Despite rain in the valleys and snow in the mountains, wildfires are still smoldering in Oregon and people are still trying to blame those fires on the lack of government spending on logging or prescribed burning. Yet increased logging wouldn’t have stopped western wildfires this year, a number of researchers told reporters in an article jointly written by the Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Propublica.
“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control,” retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen told the reporters. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
With federal timber sales down by 75 to 80 percent from what they were in the 1980s, many responded to 2020 wildfires by claiming they could have been mitigated if only the Forest Service and other federal agencies were doing more logging. “The fuel loads are enormous and completely out of balance,” due to the decline in logging, says Oregon U.S. Representative Greg Walden. “We are a slum lord when it comes to managing our forests.”
While that’s a colorful metaphor, the Antiplanner has argued the opposite, pointing out that logging leaves land more vulnerable to fire than before it was cut. This view is supported by Oregon State University research Chris Dunn.
Two years ago, says Dunn, he and another researcher from Humboldt State University “did an investigation of the Douglas Complex Fire in 2013 where we were looking at a checkerboard landscape of private industrial and public owned land and what we found was that the private land did burn more severely. The fuel structure and the structure of those forests being even-aged plantations, [with] very uniform fuel beds, increased the severity of the fire.”
Rather than use Dunn’s study to try to find ways to reduce the likelihood of their plantations burning, the timber industry elected to attack him personally, painting him as some sort of wild-eyed environmentalist. “From beginning to end I would keep the focus on these two specific researchers and their BS study,” wrote a timber industry lobbyist.
Now Dunn is looking at the 2020 Oregon wildfires, specifically the Holiday Farm fire that burned 173,000 acres (271 square miles) of the McKenzie River drainage east of Eugene/Springfield. The area burned, says Dunn, is “70 percent private, 65 percent of that being private industrial forest.”
Looking at it from the air and on the ground, “I see a lot of management and a lot of mortality and a community lost,” he says, referring to the town of Blue River. “I think it’s pretty clear that this level of intensive management didn’t aid the community in any way.”
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As pointed out by an article in the Oregonian, this year’s wildfires are “unusual but not unprecedented.” What made these fires big were strong east winds when vegetation was dried out from the late-summer droughts that are typical in the Cascades. Such east winds are not due to climate change; they’ve happened many times before.
In 1902, the Yacolt Fire burned 500,000 acres in Oregon and Washington and killed 65 people. In 1933 the Tillamook Fire burned 200,000 acres in just 20 hours, and eventually reached a total of 350,000 acres. In 1936 a fire that burned 43,000 acres destroyed 96 percent of the buildings in Bandon, Oregon, and killed 10 people.
“There is a close relation between occurrences of severe easterly winds and large forest fires in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington,” reported a 1957 Forest Service research paper. “With the east winds comes the dreaded combination of low humidity and high wind that in the past has whipped small fires into conflagrations such as the Tillamook fire of 1933 and the fire that 2 burned Bandon in 1936.” While climate activists are fond of saying that this year’s wildfires are “consistent with human-caused climate change,” they are also completely consistent with the historic, non-human-affected climate.
Nor do fuels-reduction programs make sense in the western Cascades, whose forests are not the type that require frequent prescribed burns. “Even if we somehow miraculously caught up with fuels reduction on the west side, it would grow back in a matter of years,” says Daniel Donato, a researcher with the Washington Department of Natural Resources. “It’s not even relevant to the west side. It doesn’t even need to be a conversation.” Like Dunn, Donato’s research as an Oregon State University graduate student became controversial because it didn’t support timber industry demands to log the federal forests, but now their ideas are becoming the consensus views.
Instead of blaming public or private forest lands, owners of homes and other structures need to protect themselves. “We think that we can live adjacent to these dry forest environments safely despite what we’re observing today,” says Dunn, “and the reality is with this changing climate and our past management is that is not the case.”
“Homes ignite because of ember showers. If that’s what’s driving the ignitions of your homes then really the receptor side, the home ignition zone as it’s referred to, needs to be managed effectively to protect those structures from being lost. So there’s this really significant need for communities to invest in their own protection.”
I happened to drive through the Holiday Farm Fire two weeks ago and was struck by how often I saw homes that were burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a chimney, right next to homes that were entirely untouched by the fire. I didn’t stop to do a detailed evaluation, but if Jack Cohen’s past research is any guide, the homes that burned had been left vulnerable by their owners who failed to cut brush, stacked cordwood up against the homes, left wooden roofs on the homes, or otherwise failed to make them fire resistant.
The Oregonian/OPB article notes that bills have been introduced in Congress, and may be introduced in the Oregon legislature, to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to homeowners to make their properties more fire resistant. But why should people who choose not to live in fire-prone areas subsidize those who do? This is a problem that can and should be solved by the people who have the greatest interest in solving it: the ones who live in fire plains.
Fire’s role in dryland ecology is well known and researched, It substitutes the role normally reserved by decomposers like bacteria and fungi. In more humid and wetter environments they break down wood/plant matter into soluble nutrients for plant uptake. In xeric ecosystems this process is less efficient or virtually non-existant. So fire substitutes that role by charing material into water soluble ash.
It’s not climate change responsible for these catastrophic fires; it’s California’s land use practices. Jennifer Marlon, a scientist at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and colleagues, looked at charcoal accumulation in sedimentary rocks, among other data, to understand the impact of fires in the West over the past 3,000 years. The “lowest levels” of Western fires occurred in the 20th century and between 1400 and 1700, while prominent peaks in forest fires” took place between 950 and 1250 and during the 1800s, the paper found. The researchers add that the 21st century rate of burning “is not unusual” based on patterns over the past 3,000 years. based on this data, To sum it up; We’re in a fire deficit.
But THAT’S NOT THE ISSUE. These fires aren’t natural, nor are they the result of climate change. California’s water usage has also exacerbated the fire problem. For the last 120 years, the big cities and agriculture business have pulled water from the Colorado river, Sierra Nevada mountains and sub surface wells and springs which have been tapped to accommodate domestic water consumption so LA County residents and suburbanites can have jungle plants in a xeric climate. Combine a drastic reduction in the natural ground water, the replacement of native vegetation with weedy, invasives (and sometimes oil rich plants like Eucalyptus) is a recipe for disaster. So the subsurface water has been depleted; California’s forests have lost significant ground water; soil moisture has heavily declined, so trees have to scrounge water where they can, becoming dry tinder in the summer.
Logging wont stop fires, prescribed burns wont stop fires. REHYDRATION will slow these fires. For the cost of high speed rail in California, they could have built 100 desalination plants, offsetting 13% of the states water use from conventional supplies.
The article is confusing in so far as delineating the difference between west and east of the Cascades forests. To anyone who has lived in the area the difference is pronounced. Dunn’s argument would make sense west of the Cascades with its high rainfall, high growth rate and only rare risk of fire, but East of the Cascades is a completely different matter. As with much research my fear does not have to do with the efficacy of the work itself but how it will be misused by activists and others with an agenda.