Nature

NATURE The Good, the Bad, and the Needed

By Adam Gebauer

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN. PHOTO: ADAM GEBAUER

IT IS NOT TOO SOON to talk about fire season. The PNW has just left a sweltering and smoky summer behind us, but we will see it all again. The severity and size of western forest fires is growing. The annual acres burned has risen from 3.3 million in the 1990s to over 7 million in the 2000s. It is not only a western problem. Eastern cities like Chicago and Boston are experiencing significant air pollution from particulate matter from wildlife smoke.

Our forests are facing multiple factors that are leading to bigger, more severe wild fires: for over 100 years, fire has been intentionally excluded from the landscape; annual average snowpack is lower and melting faster; forests have been harvested of the majority of the fire-tolerant, older trees and left to re-grow in dense thickets with less fire tolerant species; and on top of it all this year the PNW saw a spring drought and severe heat waves.

Added to this is the increasing number of people living in the wildland forest interface or the WUI, making fighting fire more complex, costly, and risky for both those fighting fire and those whom live there. All of this leaves us with a very combustible mess, and we need to take a multifaceted approach.

Forests with different elevations historically have different fire regimes, or the frequency and intensity in which they usually burn. Low-elevation ponderosa forests historically burned with low intensity and frequent fires every 10-15 years. This creates a park-like forest with an open understory and large trees spaced relatively far apart.

Higher elevation, subalpine forests, on the other hand, historically had infrequent fires every 100-300 years, but they could be severe, significantly reducing the number of trees that survived. Recent studies are finding that an increased fire interval (<30 years) in these high-elevation forests are not providing enough time for recovery, thereby reducing tree regeneration and delaying carbon sequestration for more than 150 years.

The hard truth is we need fire in our Western forests, more frequently in some forest types and less frequently in others. They have adapted to and are dependent on fire. Many of our conifer trees rely on the heat from fire to melt resin in their cones to release seeds. Fire also removes underbrush, creates openings in the canopy for sunlight, and prepares the soil for seedlings. Deer and elk use these open areas too, where preferred browsing plant species like ceanothus thrive after fires. Species of woodpecker will also use burned areas with standing dead snags, and their presence helps to significantly reduce bug infestations.

For thousands of years, the indigenous tribes of the West used fire to their advantage. They would burn riparian areas to open up the landscape for better hunting and clear higher elevation meadows to increase huckleberry yields. Once horses arrived, they used fire to clear pasture. These relatively small fires usually burned in the fall right before the first snow, creating a mosaic of burned, recovering, and unburned areas across the landscape. This formed many firebreaks that would prevent fire from spreading too far. There were also fewer people and human structures on the landscape, which meant there was less of a need to control lighting-caused fires deep in the backcountry.

Recent studies from the 2015 Carlton Complex fire in the Methow Valley and fires near Lake Tahoe and other areas show evidence that increasing the amount of thinning, prescribed burning, and leaving older, more fire-tolerant trees on the landscape has several benefits. It helps reduce catastrophic fire, protects homes, and reduces air pollution.

Active management like this has its own set of costs, however. Thinning smalldiameter trees and brush is costly and without much direct commercial benefit, yet there are some emerging markets for wood products made from the smaller diameter trees that need to be thinned. By gluing small, irregular wood products together, cross laminated timber plants like the one in Colville create prefabricated construction material that can even be used in skyscrapers.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and others are experimenting with using forest thinning byproducts for other purposes too, including biomass energy production and biochar, which can be used to enhance agricultural soils, remediate waste waters, or be left onsite to reduce soil compaction after road building and logging operations.

Another challenge is that the USFS and other land management agencies have trouble completing their full suite of prescribed burns due to limited funding (even as huge sums of money are going toward fighting wildfires), lack of personnel, air quality regulations, and public perceptions about smoke from prescribed burns. Agencies in Washington only receive notice the afternoon before on whether they can burn. Although a recent improvement from notice the morning-of, this makes the logistics of planning prescribed burns difficult.

Many southeastern states have not only increased their breadth and training of who can burn, but they have also worked to educate the public about the benefits of prescribed fire. Florida in particular has been able to reduce air quality issues from forest fires through prescribed burning by near 30 percent. In California, officials are looking to Native American tribes to reinstate cultural burns, once outlawed, and train more people to be able to perform these burns.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, Ashland, Ore., has become an example of how a community, the USFS, and the timber industry can come together to start to restore our public forests. On the edge of town, 13,000 acres of forest are being managed through prescribed fire, thinning, and selective logging. This community was an epicenter of the timber wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, where environmentalists were fighting to save the last old growth forests and the timber industry and the USFS were already having a harder time finding big trees. Yet, a coalition came together to find solutions, an example of diverse interests uniting to steward their home forest resources that can be replicated in communities throughout the West. //

Adam Gebauer adventures on and advocates for collaboration and access to public land. He last wrote about who fronts the bill for those lands in the September/October issue of Out There.