“When trees fall down after a short period of time, they become very dry — really like a matchstick. And they can explode. Also leaves. When you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.”
Donald Trump, in Sacramento
These fires are on federal forests. The "you," with the dried leaves, is him.
Trump looks like the archetype city guy and absentee landlord, operating in ignorance, flying in to give advice, then leaving. Meanwhile, nothing happens.
Oregon's largest fire is called the Holiday Farm Fire. At this moment is it 165,000 acres. It is burning on the Willamette National Forest, part of the US Department of Agriculture.
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| Willamette National Forest |
Oregon's second largest fire is called the Lionshead Fire. It is 149,000 acres, on land administered by the US Department of the Interior for the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
Two more Oregon fires are also greater than 100,000 acres, the Riverside Fire, on the Mt. Hood National Forest and the Archie Creek Fire on the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management. The Slater Fire, at 148,000 acres this morning, is burning on three different national forests on both sides of the Oregon-California border.
For readers not accustomed to thinking about acreage in large numbers, Central Park in New York City is 843 acres. All of Manhattan is 14,600 acres. The City of Cambridge, Mass. is 4,542 acres and all of Boston--including every neighborhood from East Boston to Roxbury, to Dorchester and out to Allston is 57,000 acres. The entire sprawling city of Chicago is 150,000 acres, the size of the second largest of the Oregon fires, except that Chicago isn't growing and the Lionshead Fire is.
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| Lionshead: 5% contained |
All these fires and others are on federal land, as is 53% of Oregon. I note this not as a complaint about federal ownership, Theoretically the United States would be a good steward of this property--indeed a better one than would be Weyerhaeuser or some other forest products company, or if it were privately owned and purchased by foreign investors.
But irony isn't dead. Donald Trump came to the West Coast to complain and give advice about the lousy management of land under his own management. Forest policy, like health care, is complicated. Forests are not golf courses, country clubs, or city parks. He looks like a clueless city dude. There is work to be done, but it would not be raking dead leaves.
The forests are, in fact, in trouble, and Trump inherited a long-standing problem. Congress passed laws protecting endangered species which, in consideration of the spotted owl, dramatically reduced allowable logging and removal of trees. Lawsuits over the adequacy of environmental impacts continue to block timber sales. The net result is that removal of trees from the forests are a fraction--perhaps ten to twenty percent--of the amount of growth that is actually taking place on the forest. Fuel has been accumulating.
In the past income from timber harvests paid for the management of the forests, supplied an industry, and paid money to the local governments in lieu of taxes that would have been earned had the land been privately owned and taxable. Not anymore. Very reduced harvests created a feedback loop. Less income means less management for forest thinning and for controlled burns outside of fire season.
Trump has been president for 3 3/4 years, including two with a compliant House and Senate, but his focus was elsewhere. Dealing with a complicated forest problem is a matter of governing, not message signaling. Some of the work to be done----and this will be controversial with some of my environmentalist readers--include cutting and removing more trees for sale. Southern Oregon's Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest grows something around a billion board feet of tree fiber even year. It doesn't--should not--mean that it is all harvested. Some of it is in areas that are set aside as natural areas for other purposes, e.g. stream side shade, wildlife habitat, recreation. When trees there get old they die and rot. Or they will burn up in a fires, as they have been doing forever. There is a cycle of life. Those rotten trees create habitat and, eventually, new soil. But forest fires from lightning are a natural occurrence, too. Those are ripe for burning.
Some environmentalists consider sharply reduced timber cutting a victory for the forest environment--natural is better. There is a consequence of sharply reduced timber harvest, showing up in more insect damage, clearly overcrowded forests, more fire fuel, and therefore worse fires, especially in this era of hotter, dryer summers. This may change the politics of forests, even in this blue, environmentally conscious region. The fires are killing people quickly, the smoke slowly, and in recent summers there have seen weeks--sometimes months--of unpleasant hazardous air.
People in the Northwest look forward to a relief from the seven months of cool rain. Summer, glorious dry summer! And the beautiful outdoors! Now smoke ruins it.
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| Dangerously thick growth |
If California, Oregon, and Washington were swing states we might see some dramatic initiatives. We aren't and we won't. Still, there is a political opportunity here, for Biden next year, perhaps, and for Trump now, if he were inclined to do it. There is a three part problem of COVID, high unemployment, and the fires and smoke. Public attention is focused and the current situation is intolerable. There is a political window for change.
