us ever imagined in the freest country in the world that we could conjure up some circumstances where one individual would have the power, with the stroke of a pen, to shut down national forests and destroy a way of life and [at least] 4,000 jobs," stated then-Governor Fife Symington of Arizona. Arizona legislator Mark Killian reproached Judge Muecke and his eco-radical allies for "wiping out whole families. You’re wiping out whole communities. You’re wiping out the culture and custom of a group of people." In retrospect, as even eco-extremists like Rex Wahl have been forced to admit, the federal campaign against logging has wiped out millions of acres of forests as well. Regarding our nation’s forests, federal policy could be summarized as follows: Lock ’em up, burn ’em down.

Budget Blues

Although most Americans are at least somewhat aware that a major disaster has been underway, relatively few are paying attention to the way in which disturbing precedents in federal emergency powers are being set in the course of dealing with the forest fire rampage. Overmatched by this summer’s forest fire onslaught, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service were given a virtual blank check by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to raid the treasury — an ominous usurpation of congressional authority over federal spending. Thousands of firefighters have been imported from Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to reinforce 20,000 brave but exhausted smoke eaters from across the United States. And more than 1,000 soldiers and Marines have been deployed to battle the blazes — thereby reinforcing a growing trend toward domestic use of the U.S. military.

Why has this fire season — which was just beginning in August, and will not end until October or November — been such a disaster? Interior Department spokesman John Wright told the August 22nd Washington Times, "we could have all the preparation in the world, but there’s no way of knowing we would have this kind of year." Coming from a regime that displays unqualified confidence in its ability to project "global warming" trends decades from now, Wright’s statement could be taken as a refreshing example of modesty — were it not a desperate attempt to distract attention from the fact that the Clinton administration had radically cut funds to fight forest fires, even as it radically expanded the budget for land acquisition.

As the Times reported, the administration sliced more than $100 million from the Bureau of Land Management’s fire preparedness budget, even as it boosted the agency’s land acquisition budget by $11 million. While the preparedness funds would have been earmarked for firefighting essentials, such as tanker trucks, shovels, and training sessions for firefighters, the administration preferred to lavish the funds on the ongoing Western land lock-up: Even as millions of acres in national forest were degenerating into fire traps, the Clinton/Babbitt Interior Department was setting aside nearly a dozen new national monuments, gobbling up millions of additional acres in the process. "Their priorities are using the money for land acquisition and a lot of different things, like building a visitor center at a new monument," commented Les Rosenkrance, a former director of the National Interagency Fire Center.

Rosenkrance was among those who had warned the administration that our national forests had become fire-bait. In an August 1999 General Accounting Office (GAO) memo, Rosenkrance had warned that funding cutbacks had dangerously weakened the BLM’s fire-fighting capacity. "Should calamity strike in the form of being unprepared for a severe fire season that results in injuries or deaths," warned the GAO memo, "the agencies will be held accountable." But the blame must be distributed upwards as well, to the executive branch policymakers who mandated the re-allocation of funds — and who are prepared for an even more radical realignment: According to the Washington Times, the White House pared down the BLM’s 2001 budget request from $400 million to $297 million, which is less than current levels.

Problem Policies

In an August 8th photo-op visit with firefighters in Idaho’s Payette National Forest, Bill Clinton tried to lay the blame for this year’s fire season at the feet of inscrutable Mother Nature: "I know that Mother Nature will burn in our forests one way or another." But as Dr. David Riggs, director of Land and Natural Resource Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pointed out, "this year’s fires are not acts of God"; rather, they reflect a "century of federal land mismanagement," with fedgov poised "to increase what it already can’t manage." Even as much of the United States west of the 100th meridian is aflame, and with the Clinton administration’s deadly eco-shenanigans being exposed to sunlight, Congress is poised to pass the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, a measure, Dr. Briggs explains, that "would increase government land ownership through the creation of a $45 billion dedicated land acquisition fund."

