Useful Fools

A few months ago I took a picture of the above billboard in Heber, AZ this year. Click on it to see the full picture.

From USA TODAY:

The Bush administration and Congress, pressing to enact a “Healthy Forests Initiative” that calls for thinning 20 million acres of forest, are “on the right track,” said Dirk Kempthorne, Idaho’s Republican governor, refecting [sic] the opinion of most on the tour.

But if the governors had gone instead to the scene of Colorado’s worst wildfire, the Hayman fire of 2002, they might have had a bit more skepticism about the beneficial effects of forest thinning.
Yes, let’s take one anecdote and draw our conclusions from that…

Click here for information on the billboard shown above, and the Rodeo-Chedeski fire that burned up so much of our beautiful Arizona ponderosa forest.

“Thinning,” concludes Greg Aplet, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society, “can change fire behavior under certain conditions, but it’s a mistake to say it can control or eliminate fire,” a statement supported by a comprehensive U.S. Forest Service study of Hayman fire.
Set up the straw-man: eliminate or control fire. What thinners want to do is reduce the damage of fire. If you want to see the real effects from an even larger fire in the same year as Hayman, click here

…[the Hayman fire was bad]…

The Hayman fire also tested theories about how thinning can affect fire behavior. The blaze slammed into areas that had been altered by commercial timber harvests or earlier natural fires. Some areas had also been thinned by chain saws and purposely set fires designed to clear underbrush and small trees.

With some exceptions, according to a study conducted by the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, the modifications had “little apparent effect on fire severity.”
So of course, only one fire, happening under record drought conditions, is enough to discredit thinning. That is what the article would like us to believe.

The accepted wisdom underlying the Healthy Forests Initiative is that poor management has left forests overcrowded, resulting in severe fire seasons in recent years.

An aggressive thinning program is needed, according to this analysis, to reduce the number and severity of western wildfires. Interior Secretary Gale Norton and other senior officials say that some 190 million acres of federal land are at severe risk of fire and must be treated.

But the Hayman fire offers several caveats to that way of thinking:

• The impact of forest thinning projects on fire — what works and what doesn’t under differing conditions — is not well understood. The research record is spotty at best.
  It is well known that reducing undergrowth and thinning normally reduces the severity of fire.
• The amount of acres that need thinning in order to protect homes may be far less than commonly thought, and much of it is in private, not federal hands.
  Thinning is to keep forest healthy, not just protect homes. Usually environmentalists are in favor of healthy forests, but certainly not if this involves any activity that might bring in the devil logging industry.
• The critical factor in keeping homes safe, according to a Forest Service researcher, is reducing flammable vegetation within 150 feet of homes and using fire resistant building materials.
  Isn’t that what we call “thinning?” I guess it works close to houses but not back in there forests? Uh huh…
• Climate cycles, including global warming, may play as important a role in the recent increase in catastrophic fires as how people manage forests.
  Ah yes… can’t have a catastrophe without “global warming.”

There is little doubt that man has had an impact on the frequency and severity of fires. That is particularly true in the dry forests dominated by Ponderosa pine trees that are common at low and medium elevation areas of the West, reaching as high as 8,500 feet.
Like what we are rapidly losing here in Arizona, with the help of environazis!

Under conditions that existed prior to white settlement, those forests experienced frequent, mild fires every 2 to 35 years or soBecause those fires thinnedcleared out underbrush and smaller trees, blazes were less severe and older trees survived. Natural Ponderosa pine forests resembled parks, with widely spaced mature trees and the forest floor covered in native grasses.
In other words, they look like they have been thinned, which of course is exactly what nature did. But nature can’t do that any more because the high density forests burn too hot, destroying all of the trees and even the deep forest soil, which is why human thinning is so important. Oh, and before white settlement, man was already thinning the forests. The Indians Native Americans burned the forests a lot as part of hunting, which helped prevent dense stands from developing. Don’t expect to learn that in this article.

Poor grazing and forestry practices, combined with nearly a century of firefighting efforts, have converted many of those forests to dense stands ripe for catastrophic fires that are difficult to stop.
Exactly. Here is the environmentalist meme: natural is good; man is bad. The amazing thing is that this article implies that thinning, which helps restore the forest to its “natural state” is bad, but only if man does it.

