National Forests Fall Victim to Firefighting

Plan to Protect Residences Costs Trees, Money

NORTH KAIBAB NATIONAL FOREST, Ariz. -- Sharon Galbreath, who has spent half of her 48 years fighting to preserve old-growth forests, contemplated a 23-inch-wide old-growth ponderosa pine with a vibrant blue slash across its trunk, indicating it is fated to be logged.

"I see something like this, I think, what are they doing?" she said, standing in a clearing where towering old-growth trees soared skyward amid hundreds of stumps -- blunt testimony to past logging.

The proposed auction of new logging rights here reflects a shift in the federal government's forest management priorities that disturbs environmentalists, who say it is giving the timber industry access to previously off-limits forests under the guise of reducing the danger of wildfires. And though the timber sales produce revenue for the Treasury, the cost of administering the auctions is forcing the U.S. Forest Service to defer other conservation projects.

In its environmental assessment of the proposed auction here, an area dubbed East Rim because it rises from the eastern borders of the Grand Canyon, the Forest Service cited the fire threat as the No. 2 reason for going ahead: "The existing dead and live fuels have a definite potential to feed a destructive wildfire, endangering firefighters and the public alike and possibly consuming facilities and valuable wildlife habitat." It did not mention that the closest real residential community is 48 miles away.

Late last year, Congress made such timber sales easier when it passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which will speed up approval of projects that are aimed at reducing "hazardous fuels" on federal lands. The measure won bipartisan support after two years of devastating forest fires that alarmed lawmakers and citizens alike, and it has been embraced by the Bush administration.

By 2000, forest fires had reached historic proportions. That year and 2002 rank as two of the worst wild land-fire seasons in 50 years. In 2002 alone, 88,458 fires burned roughly 7 million acres in states including New Mexico, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, destroying more than 800 structures and killing 23 firefighters.

For years, federal and state policy had been to prevent fires on public land, suppressing naturally occurring forest fires to protect wildlife habitat and nearby communities. Over time, smaller trees sprang up and served as a natural conduit for bigger fires. The forests became more tightly packed, leaving little room for wildlife to roam and for intermittent fires to exhaust themselves. Years of drought exacerbated the problem.

This century of fire suppression was, in the words of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who supported the restoration act, "a failed policy."

Although the Forest Service has just begun to use its new powers under the act, the agency is pursuing a new forest fire strategy across the country. It estimates that 191 million acres of federal land, out of a total of 800 million, pose a fire risk. This sort of analysis has helped fuel the shift in federal policy in areas beyond the 20 million acres directly subject to the act, and it is alarming environmentalists who are trying to keep national forests off-limits to loggers.

Galbreath, executive director of the Southwest Forest Alliance, said the best fire prevention policy would be to clear out trees immediately adjacent to residential communities and to log only the smallest trees in national forests.

Until recently, Democrats had been fighting the Bush administration's efforts to accelerate logging on public lands in the name of forest fire prevention. But under pressure from constituents worried about fires, senators such as Feinstein have found common ground with Republicans on the issue, reaching an accord that will make it easier to log 20 million federal acres over the next five years.

"You've got to go in and clear out the forests," Feinstein said in a recent interview, dismissing criticism of the act. "Environmentalists didn't like the bill. They do not want the trees cut."

The consensus in Washington on how to reduce the risk of fire on federal land does not reach to such places as the Grand Canyon or the Klamath-Siskiyou region of southern Oregon, where environmentalists are fighting to halt pending sales that will fell tens of thousands of trees. Bush administration officials call these protests misguided.

"We're engaged in an effort to return the forests and rangelands to a point of ecological sustainability at which fire can play a more natural role," said Mark Rey, Agriculture Department undersecretary for natural resources and environment. "In order to do that successfully, we have to reduce the amount of woody material in many of these areas." Under his scenario, fires would not spread as far because they would have fewer trees to consume.