In an August 15th column, George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal noted that in 1964, before the passage of the Wilderness Act, which "protects" 104 million acres of federal public lands, fire losses amounted to a mere 194,000 acres. "One principle of the act was that these lands should be left free of roads, which are a ‘death sentence for the ecosystem,’ in the secretary’s words," observed Melloan. "Certain areas also came to be declared out of bounds for anything man-made, including fire trucks. In short, they were to remain ‘wilderness.’" But rather than protecting the forest lands that were locked up, the re-wilding process left them primed to explode: "With use of detested insecticides and fungicides banned, disease and bark beetles killed stands of trees, making them powerful tinder for forest fires. Underbrush grew up, further adding to the tinder. A lightning strike could set all ablaze."

"Clinton and Gore have taken many steps to ensure funding for their lands legacy initiative, but it now looks like their real legacy will be the historic fires of 2000," observed Montana Congressman Rick Hill, whose state has been the hardest hit by the wildfires. Montana Governor Marc Racicot’s assessment is just as blunt. "The Clinton administration didn’t cause these fires, but their policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis," he told the August 12th New York Times. "I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but it’s a philosophy they have that leads to explosive fires that destroy everything." Thirty fires ravaged more than 630,000 acres in Montana, demolishing much of the state’s resource-based economy. With the Teton mountain range obscured by smoke and many of the state’s most popular rivers closed to recreational use, the fires have also gutted the tourist season as well.

"Ultimately, the White House is responsible [for the disastrous fires in federal forests], just as I am responsible for what happens to our state forests here in Montana," asserted Gov. Racicot. Although the administration professes shock and dismay over the "unexpected" intensity of the 2000 forest fire season, Gov. Racicot is among those who have warned for years that federal forest management policies were creating conditions for apocalyptic wildfires. As long ago as 1992 — during the administration of Bill Clinton’s Republican predecessor, George Bush — Racicot had warned officials from the Forest Service and BLM that forced reductions in the timber harvest were creating a dangerous accumulation of fuel. And last January, the Montana governor had petitioned Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck to allow more timber harvest in the state’s national forests — to no avail. For his part, Secretary Babbitt — in a familiar Clintonite refrain — dismissed Gov. Racicot’s criticism as "politically motivated," as if there were something scandalous about holding the administration politically accountable for its management of national forests.

Early Warnings

Gov. Racicot is just one of many who offered advance warning of this summer’s forest fire catastrophe:

• Writing in these pages nearly a year ago, William F. Jasper warned that the "federal eco-saviors" had "created ecological disasters of near-apocalyptic proportions. Tens of millions of acres of once-beautiful forestland have been transformed into charred moonscapes and dying, bug-infested, overgrown tinderboxes set to explode into blazing infernos." Mr. Jasper cited an April 1999 General Accounting Office study entitled Catastrophic Wildfire Threats, which offered detailed — and tragically vindicated — predictions of the present holocaust: "The most extensive and serious problem related to the health of national forests in the interior West is the over-accumulation of vegetation, which has caused an increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable, and catastrophically destructive wildfires. According to the Forest Service, 39 million acres on national forests in the interior West are at high risk of catastrophic wildfire."

• In April 1999, R. Neil Sampson, a senior fellow at American Forests in Washington, D.C., pointed out that "forest conditions and evolving land-use patterns are creating an explosive and expensive crisis in the Western United States — one that will not be solved without a major shift in policy and procedure at every level of government."

• The 1994 report of the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters, as summarized by Professor Jack Walstad, a Commission member, observed that "decades of exclusion, pest outbreaks, and the lack of active forest management in recent years has created millions of acres with huge fuel build-ups. In these high risk ecosystems, wildfires can build to intensities that far exceed the effects caused by natural, smaller fires which used to be more frequent and relatively benign." According to Walstad, "We’ve spent 70 years building this problem and it may take decades to get out of it.... Silvicultural measures to address poor forest health and fuel build-up are urgently needed."

These warnings, unlike fanciful speculation about "global warming" and other contrived "threats," were based upon existing, measurable trends and analysis of disasters that had already taken place. "After declining fairly steadily for 75 years," continues the GAO report, "the average number of acres burned by wildfires annually on national forests began to rise over the last decade, nearly quadrupling to about three-quarters of a million acres per year. Virtually all of this rise is attributable to the increasing number of very large fires." Furthermore, there has been a quantum leap not only in the extent of the fires, but in the magnitude of their intensity, as well: "Outside experts and Forest Service officials generally agree that increased fire suppression efforts will not be successful, because such inevitable, large, intense wildfires are generally impossible for firefighters to stop and are only extinguishable by rainfall or when there is no more material to burn. They are concerned that, in the future, such fires … will likely damage soils, habitat, and watershed functioning for many generations, or even permanently."