But for a subject of such interest, there is little research on the effectiveness of thinning. “There’s been a lot of anecdotal observation, but in terms of empirical studies, it’s a very small body of research,” says Erik Martinson, a researcher at the Western Forest Fire Research Center at Colorado State University who took part in the study of the Hayman fire.
Could this because Clinton’s Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbit discouraged such research? Could it be because such research is hard to do - empirical research means burning forests! Wait… most environmentalists themselves base their arguments on anecdotes about how things were before the evil white people came along.

In other types of forest, thinning may make little sense. Forests dominated by firs and lodgepole pines at higher elevations and more northern latitudes, for example, burn differently under normal conditions. These forests receive more moisture and are shade tolerant. So these forests are naturally far more crowded and have infrequent, severe fires.
Excuse me, but am I missing something? Aren’t severe fires bad things? Perhaps we should thin them. Oh, that’s right… nature is always right. If nature wants severe fires (such as those that destroyed entire forests early in the 20th century and killed hundreds of mere humans), nature should get them… now that’s environmental “thinking.”

Furthermore, there is some evidence that only a small fraction of the acreage cited by Norton and others may need to be thinned in order to achieve the program’s most important goal — protecting homes and communities on the forests edge.
Once again, a strawman: as if we only care about the homes. The most important goal is to protect the forests, both at the urban interface and the interior. A thinned forest normally burns at low temperatures, like the natural cycle. A forest which is not thinned often burns at very high temperatures, destroying not only the trees but the soil which took many centuries to build. This forest is replaced by vacant soil or grassland and does not recover for hundreds of years (See this current picture of 1977 Mt. Elden AZ fire).

Furthermore, forests away from homes are still part of watersheds, and if burned in a high temperature fire not only lose their beauty, but also their ability to reduce rapid run-off. In other words, they produce floods. Then there’s the wildlife… normally a matter of concern to environmentlists, but not as important as keeping out the devil loggers.

As Professor William McKillop of UC Berkely wrote today:”Thinning and
fuels reduction programs are much needed on our Western National Forests.
Those programs should not be restricted to only the “wildland/urban
interface” near communities as some suggest. Fires that occur in the
back-country are also a threat to communities, because they spread rapidly
by throwing hot embers far ahead of them when the crowns of burning trees
explode.”

…

But environmentalists worry the Healthy Forests Initiative — approved by the House and awaiting action in the Senate — will be an invitation to conduct large-scale logging in forests far removed from homes and communities at risk.
In this sort of issue, environmentalists would rather let the forests burn at high temperatures, destroying them for centuries and killing spotted owls and other environmental fetishes than to let their arch-enemies, the logging companies, get anywhere close to the forests. Because of this, environmentalists forced into law a restriction on thinning any trees larger than 12″ diameter - in other words, any trees which might interest a logging company.

And the criticism extends beyond environmental groups. Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies for the free-market Cato Institute, calls the Healthy Forest Initiative a “nice symbolic gesture with a big price tag.” To thin all forests at risk, he says, would be prohibitively expensive since thinning can cost more than $1,000 an acre under some conditions.
Not if you let the logging companies do it. They can take out the undergrowth as long as you let them take out some profitable trees too! Here in Arizona, what is left (after last year’s fires) of the world’s largest ponderosa pine forest has large trees very close together. When Bruce Babbit’s family first ranched in this forest (yes, of course Mr. Environmentalist’s family owns a whole bunch of it), natural fires had kept the tree density down so that “you could ride a horse at full gallup through the forest.” Now you cannot, because the big trees are too close together.

It would be far better, says Taylor, to treat the 1.9 million acres close to communities and follow the prescription of Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen. His research argues that homeowners can fireproof homes by reducing vegetation within 150 feet of their houses and eliminating flammable materials like wooden roofs.
Far better for reducing the loss of houses. But not better for the forests or the millions who enjoy the beauty of them. Not better for the watershed. Not better for the wildlife. Better, however, for the environmentalists. The more fires, the more species become endangered, and the more habitat becomes “critical” and subject to restrictions! And, of course, this approach keeps out the devil evil loggers.