Fire Out of Control

A lengthy report in the Seattle Times reveals just how out of control the Forest Service’s fire program has become. Rather than a subprogram aimed at protecting the national forests and adjacent lands from fire damage, fire has become the agency’s main driver and raison d’être.

According to the Times, to control a fire in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, the agency cut hundreds of acres of old-growth trees to form a ten-mile long fire line. As it turned out, the fire was put out by rain long before it reached the fire line, but the agency continued to cut the fire line even after it began to rain. Fisheries biologists and other resource specialists within the agency protested the cutting to no avail.

“One of the problems with fire fighting is a mentality completely takes hold that pretty much you are going to double down on things just simply because you want to protect your rear,” forest ecologist Jerry Franklin told the Times. “It is very characteristic, they just freak out. Basically in a sense it’s war. And you don’t worry a whole lot about side effects. It is what’s called collateral damage.”

Franklin makes a point, but something else was going on as well. In order to understand agency actions, the Antiplanner’s motto has always been to “follow the money.” In this case, Congress provided the Forest Service with nearly unlimited funds to suppress fires and, since a fire was burning, an exemption from all environmental review. Moreover, when the agency sold the logs from the old-growth trees that it cut, it kept the receipts. Thus, the Forest Service won twice, while the fish and wildlife lost.
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In other words, the fire managers didn’t so much “freak out” as they “saw their opportunities and they took ’em.” Other winners include the logging companies and private firefighting services that the agency hired to do the work.

Twenty-five years ago, fire made up only about 10 percent of the Forest Service’s budget. Today, it is more than 50 percent, and thus the national forests have come to serve the fire program rather than the other way around.

On-the-ground forest managers have come to resent this. Most of the year, those managers decide how the forests will be managed. But when a fire breaks out, firefighting specialists fly in from other parts of the country and take over. Every other resource, and every other manager, becomes subordinate to the goal of controlling the fire.

The good news that 2016 is, so far, a below-average fire year. About 3.6 million acres have burned to date, just 0.6 million of which are on Forest Service lands, compared with an average over the previous ten years of 4.5 million acres total and 1.6 million on national forests. But the problem isn’t going away, and it won’t be helped by various bills in Congress that promise to give the Forest Service more money than ever to suppress fires.