The Blazes Begin

"We have known for years about the imminent fire danger posed by the unhealthy state of our forests," observed New Mexico Governor Gary E. Johnson in testimony before the House subcommittee on August 14th. According to Governor Johnson, damage from the Cerro Grande fire was compounded "because the United States Forest Service does not allow the immediate removal of the fire-damaged timber for commercial use. Under current policies, it will take eight to twelve months before any recovery can occur, at which time the timber will be rendered useless by the effects of degradation. By conservative estimates, this represents a potential lost economic opportunity of nearly $15 million in New Mexico alone."

The Cerro Grande disaster is just one of the instances in which "controlled" burns have gotten out of hand. "Many cities in the West have in effect been entered in a new national game of Russian roulette," wrote Dr. Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland, a former Interior Department official, in the August issue of Liberty. "It was just the bad luck of Los Alamos that it happened to catch the fire bullet this time around. Last year, the wheel spun for northern California, where a prescribed fire set by the Bureau of Land Management got away and burned twenty-three homes. Even as Los Alamos was burning, another prescribed fire was out of control in Grand Canyon National Park.... The latest unlucky winner in the wildfire lottery is Colorado, where nearly 20,000 acres [have] been destroyed...." Politicians and the media rushed to place the blame for the Cerro Grande fire at the feet of the supervisor of the Bandelier National Monument, who set a prescribed fire in unfavorable weather conditions, and was subsequently put on administrative leave. "It is an old story," comments Dr. Nelson; "blame the sergeants and let the generals go free."

The Clinton administration’s "generals" — Bill Clinton, Secretary Babbitt, and Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck — "are caught in a rigid ideological bind that has prevented them from taking effective fire preventive action for the past seven years," asserts Dr. Nelson. "Prescribed burning has become almost the official religion, the one proper way that forests must be cleansed of excess wood ‘naturally’ (as if a fire deliberately set is ‘natural’). Forest managers have been under strong pressure to raise the levels of prescribed burns." As Governor Johnson pointed out, even after prescribed burns have wrought havoc, the Forest Service remains opposed to commercial salvage of fire-damaged timber. And, points out Dr. Nelson, the federal eco-bureaucracy is still intransigent in its ideological opposition to "mechanical thinning" of national forests — and perversely committed to seizing and locking up ever-greater tracts of land.

"In the very same week that portions of the Santa Fe National Forest near Los Alamos burned up, the Forest Service announced a new moratorium on road-building on 43 million acres of national forests," writes Dr. Nelson. "It was yet another step in a virtual agency war on timber harvesting over the past decade. Since 1989, harvest levels on national forests have fallen from twelve million board feet per year to less than four million."

Even after the current wave of forest fires runs its course and eventually succumbs to colder, wetter weather, national forests in the West will remain at risk of future disasters "as long as their huge inventories of excess fuels remain," warns Dr. Nelson. "The only way to remove these fuels now … will be to go in and cut the wood for sale for whatever money it will bring." Unfortunately, such a course is not regarded as ideologically correct.

"Although some environmentalists are willing to admit that ‘mechanical thinning’ — what most people call logging — is necessary to preserve the health of forests, they insist that it cannot be tainted in any way by private profit," Dr. Nelson pointed out to THE NEW AMERICAN. "Theirs is a worldview quite a bit like Marxism, where collective ownership under the government is seen as the only moral way to manage these forests. But at some point, even for the most devout environmentalist, ideology has to yield to common sense, or we’ll see more disasters, more loss of life and property, and the destruction of entire ecosystems through these aggressive, unmanageable fires."

Millennia ago, Aristotle taught that those things that are owned collectively are "equally neglected by all alike." The aggressive neglect of our collectively owned national forests sowed the seeds of disaster, and this year’s apocalyptic fire season represents the tragic harvest of decades of sylvan socialism.

 • The banning of insecticides and fungicides has allowed disease and bark bugs to kill once-healthy trees, making them more susceptible to forest fires.