Trump could make a big show, announcing a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps combined with a bipartisan task force to increase timber harvests to remove diseased and overcrowded forests. It would require cooperation and deal making with Democrats, with environmentalists, with people from timber country and with urban environmentalists who know nothing about forests beyond that they are God's creation and need to be protected from the terrible logging industry. He could make it bigger than anything FDR did, and tell the public he--not FDR and not Biden--is the historic deal maker president, doing something huge and tremendous to solve a forest problem.
It won't happen. Trump's presidency is not about bi-partisan task forces to address complicated issues. Environmentalist are more valuable to Trump as people to mock and accuse. Any plan advanced by Trump would be understood by Democrats as political signaling, not serious potential legislation. They would be deeply suspicious.
So here we are: Trump flies to California and tells Democrats they are at fault for not raking leaves on his forests. Meanwhile, the forests grow, fuel accumulates, for burning later this month, or next year, or the year after.
3 comments:
Posted by Peter Sage on behalf of Tam Moore, a former Jackson County Commissioner and veteran journalist:
"This is a valid viewpoint, but as many of your readers will argue, it doesn’t do justice to the tension between “doing something” and jumping to conclusions. Same issue when gov. Newsom ties the current wildfires to climate change. The linkage may work as political rhetoric, but it falls short of fixing the problem.
One of the most instructive long-time science stories I covered was the cooperative forestry study undertaken in Southern Oregon in the 1990s by private timber owners, county governments, the BLM and Forest Service with OSU providing the scientists. The problem, as you may recall, were thousands of acres of burned-over or cut- over terrain where conifer forest did not regenerate. The scientists developed hypothesis, created simple experiments to test them, and observational research projects to gather basic data on how the plants functioned on a particular site. When something didn’t work, they tried something else. In less than two decades, new crops of trees were growing on lands in Southern Oregon which had been written off for generations as little more than brush fields. The process is called “adaptive management” which emerged in this century as the way most on-the-ground natural resource managers go about stewarding the land and its resources.
Selective logging isn’t the fix for managing all timberlands, and it won’t make a dent in the federally-owned brush fields which burn every year in Southern California where there’s nothing to log in the first place. What’s needed is managers willing to stick with the research, make adjustments to their hypothesis with a goal of changing the fuel composition on a landscape basis. That is not a job for politicians or bureaucrats who flit from one simplified notion to another. Land stewards have to do something, and be willing to adjust. Again and again.
Tam
As a past Bureau of Land Management(BLM) employee I spent 15 years in the resource field in Medford. Five of those years I ran a crew correlating soils with site potential/seral stages(actual Vegetation on site). Soils in the Cascade Range closely correlated with site potential and response after logging. One of the major problems in southern Oregon is frost during critical bud stage growth, which kills young seedlings, especially as slope gradient are flatter. Gradients from 0 to 30-35% experience a greater frost damage problem. One of the issues I observed were the regulations back in the 1970-1980’s was that BLM was required to roughly plant back the same species that were logged. Douglas Fir was very susceptible to frost damage and the young trees looked like they died from drought, but it was frost.
While conducting this research I personally had the opportunity to view private forests lands and noticed on many frost problem areas that private land managers planted Ponderosa pine and sometimes lodge pole pine as nurse crops. The purpose was to develop an umbrella over years to modify ground temperatures for young fir trees to establish. It worked!
Today’s Forest management on public lands represents 10-20% of what use to be, and has caused a major shift in how Forest lands are presently managed:
1) The lack of equipment out in the Forest now is infinitesimal to the period in the 1970-1980’s which has caused a slow response to initial fire response. Fires were put out quickly because initial response was fast and equipment was readily available.
2) in the 1970’s fire fighting Was all hands on deck. In today’s world ONLY QUALIFIED fire fighters can be on a fire. Quick response disappeared as agencies regulated how fires will be fought. Slow response became the theme and lots of money was pumped into fire fighting, but initial attack was abandoned. To much regulation on how fires are fought.
3) I know of numerous cases where loggers were close to a fire and even called them in, but were told to not fight the fire.
4) in today’s world we also have to deal “NATURAL MANAGEMENT CONCEPT” and way to many pyro maniacs. This new concept is resulting in massive fires and huge amounts of pollutants. A failed management concept!
Bill Drewien
Great comments.
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