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A losing battle
, part II

Recent research shows that natural, catastrophic wildfires have been widespread during warmer, drier periods of North America’s history. For the forests, this may be good news.

By Ray Ring

High Country News

It is comforting to believe that catastrophic fires are something unnatural we have caused, because that implies we can stop them, with our forest thinning and other strategies. But that’s another assumption that may not pan out, says Jennifer Pierce.

Pierce, a third-generation geologist in Carhartts and turquoise earrings, scrapes the dirt with a shovel in the mountains just 50 miles from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Around her is an entire landscape of multiple catastrophes. The place looks like it’s been bombed. A series of fires beginning in the late 1980s has burned about 1.5 million acres of federal, state and private land. The fires swept away vast expanses of vegetation on highly unstable, very steep slopes — and that caused many dozens of massive mudslides.

"Don’t call it a mudslide, please," Pierce says, as she crouches on one slide that settled beside the South Fork of the Payette River. "It’s a debris flow."

Pierce is working on a Ph.D. in geomorphology, the study of how landscapes are formed. In the layers of mud, she’s finding a record of fires that have burned through here in the past. Her work, published just a few weeks ago, is part of the cutting-edge fire science that may force land managers to rethink the age-old dogma that says catastrophic wildfires are the fault of humans.

Beginning only about 10 years ago, tree-ring researchers made the connection between fire and climate change, when they showed that widespread fires in the Southwest United States have erupted consistently over the past 300 to 400 years, on roughly the same schedule as the planet’s El Niño-La Niña weather cycle. Paleo-ecologists at the University of Oregon have looked even further back in time; examining lake sediments that contain ancient charcoal fragments, they are discovering that widespread fires have occurred during the warmer, drier periods in the Northwest and Northern Rockies, stretching back thousands of years.

The tree rings and lake sediments show a lot of fires during past warming spells, but are not so clear on how severe the fires were, says Pierce.

That falls into the realm of geomorphology. A catastrophic fire that denudes an entire slope and causes massive erosion leaves a telltale deposit of charcoal fragments and sediment at the bottom of the slope, where the debris flow helps build a fan-shaped deposit called an alluvial fan.

The first researcher to use alluvial fans to link catastrophic fires and climate was Pierce’s mentor, Grant Meyer, a geomorphology professor at the University of New Mexico. His 1995 paper, focusing on Yellowstone National Park, showed that the lodgepole pine forests there suffered catastrophic fires in sync with long-term climate shifts, with big flare-ups during what’s called the Medieval Warm Period — roughly 900 to 1200 A.D. During that period, lakes receded, treelines rose in elevation, and parts of the West were gripped by prolonged drought.

Meyer’s findings were groundbreaking, but not entirely surprising — they were in lodgepole pine forests, which are known to burn dramatically. But Pierce has been working in ponderosa pines, which are not thought to suffer catastrophic fires unless people have caused an unnatural buildup of fuels. Her research suggests that the recent catastrophic fires are not a human-caused anomaly. The ponderosa pines around here also suffered catastrophic fires during the Medieval Warm Period; those fires were likely not the result of anything people did back then.

"I would contend that catastrophic fires are natural in the Idaho ponderosa pines," Pierce says. It’s true across the different types of forests, she and Meyer have concluded, and warming trends and drought seem to be the main cause.

Climate swings naturally back and forth on a predictable rhythm. Right now, as everyone in the sunburned West can see, we are in another natural warming trend — likely compounded by our industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

If climate is the main cause of the fires, then all our firefighting empire will amount to battling drought and global warming, slurry bucket by slurry bucket, saw-cut by saw-cut. Meyer has another strategy for slowing the fires: "Let’s worry about this warming problem, first and foremost, and see how we can work on that."

 

We don’t hear much from the policy-makers about the link between global warming and fires. Instead, those running the National Fire Plan say we should do more forest thinning and prescribed burns to help clear out the fuels, all to reduce the flammability of as much as 190 million acres nationwide. The costs are staggering — hundreds of dollars per acre on the low end, and as much as several thousand dollars per acre, depending on the condition of the forest. That would cover the first round of treatments. Over time, much of the land would have to be treated again and again, because ecosystems don’t stand still.

