I live in a part of the West where protecting houses from fire is a dangerous
and expensive business. It’s that incendiary mix of homes and forest alongside
publicly owned lands, the kind of place that’s bankrupting the U.S. Forest
Service.
My home is in northwestern Montana. It’s not a flashy McMansion; it’s a modest
house built 30 years ago, and it’s just two miles from town. But my neighbor
happens to be 30,000 acres of timber-company land, and its neighbor is a
national forest. Any day, a campfire or lightning strike could erase my
home.
Westerners know that wildfires grew bigger, hotter and more costly
in the last decade. Although fringe elements blame environmentalists or too much
wilderness, the true cause is the hapless combination of a century of Forest
Service fire suppression, diminishing snowpacks and the growing droughts
associated with climate change -- not to mention a reckless housing boom on
fire-prone lands.
In my community, the government offers grants for
landowners to thin unhealthy forests, making them more resistant to big fires.
The idea is to mimic the low-intensity ground fires once common here, by
removing litter, pruning trees and thinning over-crowded stands.
It’s a
treatment long overdue on the dense woods that have taken over one acre near my
house. Last autumn, foresters walked the land with me, showing me how to make it
fire-safe. In late February, with the snow still three feet deep, I went out
with my loppers and crosscut saw and got to work.
It seemed a simple
project: Each day after work I’d lop branches until dusk, pruning up to 10 feet.
My wife, Barbara, piled the branches, and even as bark and lichen fall on our
faces, we enjoyed ourselves. We found fox and grouse tracks in the snow and a
magnificent cottonwood we had never even noticed.
In March, we got busy
on the fir thickets. This was easy, too, removing spindly saplings that starve
bigger trees and offer flames a ladder to the canopy. The ladder can transform a
creeping ground fire into a roaring wall of flame. As we removed the last
saplings, we begin to focus on taller firs. And that’s when our confidence
wavered.
With the forest more open, we became nervous, wondering if we
were creating a sanitized park or losing privacy. Then there’s another problem:
We’re tree-huggers. Removing fir thickets is one thing, but choosing older firs
to go is harder. One offers shade for a young cedar, while another shelters some
well-used deer beds. We decided to wait.
We moved to the cedars, growing
thick in the absence of fire. But cedars are special. Along the Northwest coast
they provided canoes, fish hooks, clothing and planks for longhouses. Here in
the Northern Rockies, their fibrous bark and drooping fronds are unique among
our spruce and fir. We cut a few, but quickly moved on.
The spruce
should be easier. They’re abundant along the edge, with their crowns mixing
together and inviting a hot fire. When we fell small-diameter trees we can
almost hear the larger ones sigh in relief. But after six trees we stall again.
We really should take out some taller ones, but each reaches skyward with pointy
crowns, their trunks straight as a ship’s mast. We stare for a while, then walk
away.
Removing a few snags should be simple. We quickly down four, our
saw gliding through their brittle trunks. But we become bogged down about the
rest. The woodpeckers are frequenting one, while another -- broken at 30 feet --
might be nice for an owl. Barbara walks to a scraggly pine and shakes it. “How
about this one?” It’s a runt, with a scant crown and rounded top, yet it’s a
white pine, and we only have a few. We leave it.
One afternoon in late
March, I’m out there alone. After long deliberation, I decide to remove a tall
fir. It’ll create some much-needed spacing between crowns. Finally, a firm
decision. But before I can make the first cut, Barbara arrives. She shatters my
resolve, pointing out that two nearby birches are dying. Removing the fir might
create too large an opening, eliminating winter shelter for deer and
others.
We go inside. From the window, I see we’ve created a giant slash
pile, but the acre still looks thick. I’m learning that reversing a century of
fire suppression while maintaining a diverse forest for the future doesn’t
happen overnight.
Maybe our woods just need a good fire, not a couple of
hack imitators like us. They need something indiscriminate, something drastic,
like a wolf on a young elk. It may not look pretty, but just as wolves
strengthen elk herds by culling the weak, fire strengthens forests. Without
remorse, it removes the young and sick, favoring big Doug firs or ancient
cedars. The stories are singed across their trunks.
All this makes me
think of the Forest Service, which manages millions of acres of fire-starved
woods. The agency doesn’t pine over cutting trees, but it suffers a paralysis
similar to ours. Often, its thinning proposals are thwarted by citizens opposed
to logging. Sometimes the distrust is justified, when logging projects mask
themselves as fire restoration. Added to that tug-of-war, bureaucratic
requirements hobble attempts to use prescribed and natural fire. Then there’s
the budget crisis, which makes simply functioning a heroic achievement for a
collapsing bureaucracy.
In the end, 95 percent of fires on public lands
still get suppressed each summer, and fire-prevention projects lag far behind.
This winter, George Bush lopped away even more at fire-prevention funding,
further endangering firefighters, homes and forests. Meanwhile, living with
inevitable fire is anything but easy, and that goes for the government, as well
as for landowners like me.
Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a wilderness ranger in
Alaska and lives part-time in Montana.
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