Environmental▼News PERSPECTIVE U.S. forest fire policies get flamed have the potential to rage out of control. The smoke from these fires can also be a nuisance to surrounding communities. The chief of the USFS has authority over the agency, but the man who really maintains control is Mark Rey, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Deputy Under Secretary of Natural Resources and Environment. Prior to joining USFS, Rey served in a variety of industry positions including vice president for the American Forest and Paper
WASHINGTON DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES
Sometime this summer or maybe late fall, news programs will fill with images of catastrophic wildfires ravaging forests in the American West. And if the trend holds from the past two fire seasons, hundreds of homes will burn to the ground, causing billions of dollars in property damage. Next year will likely yield the same results, because the underlying issues are not going away. The western states are experiencing the worst drought in 500 years, and a combination of past timber-cutting practices and fire suppression in the United States has allowed the forests to become thick and overgrown. When fires come through these dry, overgrown forests, they burn at much higher temperatures and are more difficult to control. To handle this problem, President Bush has put forth a host of policy changes called the Healthy Forest Initiative, which culminated last December in the passage of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA). When the President signed the act, he remarked, “[W]e will help to prevent catastrophic wildfires, we’ll help save lives and property, and we’ll help protect our forests from sudden and needless destruction.” Specifically, the Bush agenda calls for more thinning of the national forests and a streamlining of appeals, public involvement, and environmental analysis to speed the process. While many experts agree that the national forests have become tinderboxes, there is strong disagreement even within the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) on how to handle the issue. Officially, the USFS prefers to thin trees mechanically and remove the wood instead of using prescribed fire. Prescribed fires are usually set in the cool, rainy spring months. At this time of year, brush and grass are still lush and burn with less intensity than in the dry, hot summer. While controlled burns require less man power and are cheaper than mechanical thinning, these fires do
thin the forest to control fire,” says former USFS chief Jack Ward Thomas. “We’ve done thinning for silviculture enhancement and pest control. So we do have a lot of research on thinning, just not related to fire.” An assistant professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, Scott Stephens agrees and says that any research to mitigate forest fires is maybe six years old at best. “I’m afraid the Forest Service thinks solutions are already known, and they are now going to implement them on a large scale,” he says.
U.S. forests have become tinderboxes, but many scientists think that the Bush Administration’s plan for “healthy forests” is more about helping the logging industry than about stopping fires.
Association, a timber industry lobbying group that supported passage of the HFRA. Rey told ES&T that the USFS has solid research that shows thinning can control western wildfires. He added that reducing fuels on that national forest will save both lives and property. “It’s not going to save every home, but it will mitigate the issue,” he says. But scientists, both inside and outside the USFS, say the research on the effectiveness of thinning is itself quite thin. “The Forest Service doesn’t have a clue about how to
324A ■ ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / SEPTEMBER 1, 2004
One of the first projects to provide good quantitative data on fire mitigation is the federally funded Fire and Fire Surrogate Project. The project encompasses 13 different forest types across the nation, and each site has four different plots of land to examine different fire control strategies, including prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, and mechanical thinning followed by prescribed fire. Other plots remain untreated to serve as controls. Stephens heads up the project site at Berkeley’s Blodgett experimental forest three hours east of
exploitation. According to Ward, “[Rey] makes no bones about it. He wants to bring the Forest Service more in line with production of commodities.” To help orchestrate commodities production, the first thing Rey did early in the Bush Administration was streamline the process for USFS projects. Streamlining was needed, he claims, because incessant appeals and litigation by environmental groups has slowed the USFS’s ability to protect the forests by thinning trees and has resulted in “analysis paralysis”. But a 2003 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) found that only 3% of USFS thinning projects were actually litigated by environmental groups. Further, the report also discovered that the USFS did not even have a database to back up its claim that litigation was impeding thinning projects. “The Forest Service is a case study in spin,” says one author of the GAO report. A recent study by Hanna Cortner, associate director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, found that a broad spectrum of groups appealed USFS projects, including individuals, tribes, business interests, and environmental groups [ J. For. 2004, 102, 26–32]. She also questions the USFS’s claims that litigation by environmental groups slows action and causes fires since the agency lacks a national database of appeals and litigation. From her point of view, the USFS is just playing political games. “I think the Forest Service has done a wonderful job of turning those who we think of as saviors of the environment into those we now think of as threats to the environment,” she says. Former chief of the USFS, Mike Dombeck, says that streamlining the process for thinning projects has left environmentalists feeling locked out of the process, which will probably lead to even more litigation. “Ultimately, if you don’t let people play in the game, the next time you’ll see them is in court,” he says. —PAUL D. THACKER
News Briefs Protecting the Indian Ocean Eight African countries will devise national action plans to cut pollution in the bordering Western Indian Ocean, with help from a three-year, $11 million project funded by Norway and the Global Environment Facility, a joint program of the United Nations and the World Bank. The countries are the Comoros Islands, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, and Tanzania. The Western Indian Ocean is one of the most wildlife-rich areas in the world. But the waters are threatened by unplanned urbanization, untreated sewage discharges, destructive fishing practices, and overexploitation of natural resources. Cleanup measures will likely include improving recycling schemes and developing wetlands to naturally filter and detoxify sewage, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which will implement the project. For more information, go to www.unep.ch/seas/ main/eaf/eaf.html.
Closing the diesel loophole Emissions from stationary diesel engines will now be regulated, according to a proposed agreement that ended a lawsuit between Environmental Defense and the U.S. EPA in July. A half-million diesel and gas stationary engines are currently in use, including industrial engines for agriculture, oil and gas development, and on-site electricity generation. Industrial engines emit the same harmful pollutants as vehicle engines but have not faced the same regulatory oversight. Under the proposed agreement, EPA must establish national clean air regulations for diesel engines by June 29, 2005, and for gas engines by May 23, 2006. The rules must be finalized by June 28, 2006, and December 20, 2007, respectively.
SEPTEMBER 1, 2004 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ■ 325A
USGS
San Francisco in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. Now in its fourth year, the Blodgett study has found that the most effective means to reduce fires is not thinning trees but removing surface fuels such as brush. The second-most important component to remove is the “ladder fuels” such as small trees and tall shrubs, and the final component is crown fuel in the tree canopy. While the ecosystem at Blodgett is different from places recently scorched by catastrophic fires, such as Los Alamos, N.M., and southern California, Stephens says treating the surface fuels through prescribed burns would still be the best strategy to mitigate fire. Critics also fault the USFS for failing to concentrate fire reduction programs in the wildland–urban interface—areas close to forests where people live and own property. The HFRA calls for $476 million to be spent this year on hazardous fuels reduction, but according to Rey, less than half the acreage thinned will be in the wildland– urban interface. In fact, the expert on protecting property from forest fires is USFS researcher Jack Cohen. His studies found that the best way to save homes from wildfires is to treat all vegetation within 100 feet of buildings, an area he terms the “home ignition zone”. Critics also charge that Rey is focusing too many thinning projects in old-growth forest and roadless wilderness. They see this as a sign that the USFS is reversing a recent trend toward environmentally sound management and reverting back to policies that favor industry. As an example, the environmentalists point to a recent operation on the northeast rim of the Grand Canyon on the Kaibab National Forest, one of the last few stands of old growth in the Southwest. The logging was stopped after litigation by environmental groups. The closest home was 48 miles away. These types of logging operations raise warning flags that the HFRA is less a means to protect homes and property than a policy to open up the forests to business