 • The cutbacks in the Bureau of Land Management’s fire preparedness budget have dangerously weakened the agency’s firefighting capacity.

 • The simultaneous boost in the BLM’s land acquisition budget means that the beleaguered agency must protect more lands with diminished firefighting resources.

 • The creation of roadless areas eliminates pre-existing firebreaks and impedes getting fire trucks and other equipment to the fires.

 • The increased use of controlled burns, the one politically correct way to remove excess combustible material from the forests, heightens the potential for some fires getting out of control — as has already occurred.

Drought Fuels Raging Debate

By Jennifer McCary
June 2000 / Southern Loggin' Times

Even before the smoke had cleared, high ranking government officials, who ought to know better, responded with the usual knee-jerk reaction to the tragic Los Alamos fire. More than 30,000 acres burned as the result of a prescription burn that unexpected winds quickly turned to a raging inferno. Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman immediately imposed a 30-day ban on all prescribed burns in the Western U.S. 

Such blanket action is just another example of Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all mindset that is governing complex resource issues today. We seem to have forgotten that man cannot, and will not ever be in complete control of nature. There are always risks in any action. And when that risk becomes reality, the person best suited to respond rationally and responsibly is the man who is there, who has firsthand knowledge of the overall situation, not some poll-driven bureaucrat sitting in Washington. 

I guess a blanket ban might be a prudent course of action if this were an ordinary year with at least average precipitation. But the recently released drought forecast from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) anticipates a continuation of the La Niña-based dry conditions that have plagued some regions of the country for the past two years. NOAA's first-ever drought forecast was released in March of this year and then updated in mid-May. The latest report indicates that some areas will see diminishing drought conditions in the upcoming months but the full benefit of that much-needed rain will probably not bring relief because above-normal temperatures will rapidly evaporate the precipitation and soil moisture. 

According to a report to a House subcommittee last year, the administration's own General Accounting Office cites at least 39 million acres of Western forests and grasslands as "high risk for catastrophic wildfire." Thus, it would appear that the potential risk of more forest fires can only intensify during the hot summer months. Personally, I'd rather see efforts to reduce the fuel load in these timberlands using a prescribed burn to promote and sustain growth, rather than sit back and wait to see where and when nature will ignite a wildfire. 

But there is a concern that in some areas, forest conditions are so dense that any attempt at controlled burns could ignite a "crown fire," which is a type of fire that jumps from treetop to treetop with an explosive force. 

Some opponents of forestry's prescribed burn management tool are promoting the use of harvest thinnings to reduce the fuel load. I would agree that better management through increased logging operations would be ideal. But, let's face it, there is no way one single stick of timber in these high-risk areas can be cut soon enough to eliminate the current danger. Even if the Forest Service could respond fast enough to bid out these high risk areas, you can bet the greens would block every attempt through protests, litigation, or whatever means possible. 

An investigation into the cause of the Los Alamos fire will likely result in a lot of pointless finger pointing and perhaps even lay the blame at the feet of some poor FS employee who just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. 

Already there are some who claim fire suppression policies of the last 50 years are the culprit because it has encouraged "rampart growth" and ultimately worsen the fires that do occur. That seems illogical to me. First of all, isn't healthy growth a desirable goal? Secondly, what's the difference between a naturally occurring wildfire that is allowed to run its course and a man-made prescribed burn that gets out of control? Both destroy forests, threaten nearby communities and endanger wildlife. I seriously doubt Bambi and all his friends stop to ask whether that line of advancing flames is natural or man-made! 

I agree with the Wally Covington's assessment as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Ecological Restoration Institute director at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff sees a need for both burning and logging. "Under the dense forest conditions we're seeing in many areas, there's no way you can burn without getting a crown fire," he says. "You have to thin, rake the litter away from old-growth trees, burn the slash, then continue low-level prescription burning on a regular basis. And you have to do it in landscape-size units--200,000 acres or more instead of the 1,000 acre units we're dealing with now."

I think it is the lack of a balanced, multi-use forest management program that has created the dangerous tinderbox that exists in our Western forests. It'd be nice if everything didn't have to go up in flames before both sides recognize that we all benefit from a vital, growing forest. And like a flower garden, that takes cultivation.