Locals rebut fire conference sentiments
‘You couldn’t see the truth through it’
"There was so much rhetoric in here. It was like a
smoke column off one of the fires. You couldn’t see the truth through
it."
Ed Cannady, Sawtooth National Recreation Area
public information officer
By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer
The U.S. Forest Service was the whipping
boy of choice Thursday at a wildfire conference in Boise.
According to most conference
panelists—politicians, activists and fire researchers—improper public
lands management policies contributed to last summer’s wildfire
extravaganza. The fires swept across the West in the face of hot, dry
weather and a fuel load that had been building for 100 years.
The ecosystem management approach to forest
management, which has driven Forest Service policy for the past 10 years,
doesn’t work, critics charged.
Local Forest Service representatives and a
local conservationist who attended the conference, however, said a lot of
what they heard was incorrect.
"There was so much rhetoric in
here," Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) public information
officer Ed Cannady said. "It was like a smoke column off one of the
fires. You couldn’t see the truth through it."
The one-day conference, titled The Fires
Next Time, was sponsored by the Andrus Center for Public Policy and The
Idaho Statesman. It was held at the Boise State University (BSU)
campus.
Robert Nelson, University of Maryland
professor of environmental policy, was among the most critical speakers.
"The Forest Service has been
experiencing problems with land use planning for over 10 years," he
said. "It’s dysfunctional. My proposal is to abolish the Forest
Service. I think the agency has outlived its usefulness."
Decentralization of the agency and more
decision-making power for states and cities would result in better land
management, he said, noting that abolition of the Forest Service probably
isn’t realistic in the near future.
"We’d better do better if we don’t
want [the fires] to happen again in two or three years," he said.
Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne was also
critical.
"I don’t think anybody doubts that
the current forest policy is not working," he said. "That policy
went up in smoke."
Cannady said he was dismayed by such
comments, because words like emergency, catastrophic and devastating were
threaded throughout speakers’ talks.
"I don’t like the word
catastrophic," he said. "It paints fire as a bad thing. That’s
not the way this debate needs to be framed."
Cannady contended that more time needs to
elapse since the fires occurred to have an objective public dialogue.
"If you don’t learn the lessons of
history, you’re going to repeat them," he said. "We’re going
to overreact again."
Cannady said large fires of the past
prompted overly aggressive fire suppression efforts, contributing to the
current heavy fuel loads.
Policy makers discussed three primary
methods of preventing another big fire year, all dealing with reducing
fuel loads before fires begin: prescribed burns, commercial logging and
thinning of smaller timber.
"All three of these are tools that
must be utilized," Kempthorne said.
Many of the speakers at Thursday’s
conference also discussed the $1.6 billion Congress has allocated to the
Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service over the next year to
improve forest health and resistance to fires.
SNRA area ranger Deb Cooper said after the
conference that the funds are putting a lot of political pressure on the
agency to accomplish what might not be possible in a short time frame.
"We’re entrusted with $1.2 billion
to $1.4 billion to do the impossible with a ‘You’d better not screw up’
sentiment behind it," she said. "The bottom line is, no matter
how many acres we treat, those acres will be a tiny percentage of one
large wildfire.
"All we can do are relatively tiny
projects."
In short, she said, the Forest Service is
being set up to fail.
Speaking at the conference via satellite
from Washington, D.C., Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said he hopes the
funding will be ongoing.
"Funding forest management doesn’t
just call for a one-time appropriation," he said. "Increased
funding needs to occur steadily. It’s taken 100 years for the current
fuel load to build up, and it won’t take one year to solve the problem.
"It’s imperative Congress sees a
difference in how our public lands are managed so it will continue to fund
fire prevention. This money needs to be utilized on the ground and not
eaten up by Washington, D.C., bureaucrats."
In response to questions about the
conference, Linn Kincannon, Ketchum rresident and central Idaho director
of the Idaho Conservation League, said it was "a hard job to be
there."
"I felt discouraged, because there
were so many politicians saying logging is the answer to any problem they
identify in the forest," she said. "For any forest problem, it’s
always log. It’s the whole idea that logging and local control are what’s
needed to take care of our forests."
Kincannon said there is no evidence to
support logging as a healthy and effective means of fire prevention.
Kincannon also expressed skepticism about
the motives behind Kempthorne’s three-fold plan toward preventing future
fires.
"His record doesn’t show that he
wants to take care of and conserve forests. His record shows he likes
logging," she said. "If you want to log, logging always looks
like the best solution."
