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Let me start here by making it clear that I have nothing against logging in our national forests. For four years, from 1974 to 1978, I lived in Kremmling, a sawmill town back when Colorado had sawmill towns. The surrounding forests, despite the skidders, logging trucks and slash piles, were fine places to camp, hike, ski, hunt and the like. Plus, the lumberjacks and millhands were good fellows to be around when it was time to drink beer and swap lies.
As far as I'm concerned, Colorado would be a better place if every mountain town had at least one sawmill that drew on nearby national forests. We all use wood, and we should get it from our own backyard, rather than someone else's.
That said, the latest Bushite proposal to reduce fire danger by increasing logging in the national forests is about as stupid anything I've ever heard. No matter how you look at it, it doesn't make sense.
The common pro-logging argument is that managed
forests
which have roads and have been logged are less
prone to fire than unmanaged forests
like wilderness
areas.
This may sound plausible to a speechwriter in Washington or an editorial writer in New York, but on the ground, it's a different story. If this logic were valid, then our Hayman fire, which spread quickly through a road-laced forest that had been logged for more than a century, should have moved like lightning once it reached the Lost Creek Wilderness Area.
Instead, the fire subsided there. Similarly, the Missionary Ridge fire near Durango, which also began in a roaded that had been logged from time to time, ought to have gone nuclear when it reached the Weminuche Wilderness Area -- but it didn't.
For that matter, the worst forest fire in U.S. history, the Peshtigo (Wis.) fire of 1871 that burned 1.2 million acres and killed 1,152 people, happened in an area that was being logged at the time.
This isn't to say that roads and logging cause forest fires -- our Western Slope suffered immense and widespread fires in 1879, before there was much of either going on there.
The point is that there doesn't seem to be any discernible connection between logging and fire danger. Even areas that have been clear-cut have grass and brush, which can get dry and contribute to a wildfire.
The second problem with the Bushite fire-prevention plan is that it makes no economic sense. It costs about the same to cut and haul a big tree as a little one, and there's a lot more lumber in the big tree -- so that's what the timber companies want, and it's what their mills are set up to handle.
But it is the little crooked stuff that is most likely to burn. Timber companies are in business to make money, not to haul out wood that can't be milled at a profit. No matter how many areas are made available to commercial logging, that in itself will not reduce the quantity of combustible crooked little stuff.
If it's really important to remove the crooked little stuff for the comfort and safety of exurban Republicans with their log homes and wooden decks on five-acre lots adjoining national forest land deep in the Stupid Zone, then we'll have to pay somebody to do it, since commercial logging is not a form of fire prevention.
The ideal solution to this, perhaps, would be to resurrect the Civilian Conservation Corps from the 1930s, with sturdy young folks out thinning the woods, cutting and hauling firewood, building trails, improving riparian zones, etc. But that's not what the President proposed.
At any rate, the only effective way to minimize the fire risk in our national forests is to remove the stuff that the logging companies don't want.
As for stuff that the timber corporations do want, there really isn't much of it in our national forests, and there hasn't been for a long time. Back in 1970, before there were any environmental regulations to speak of, the Rocky Mountain region produced only 16 percent of the total sawtimber that came from national forests. By 1996, our region produced less than 15 percent.
Our trees are relatively small and our slopes are steep in comparison to the Northwest region, where most of the National Forest production happens. The only way we'd see much of an increase is if wood prices went way up, which would perturb other important Republican constituencies, like homebuilders and developers.
So, even if increased commercial logging guaranteed a reduction in fire risk, which it doesn't, it would be unlikely to occur in Colorado, since it's almost always cheaper and easier to log somewhere else and haul the resulting lumber to Colorado.
Given all that, the Bush plan for forest management won't reduce our fire risk at all -- indeed, all that hot air might even increase it.
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