Burning Money

The wildfires that swept across the western United States during this past fire season were predictable and inevitable. In most cases, several years of heavy rainfall had allowed grasses and other fine fuels to grow up. Then, as so often happens in big fire years, it all dried out. As early as July, the moisture content of live green trees throughout much of the West was less than 12 percent--lower than that of kiln-dried lumber. By the end of August the Bighole River at Wisdom, Montana, was flowing at 9 cubic feet per second--51 cfs below normal for that time of year.

Even in the spring the fire hazard had been extreme. In mid-May a fire spread from Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico into adjacent suburbia, leaving 405 families homeless and damaging the nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos. On August 6 a fierce wind whipped eight fires near Darby, Montana, into the year's biggest conflagration, which burned 155,600 acres. At about this time, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a running crown fire (in which the tops of trees explode) engulfed 50,000 acres in just hours, eventually scorching 82,000 acres--the largest fire in that region's recorded history. As of mid-November, 7,250,965 acres had burned, and federal agencies, mostly the U.S. Forest Service, had spent more than $1 billion trying to extinguish the fires. The press called fire season 2000 "a natural disaster."

But for the most part nature emerged just fine. The only real environmental damage was caused by human intervention. Fire had been excluded for so many years that unnaturally high brush buildup frequently carried flames into the crowns of large, thick-barked, otherwise fireproof trees. Burning watersheds were bombed with a thick, red slurry that degrades to cyanide. Although the Forest Service suspended the use of the slurry last March, it waived the ban as the fire season approached. Finally, firefighters hacked up ground cover by bulldozing fire lines through forests. Even as I write, these fire lines are providing access for all-terrain vehicles and invasive weeds (a major wildfire hazard because they replace plant communities whose diversity had provided natural firebreaks). Smokey's shibboleth notwithstanding, forest fires cannot be "prevented," only postponed. And the longer they're postponed, the hotter they burn and the more damage they do to things humans want, such as buildings and old-growth timber.

If humans would cut old-growth timber more selectively, less of it would burn. Few fire hazards are more severe than a large clearcut where slash and second growth have been desiccated by sun and wind. In fact, forest fires frequently jump from one clearcut to the next, racing along the connecting logging roads. Such reality, however, has never deterred advocates of increased logging from using summer fires to advance their cause. For instance, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois blamed fire season 2000 on logging reductions implemented by the Clinton administration. Although fuel buildup takes decades or in some cases centuries, presidential candidate George W. Bush announced that the policies of the Clinton administration had "made the forests more dangerous to fire [sic]." But then Texas--a state presumably well insulated from Clinton and fire, since it has almost no federal land--erupted into flames, and Bush beseeched the president for emergency firefighting funds. Montana governor Marc Racicot, positioning himself for an appointment in the Bush administration (reportedly as Interior Secretary), attempted to tie the fires to Clinton's roadless policy, despite the fact that it had yet to be implemented. He told the Montana Wood Products Association that he wanted to use the fires to "redo the entire legal framework" governing national forests--including the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

If roads and logging operations prevent forest fires, those that occurred last summer should have avoided private timberlands and burned instead on federal wilderness. But the exact opposite happened. For example, the most destructive fires in the nation got started on private land in Montana that, with Governor Racicot's blessings, had been heavily roaded and logged by the Darby Lumber Company. Moreover, the company had procured the property with a loan from the state. Throughout the West, 70 percent of the burned area wasn't even in the national forest system.

The fires in Yellowstone National Park 12 years ago taught the federal government and even an element of the public that wildfire isn't just natural and inevitable but essential. Today the park is richer and more diverse than Caucasians have ever seen it--a far cry from the "smoke-blackened ruin" The Wall Street Journal proclaimed it to be 12 years ago. Fire cleanses and renews, and countless organisms that have evolved with fire cannot survive without it. The frequency of fire varies with forest type. Sage grass-ponderosa pine ecosystems need slow ground fire every few decades. Yellowstone's lodgepole-pine ecosystem needs a hot, stand-replacing fire every few centuries. Some, though not all, lodgepole cones need fire to melt their resin and release their seeds, and because the seedlings are sensitive to a damping-off fungus, they have a difficult time surviving in soil that has not had its organic layer burned away.

Aspen seedlings and giant sequoias also depend heavily on burned soil to get started. The seeds of the Peter's mountain mallow won't germinate unless cracked by fire, and the species is now endangered because of fire suppression. The shrub ceanothus produces seeds that can lie dormant for centuries awaiting scarification by fire. Fire stimulates some plants to flower--Great Basin wild rye, for instance. Jack pines cannot reproduce unless their cones have been opened by fire, and now the Kirtland's warbler, which nests in their branches, is endangered. In the Great Lakes states, a species of purple lupine that grows only in fire openings has been nearly eliminated by fire suppression, as has the endangered butterfly that feeds on it--the Karner blue. In the Southeast, red-cockaded woodpeckers are endangered because decades of fire suppression has allowed oaks and other hardwoods to grow to the level of the birds' nest holes in longleaf pines, thereby providing access to snakes and other predators. Depriving a forest of fire is like depriving a coastal salt marsh of tide.

Despite the noise from politicians and the press, there was nothing unusual about the fires of 2000, which burned 7.2 million acres. In fact, they weren't much more severe than the fires of 1999 and 1996, when 5.7 million and 6.7 million acres burned, respectively, and they were less severe than the fires of 1988, when 7.4 million acres burned. In the context of the 20th century, they were mild. In the 1930s--before Congress started writing federal agencies blank checks for firefighting--an average of almost 40 million acres burned per year. From 1920 to 1950, when forest fires were still more or less doing their thing, the average area burned each year was eight times what it was from 1970 to 1999. In the past 30 years the federal firefighting budget has increased by a factor of 10, to roughly $1 billion a year.

What America got for the $1 billion it spent to fight the fires of 2000 was essentially nothing. Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, put it this way: "It may make financial sense to put out small fires that have just started in places we don't want burned--say, the grasslands around suburban Los Angeles or the backyards of Santa Fe. But the notion that we should continue to fight fires when they're 10,000 acres or 100,000 acres is ludicrous. We never put out fires of that size. Nature does. But we always fight them. We might as well drop dollar bills on them." The General Accounting Office agrees, observing in a 1999 report that "large, intense wildfires are generally impossible for firefighters to stop and are only extinguished by rainfall or when there is no more material to burn."

During the Yellowstone fires, Guru Ma, spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant (who once told me she used to be Marie Antoinette), fought a blaze bearing down on the church's sacred meeting ground at Mol Heron Creek by deploying her flock in rotating, mantra-chanting brigades of 300 that instructed the flames to "roll back." The flames complied. A month later, when the fire circled the church's 30,000 acres and came in from the opposite side, Guru Ma again suppressed it, this time by ordering up a cold front from the archangel who handles weather. Using this technique, the National Park Service and the Forest Service would have saved taxpayers $130 million and achieved results no worse than the ones they got. They knew it even then; when the park was still smoldering, both agencies were admitting that their fire suppression efforts had accomplished virtually nothing.