Big Iron & Big Profit
As is in vogue today, business experts are allowed to pose as experts in any and all things. I caught this review of the new book, Running Out of Time: Wildfires and Our Imperiled Forests in Wildfire Today. The review is by Brian Ballou, who sits on the Board of the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative (SOFRC), an organization doing fine work in Southwestern Oregon. Brian’s review was reasonable and not gushing, but was overall positive. For that reason I had to take a little time to drop in a comment, from which this blog post is derived, since the book fuels the growing anti-use of fire sentiment we hear so much from those convinced we can log our way out of the wildfire dilemma. While the authors of the book, David Auchterlonie and Jeffrey Lehman, do get some things right, like the need to restrict development in fire prone areas, they mostly miss the mark. But hey, these are business guys, for whom growth and profit is the sacred cow. They tried to acquire a highly profitable aerial firefighting company, as part of their vulture capitalism, but were unsuccessful. This book seems to be an ill-informed vindictive response to their inability to jump on the wildfire profiteering gravy train a la Haliburton.
With no experience whatsoever in fire ecology or even wildland firefighting, they decry a culture that dares to consider ecosystem health and, instead, double down on suppression – the dominant, albeit failed, policy that has driven all the land management agencies since their inception. For the authors, an all-out reliance on technology and heavy equipment – privately owned, of course – is the only answer to the growing wildfire problem. This is disaster capitalism at its finest. They also reinforce the dominant belief in the industry-captured U.S. legislature that only more “forest management” (a.k.a. logging) can solve the wildfire problem. This process of thinning mature trees can only influence crown fire propagation, but does nothing to treat the surface fuels, the very thing that prescribed fire does eliminate. The “service work” of thinning non-merchantable materials and pruning lower limbs today comes only on the heels of a successful timber sale. Removing the slash, burning the piles, conducting understory burns all comes as an afterthought, using the proceeds from timber sales to get the work done. No timber sale often means no actual wildfire risk reduction.
This is beginning to change under the new U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Crisis Strategy. Of course, too much logging is proposed far from values at risk, but an increased emphasis on prescribed burning, putting it on par with the open checkbook always available for suppression, is also in the works. I’ll be doing another post about Forest Service Chief, Randy Moore’s, turnaround in his annual Letter of Direction to USDA wildland firefighters prior to this year’s fire season, now in full swing. After several years of promoting aggressive suppression, he finally go the memo that there will be no wholesale removal of fire from American forests. And don’t get me wrong. There’s an important place for prompt initial attack near homes, and removing merchantable sized trees has a place in forest restoration, but this should all be done with the interest of returning fire as a process to these fire-adapted landscapes where feasible.
If you live near a forest, it is not reasonable to expect you will never experience smoke. It is not the job of wildland firefighters to die protecting people’s stuff or to prevent the public from being inconvenienced by smoke. If you think that is their job, I would invite you to get out there and give it a whirl, yourself. With today’s climate-charged wildfires, it’s all firefighters can do just to get people out of the way. No amount of airtankers or bulldozers will put the fire out. Only a break in the weather does the trick. In the meantime, wildland firefighters have to contend with the likes of the authors and others who have permanently ensconced into the MAGAsphere of conspiracy thinking that “the government doesn’t put out fires anymore.” Their remedy is to remove all barriers to private for-profit wildfire suppression. How is that going on the war-fighting front?
For a sound and well-reasoned look at where money could best be spent to reduce the loss of homes and lives to wildfires, I would direct readers to this report, entitled Missing the Mark: Effectiveness and Funding in Community Wildfire Risk Reduction by the Headwaters Economics and the Columbia Climate School. We need to focus on zoning, building materials and fuel reduction in and around communities. Suppression is purely reactive, though it always elicits the “hopes and prayers” politicians so crave. It’s time to get behind proactive measures, rather than vilifying those same brave firefighters who conduct prescribed fires when one of the fewer than 1% of prescribed fires go awry. Away from communities in the wildlands we need to learn to live with fire, rather than continuing the hubris of believing all fires can or should be extinguished. The growing technology of fire behavior prediction and risk management should be fully put to those ends, rather than standing up more airtankers and bulldozers to sit idle when the ground is too steep or too fragile, the wind too strong, or when the visibility is too poor.
“This analysis concludes that the most effective policies for reducing community wildfire risk tend to
be those that manage the built environment, including mandated building codes and home hardening.
Those policies are also among the least funded or supported. Meanwhile, policies such as broad wildfire suppression are regularly funded but do little to reduce risk to communities and actually contribute to increasing risk over time.”