An essay by Rich Fairbanks in an Ashland, OR, news outlet.
“Here is a maddening irony: We now have solid science and decades of hard-won experience managing western wildfires, yet the issue of fire policy is becoming as polarized as the spotted-owl timber wars of the 1980s and ‘90s. Ideology is crowding out evidence at precisely the moment when getting this right matters most. So, let’s try something radical — a fact-based look at what peer-reviewed research actually tells us about controlling wildfire.”
I’m always leery when people talk about “fact-based” and “peer reviewed” in an area where we know that scientists disagree. But I guess we can leave the folks in SW Oregon to their own disagreements.
See Derek’s photos for another situation in Montana where the regen did better than elsewhere.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2010/10/23/impacts-of-fire-disturbance-on-anthropogenically-induced-vegetation-mosaics/
I think that many of us here are in the “it depends” camp. It’s foolish to think that a One Size Fits All pro-“management” approach will fix 80 years of fire suppression. If you have limited tools in the toolbox, you still have to pick the best tool for the job, out of the available options.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and this one makes some good points. However, the problem, once again, is throwing everything in the US into the same cesspool as Region 5!
Salvage logging works well in most instances; the idea of a tree length or two along WUI, or roads will make a difference in doing anything to a running crown fire is just plain silly! Com’on man, there will be a few instances where flanking fire might react, but a head fire? Not what I saw in the past 30 years, not one time!
And once again, remanding timber management to economics also shows a bias from the fire organization that it’s either their way or the highway. That, and the lack of identifying “logging hurts our feelings”. Since Medford was mentioned, Medford is where the devil goes to get more heat! Most of Washington and Oregon were logged heavily in the early days, and up until the late-1970’s, the prescriptions were usually “high grade”. Anything outside Roadless or Wilderness needs cultural practices to put forests back into proper successional stages. Thinning? What are you thinning?
Our grand old Forest Service was founded on multiple use principles, as a result of over logging, over grazing and watershed protections. Somehow along the way, our employees lost sight of those bold initiatives and began to lean (then run) toward preservation as a management tool! If you look at the history of the big “why”, and The Greatest Good is as good a history book as any, you see the impacts of tinkering with actual science for continuing those objectives. Fire, both prescribed and wild, has been removed from the local per-view and now resides in the comforting realm of the stove pipe – er I mean, fire organization! Everyone needs to learn to collectively pull on the same chain instead of pushing from the back end…….
“proper successional stages”
Human impacts make that term (mostly) irrelevant.
The essay title is misleading. Instead of “managing wildfires” (which is approved terminology), it should say when “managing fire-adapted ecosystems”. While I concur with the points brought forward, there is a much larger and complex topic that needs to be tackled given some recent incidents…how can the agencies do a better job of managing naturally occurring wildfires to achieve protection objectives, hazard fuel reduction objectives, and/or ecological objectives? From where I sit, we have the tools to make risk-informed decisions. Let’s put those tools to work in planning and incident operations.
I took a trip in September 2024 to see what deer hunting opportunities looked like in Jackson county. Did Dead Indian-Green Springs scouting first day. No end to severe no trespassing notices and Howard Prairie very, very low water. Not a lot of deer sign. Private land logging evidence. No USFS or BLM sale paper unit boundary signs. Lots of summer homes. All new to me in my 60 year absence. Howard Prairie Lake was the first place I saw Canada honkers nesting in an osprey nest high in a snag top ponderosa pine. This half century later outing was in the Scary Dry. Maybe triple that this spring. Second day Mt Ashland to Dutchman, other spurs, and descending. First time road so close to the Pacific Crest Trail. Nice fall day. Glassing the country I heard people talking several times in less than an hour. Those were hikers in groups. Loners were going to be into the Monument east of I-5 by dark. Still, September is late enough that in a normal year the last 100 miles to Canada will be a test. And then plumb tuckered, it’s a retreat of 30miles to get down to civilization on the east side and a hot shower and food.
In the 60 years since college, seedling fir trees are now 60 yrs old and 60 and more feet taller. 60 years or more since driving home to Ashland down the watershed road. Down Tolman creek road. The Ski Area access road was under construction. I-5 had yet to be completed from the Green Springs-Dead Indian interchange to Hilts at the border. Not an Ashland RD clearcut visible that day. All the old ones now grown up. The 60 yr cohort of 1964 is now 120, and that is 20 years older than the Siuslaw when I worked logging there during my high school summer “vacation.”
