1. Fire isn’t always bad. Fires can be beneficial to forests. By eliminating undergrowth, wildfires create openings in the forest, which enable diverse vegetation growth that provides fruit, seeds, and nectar for wildlife to thrive. Fires also create standing dead trees (snags) that many animals rely on for food and shelter. Dry ponderosa pine forests actually need fire to control undergrowth and reduce competition for water and nutrients. However, while fire is often beneficial to forests, unnaturally severe fires—particularly near homes and communities—are a serious problem.
2. Humans have made forest fires worse. By removing the old-growth, planting dense stands of young trees, and suppressing natural fires, we have created unnaturally flammable conditions in many forests. Old-growth trees, with their thick bark and tall trunks that keep the forest canopy safely above the flames, are much more fire-resistant than smaller, younger trees with thin bark and canopies close to the ground. We also make matters worse by suppressing natural fires, which causes fuel loads to build up and increase the risk of an unnaturally severe fire.
3. Climate change could increase risks. Scientists predict that climate change will bring hotter, drier summers to the Pacific Northwest, together with less snowfall in the mountains during the winter months. Combined, these could significantly increase fire severity. The best way to combat this challenge is to restore and protect more old-growth forests across the landscape. Not only are old-growth trees more fire resistant, but they also capture and store tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide.
4. Many forests need restoration. Old-growth logging and fire suppression have left many forests unnaturally dense. Restoration-based thinning projects that focus on dense young stands and seek to restore old-growth conditions can be beneficial in making forests more fire resilient. Efforts like the Glaze Meadow restoration thinning project near the town of Sisters have reduced fire risks while improving habitat for fish and wildlife. In an old-growth forest, controlled burning can reduce fuel loads and maintain environmental health while reducing the risk of unnaturally severe fires. With proper restoration techniques including thinning and prescribed burning wildfire could cease to be the terrifying event that we think it is today. Instead, natural fires would be mostly the low-intensity ground fires that renew the forest in the ways it’s adapted to. (See more in our Eastside Restoration Handbook.)
5. Protecting homes doesn’t mean logging the backcountry. Thinning projects can reduce the risk of fire to homes and communities, but only when they are done carefully and in the right places. Unfortunately, the Forest Service and other agencies, under pressure from politicians and the logging industry, often have misplaced priorities, and spend millions in federal tax dollars trying to log in remote backcountry areas rather than prioritizing thinning forests near homes and communities.
6. Logging in recovering areas makes things worse. Logging corporations often demand that the Forest Service and other agencies allow “salvage logging”—including old-growth logging—after forests burn. This controversial practice allows bulldozers and other heavy equipment into fragile recovering areas, where they clear-cut both live and dead trees. Such logging destroys snags and wildlife habitat, interferes with the development of future healthy forests, damages fragile soil, and sends mud and sediment into the rivers and streams we rely on for clean drinking water. Scientists have found that letting nature take its course is the best way to help a forest recover after fire.
7. Simple steps can help homeowners prepare. Homeowners who live near forests can reduce risks to their property with a number of simple steps. Keep trees and shrubs pruned away from buildings and structures, use fire-resistant roofing material, mow the grass around the home, clean leaves and other debris out of gutters, and move firewood, propane tanks, and other flammable materials at least 50 feet away.
Industry uses fires to advance its agenda. Politicians, the clearcutting industry, and the news media often focus on wildly sensational stories about forest fires, making them sound far worse than they really are. For example, media outlets covering the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park described the forest as “charred,” “blackened,” “devastated,” and “ruined.” Yet today, park biologists say the fires rejuvenated Yellowstone and did more to improve the health of the land than any other event in the last 100 years. Fires are a natural part of typical dry Oregon summers and should be reported calmly and factually, without excessive hyperbole and hysteria.
Steve Pedery is the Conservation Director for Oregon Wild
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2015.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
As a professional forester with 33-years of experience in Oregon, I offer seven comments in response to Mr. Pedery’s opinion piece:
1. It is interesting that he criticizes the forest industry for using fires to advance its agenda even as he is using fires to advance his own. I encourage Oregon Wild to redirect its energy from criticizing others to direct participation in the many collaborative projects underway to promote landscape-scale forest restoration if it believes the priorities are wrong and money is being wasted.
2. He over-generalizes the fire tolerance of “old growth” (however that term is defined). Yes, for ponderosa pine and western larch but not so much for lodgepole pine, mountain hemlock, and white fir.
3. He seems to forget that about a third of Oregon’s forests are privately-owned financial assets that the owners would like protected. Unless he is advocating converting all forests to public ownership, just thinning around homes and letting fire run its course everywhere else is not sustainable when environmental, economic, and social values are holistically considered.
4. I would argue that 100 years of fire suppression and the last 30 years of a lack of vegetation management on federal lands have done more to promote recent unnatural fire behavior than continued fire suppression coupled with more active forest management on non-federal lands.
5. He seems to believe old growth continues to be under attack from logging. I am not sure where that is still happening at any scale close to the acres of old growth are being lost each year to fires than to chainsaws (think Santiam Pass). It is also important to remember that Oregon forests have always been affected by disturbances such as fire, windstorms, insects, and disease and were never an unbroken sea of large trees, but rather a mosaic of different age classes.
6. His tired rhetoric about environmental damage caused by logging does not reflect modern forest practices regulated by state and federal governments. There are good clearcuts and bad clearcuts just as there are good thinnings and bad thinnings. In the right forest type, in the right location, and depending on management objectives clearcut regeneration harvesting and perhaps even (gasp) salvage harvests can be the best choice and conducted in a manner that protects and maintains forest ecological processes.
7. It seems that society has three choices: 1. Let fires run their course and live with the consequences; 2. Do tax-payer subsidized light fuel treatments near communities that may or may not be adequate to save them or to restore forests to healthier conditions and will soon need to be repeated; or 3. Conduct more intensive, science-based, site specific restoration treatments across the broader landscape, which in some cases might actually generate some revenue.