Andrus Center releases new report on
wildfire policy
Little progress seen in reducing fire
threat
By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer
Lawmakers have done little in the last
four years to address fire-related policies that could help the West move away
from a string of difficult wildfire seasons, according to a Boise-based think
tank.
A new report released by the Andrus Center
for Public Policy contends that little has been done to better respond to fire
threats since Idaho’s significant 2000 wildfire season. The report called the
situation a "crisis that demands a willingness to take risks, show leadership
and act immediately."
With Idaho’s spring snowpacks ranging
between 1 and 50 percent of average, Idaho could be on the cusp of another hot
and dry wildfire season.
The new report—A Challenge Still Unmet: A
Critical Assessment of the Policy Response to Wildland Fire—is an update on a
conference on fire policy the Andrus Center convened after the 2000 summer fire
season.
According to the new report, the December
2000 conference produced consensus from federal and state land managers, fire
scientists and conservationists about what needed to change to reduce the threat
of catastrophic fires.
But according to the new report, "… it is
painfully obvious that progress on change has been glacially slow."
"At the end of our evaluation, we
concluded that many of the issues we identified in 2000 are still not being
adequately addressed," said Andrus Center Chairman Cecil D. Andrus, the former
Idaho governor and U.S. Secretary of the Interior. "This is a significant
failure of both political and policy will, one that has many causes, but the
consequences of that failure, as you know, are potentially devastating for the
communities and resources of the West."
The Andrus Center report says four issues
must receive more attention if national wildland fire policy is to improve:
- Coordination among federal agencies
must improve, and bureaucratic aversion to change must be overcome.
- Planning efforts must continue to help
fire managers to decide which fires must be aggressively contained and which
can merely be monitored.
- Federal money needs to be focused on
the West, rather than distributed nationally.
- Local governments and individual
homeowners must assume more responsibility to protect their own lives and
properties.
The report concludes by contending that
the forest wars of the last century are over.
"The Bush administration could encourage
this dialogue with an honest assessment: Industrial forestry on national forests
is largely a thing of the past. Today, restoration, forest health and fire
prevention are the jobs of the U.S. Forest Service, and all the parties must get
on board."
The Andrus Center report is available at
the Center's Web site—www.andruscenter.org.
A printed copy of the report is available for $5 by contacting the center at
(208) 426-4218 or at
www.andruscenter.org.