Subject:  Commercial logging Causes, Not Prevents, Catastrophic Fires
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.
     http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives
	http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

05/22/00
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY
The American timber industry is using the Los Alamos prescribed burn 
that got out of control as an excuse to push for more commercial 
logging in National Forests, ostensibly to reduce fire risk.  This is 
ecological heresy.  The truth is that timber sales are causing 
catastrophic wildfires on national forests, not alleviating them.  In 
many cases, overly intensive industrial forest management opens up the 
understory, changing microclimate, and making conditions more 
conducive for large fires.  Prescribed burns are an important tool in 
forest management.
g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

Title:   Commercial Logging Doesn't Prevent Catastrophic Fires, It 
         Causes Them
Source:  Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company - Opinion 
Date:    May 19, 2000  
Byline:  Chad Hanson 

Yesterday's release of the National Park Service plan for a 
"prescribed burn" in New Mexico -- the fire that went awry and 
destroyed homes and businesses in Los Alamos -- has added to calls for 
a re-evaluation of the service's fire policies.  But some of these 
exhortations, coming from the timber industry's supporters in 
Congress, look more like opportunism than considered criticism of what 
went wrong in this fire.  

For those who want more commercial logging of America's national 
forests, the Los Alamos tragedy plays into a stance that is already 
well rehearsed: that more logging can "reduce the risk of catastrophic 
wildfires." It is an argument that doesn't hold up.  

While Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, and his allies in the 
timber industry talk about "thinning underbrush," the real interest of 
the industry is in gaining access to the last remaining mature forests 
on federal lands.  

In April 1999, the General Accounting Office issued a report that 
raised serious questions about the use of timber sales as a tool of 
fire management.  It noted that "most of the trees that need to be 
removed to reduce accumulated fuels are small in diameter" -- the very 
trees that have "little or no commercial value." 

As it offers timber for sale to loggers, the Forest Service tends to 
"focus on areas with high-value commercial timber rather than on areas 
with high fire hazards," the report said.  Its sales include "more 
large, commercially valuable trees" than are necessary to reduce the 
so-called accumulated fuels (in other words, the trees that are most 
likely to burn in a forest fire).  

The Forest Service typically keeps about 90 percent of the revenue 
from these timber sales.  The money has helped finance both the 
agency's budget and its preparations for more commercial logging.  
Meanwhile, the logging industry gets rich on cheap timber, and pro-
timber members of Congress receive millions in campaign contributions 
as an incentive to keep this system going.  Taxpayers take an enormous 
loss.  

The truth is that timber sales are causing catastrophic wildfires on 
national forests, not alleviating them.  The Sierra Nevada Ecosystem 
Project Report, issued in 1996 by the federal government, found that 
"timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local 
microclimate and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more 
than any other recent human activity." The reason goes back to the 
same conflict that the G.A.O. found: loggers want the big trees, not 
the little ones that act as fuel in forest fires.  

After a "thinning" timber sale, a forest has far fewer of the large 
trees, which are naturally fire-resistant because of their thick bark; 
indeed, many of these trees are centuries old and have already 
survived many fires.  Without them, there is less shade.  The forest 
is drier and hotter, making the remaining, smaller trees more 
susceptible to burning.  After logging, forests also have 
accumulations of flammable debris known as "slash piles" -- unsalable 
branches and limbs left by logging crews.  

In 1994, Jack Ward Thomas, then chief of the Forest Service, said in 
congressional testimony that fires don't hurt the forest itself.  Even 
fires that kill many trees "in an area from which you do not expect to 
extract timber" might be "perfectly acceptable," he said.  He gave the 
example of Yellowstone National Park.  "It burns up; it burns hot, and 
the system that's associated with it comes back," he said.  

After several decades of federal management that suppressed fires -- 
with timber sales in mind -- some forests on federal lands have 
actually become more flammable, since they have been deprived of 
fire's important natural role of clearing brush under the big trees 
and returning nutrients to the soil.  

Controlled burning has been used successfully for over a decade to 
reintroduce fire into forest ecosystems.  The National Park Service 
reports that fewer than 1 percent of controlled burns result in 
"escapes" -- fires that cross their predesigned boundaries.  Even 
then, people and property are almost never hurt.  

This does not excuse any carelessness, of course, that may have led to 
the New Mexico fire, which clearly did escape, and tragically so.  

But it would be an even bigger tragedy if we allowed the timber 
industry's allies in Congress to continue destroying our national 
forests under the self-serving guise of fire management.  Ultimately, 
our public forests will be safe only when Congress passes legislation 
to end the timber sales within them.  

Chad Hanson is executive director of the John Muir Project and a 
national director of the Sierra Club.