Even many people in the firefighting empire admit, quietly, that it’s madness to imagine we could ever do that much. But it represents job security and a fresh flow of funding. In the U.S. Forest Service now, whether you’re a biologist or a timber staffer, "No matter what you’re doing, you can justify it by a fire you might have, or a fire you already had," says Randal O’Toole, who heads the Thoreau Institute think tank in Oregon.

But even the empire has limits. Recently, the Bush administration and Congress refused to cover $300 million of the $1.66 billion the agencies spent fighting fires last year; the Forest Service has to eat that cost internally, by delaying or canceling all kinds of other work, including many of the thinning projects that would supposedly help solve the problem.

More reasonable minds conclude that we must set priorities. Concentrate on the forests close to the houses and the city watersheds, and begin to assign responsibility, so the taxpayers don’t have to bear so many costs for what amounts to a lifestyle choice — building houses in the woods.

"There is no way we are going to get out ahead of wildfires on so many millions of acres," says Jonathan Oppenheimer, who used to track fire spending for Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington, D.C., and now handles fire issues for the Idaho Conservation League. "The private property owners have the primary responsibility for making sure their homes don’t burn down. Why should taxpayers in Rhode Island provide fire insurance for people who live in Montana?"

Budget watchers, insurance companies and environmental groups in the U.S. are beginning to call for Red Zone residents to make their property fire-resistant, something that will surely collide with the usual anti-regulation fervor. Other predictable conflicts are already making reform difficult — collisions over whether loggers should take the old, big-diameter trees (which tend to be fire-resistant) to help pay for the thinning projects, and whether environmental regulations should be shoved aside so we can speed up the cutting. The evolution of a U.S. fire policy suffers the usual political and ideological catastrophes.

Roger Kennedy, who directed the National Park Service from 1993 to 1997, is among those who call for Red Zone residents to take responsibility. He also sees that the larger problem is global warming. "There’s no question at all" that the recent catastrophic fires are linked to global warming, he says. And the responsibility spreads far beyond the Red Zone — people everywhere in the global ecosystem contribute to the warming trend by driving cars, heating homes, using electricity from coal- and gas-fired power plants, and a hundred other things.

As we grope for an effective fire policy within the climate realities, science can be a beacon. As a beginning point, pretty much all fire scientists agree: Forest thinning and the other mechanical treatments will never replace the role of fire in recycling nutrients, or take the place of everything else that fire achieves. "We cannot thin our way to nirvana," says Jack Cohen, a researcher at the federal Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula, Mont. And prescribed fires will never replace the beneficial effects of true wildfires.

Scientists also agree that, with thinning or without it, fires are here to stay — and now we’re learning this includes some massive "catastrophic" fires. A realistic fire policy must acknowledge the inevitability of these big fires, impolite as they may be.

An effective fire policy will also attempt to undo the other insults we have heaped on the ecosystem over time — impacts that compound the negative effects of fire. Our mega-dams fracture river habitats; our thousands of forest-road culverts and water diversions fragment streams; farming and development remove sagebrush and grass habitat; we spread weeds and non-native fish, and on and on. We have broken up the forests so much that when a fire wipes out one patch, there may be no nearby patch to provide a refuge for native fish and birds, or to reseed the burned area.

"We have generated a stiffness up and down the ecosystems," says Cohen. That stiffness makes it more difficult to accept the stresses of fire. "If you’re already sick and you get beat up," says Atzet, "that’s worse than if you get beat up when you’re not sick."

Right now in the United States, we’re siphoning only a few million dollars from the firefighting empire into attempts to restore forests. It’s reasonable to invest more in restoration, in more creative ways.

Beavers, for instance, used to help make forests fire-resistant around the West. As beavers created their natural networks of leaky dams and pools, they slowed runoff, enhanced stream braiding, and created large riparian areas. Today, the West has only 10 per cent of the beaver population it once had. As a result, the riparian areas have shrunk, water tables have dropped, and many streams no longer flow year-round. When a fire breaks out, the dry streambeds and remnants of riparian habitat are vulnerable.

Perhaps we could siphon off a few hundred million dollars into a National Beaver Plan, and take a few more reasonable steps. Then, we could stand back and let the forests burn.

We may not have much choice about the latter.

 

This article originally appeared in High Country News (www.hcn.org), which covers the West's communities and natural-resource issues from Paonia, Colorado. Ray Ring, HCN’s editor in the field, writes from Bozeman, Montana. He can be reached at rayring@hcn.org.



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