Sled donkey with a rigged spar tree, a climber to swing the blocks to not have diamond lead on the mainline block. A whistle punk with his rubber coated wire boa around his neck. And both the Rogue River and Siuslaw NFs are primed to burn. Planted clear cuts from those days have been thinned. Increases the wind volume and force. Those forests mostly become crown fires that race to heat and heights killing needles with super heated air. Leaving all the green timber (average of 50 thousand board feet of dead trees per acre—2 mmbf per 40acres.) Each acre burned is a loss of $10,000-$15,000 in stumpage value to the federal Treasury. vs the same cost or more to fight project fires. And a $2500-$3600 per acre loss to the county the trees lie in.
You can kick the can down the road with never ending indecision and inaction and Joe Sixpack and wife Jellyroll could care less. Their kids have grown and gone, and that cut the entitlements and government freebies. Their struggle only gets harder. What they need is a return to selling timber and 25% USFS and now 75% BLM/O&C stumpage return to the county of origin to fund schools, county roads to the federal land gate, opportunities to afford mental health care, child health and welfare care, upkeep for county parks, and more education opportunities for a more diverse course of study offerings.
We can start with FIRST, PUT OUT THE FIRE AT ONE TREE, ONE ACRE!! ONE LESS CAN TO KICK DOWN THE ROAD, AND ONE LESS ISSUE TO CONFIGURE SOME RECOVERY FROM BEFORE 2101.
Dang it! I was excited to see this posted here and I fully agree with the essay. Unfortunately, the responses above deflated my excitement all too quickly. In forests where ponderosa is a component, I think there is pretty solid evidence that building containment lines and leveraging the containment lines to get as much low severity fire on the ground as possible, while hardening the urban interface are the most important and effective things we can do to prevent megafires. In ponderosa systems, this is not an “it depends” situation, the answer to the problem really is that simple. The answer is simple but getting it done is not, with the first impediment being a lack of agreement on the solution. Alas, from the responses above, I have no hope that we have any chance of saving much of these forests. We have to be in relative agreement on what the broader solution is to solve a problem this big, and clearly, we are not. Each year we watch more of it slip away. Random acts of thinning, chasing MBF, and postage stamp treatments are never going to get it done. I really don’t understand how one can weigh the mountain of evidence and not come to the same conclusion, but that’s where we are at.
The Caldor Fire is a prime example of how ample “active management” didn’t stop it from burning. Most of that Ranger District is checker-boarded, and nearly all of those lands have had trees cut in timber sales, including insect and fire salvage.
There is no real-world way to ‘manage’ the steep slopes, where tractor logging isn’t possible. Cable and helicopter logging just isn’t a solution for thinning, in most of our National Forests. Pretending that high-grading is a good thing just isn’t going to fly.
Yes, more commercial thinning is good, but it’s not easy, in the real world of today.
I fear too many readers will see “thinning works” and miss the nuance that “low thinning” works, think that’s what the agencies do. They don’t. The medium and large trees they take to “make it pencil out” are not the fire/fuel problem.
The USFS thinning projects I’ve seen throughout central Oregon in ponderosa stands have left most of the large trees and removed must of the understory, and combined with Rx fire, has left these forests mush less prone to high-intensity wildfire. See also the forests around Ashland, OR. And, BTW, see also many stands on the Warm Springs reservation. FWIW, this storymap on the Ashland Forest Resiliency Partnership is worth a look, though it is a few years old….
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/68d5632eb1bd45ce87a89580bd1b6ab0
Steve, we were doing this exact prescription on the Ochoco in the early 1980’s. I gained my burn boss certification on a broadcast burn in thinned ponderosa. I’d already done a few clearcut burns for site prep but this was my “baby” for underburning. I had been the silviculturist and TSA on that particular timber sale too!
Right with ya on the reduction in fire severity! Mixed conifer had a bit more challenge, but if it was predominately ponderosa, with a mixed understory, we cleaned it out and burned!
But not everyone removes medium and large trees to “make it pencil out”.. they might be using different research, e.g.
https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/articles/how-thinning-and-fuels-treatment-design-influence-outcomes
Also some people thin to restore HRV tree densities and others to increase the health (and reduce stress leading to bark beetle attacks) of the remaining trees where water, rather than light, is limiting. And these all happen in Colorado where there are no markets for logs and on private land. So…different places different conditions.