climate change

Did Sen Tester claim his logging bill would have stopped wildfire?

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Yesterday I wrote about a new study from the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research station, which found that fuel reduction logging and thinning prior to the Fourmile Canyon Fire outside of Boulder, Colorado was ineffective at moderating the fire’s behavior, having had a minimal impact in affecting how the fire burned or the damage it caused.

Below that article from yesterday, frequent commenter Ed made an interesting point worthy of highlighting here:

Some people just refuse to accept the reality of this…that when you get really extreme conditions of humidity, temps, and high winds, there is no power, no planning, no treatment, no nothing that will stop a fire from going where it wants.  Nada.  I am tired of reading statements from pols (and others who should know better) that “demand this fire be stopped”…. We are now experiencing more and more extreme weather, for whatever reason that none of us are smart enough to explain. We will have to learn to live with these blowup fires, and concentrate our prevention efforts in and around the homes and structures along the forest perimeter.

Well, we know that at least one politician – and their staff – was apparently too busy on the campaign trail to actually have time to read the findings from Forest Service’s Fourmile Fire Report about the fact that fuel reduction logging and thinning had a minimal impact in affecting how the fire burned.  This morning I woke up to see Senator Jon Tester (D-Mont) quoted in Montana newspapers with this amazing claim:

This election is about an area between here and Whitehall that is burning. If we could
have gotten my Forest Jobs Act past [sic] we would have been able to cut those trees.
– Senator Jon Tester

It’s worth pointing out that Senator Tester is referring the 19 Mile Wildfire, a 3,000 acre fire, which according to inciweb, is burning in grass, brush and some timber mainly on private lands west of Whitehall, Montana (see official maps below).   The cause of the fire is under investigation.  Yesterday, the weather at the fire was 97 degrees, 13% humidity and 20 mph winds blowing out of the southwest.

I’m not sure if the Forest Service has an official threshold that needs to be crossed in order for “extreme fire weather conditions” to be met, but suffice to say that temps near 100, humidity in the low teens and winds blowing 20 miles an hour qualify.  Once a wildfire gets going under these types of weather conditions any wildfire expert will tell you there’s not much you can do to put the fire out.

But not Senator Tester. Nope, apparently he wants us all to believe that if Congress would have simply passed his mandated logging bill, which calls for a minimum of 5,000 acres of logging on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest annually for the next fifteen years, that this 19 Mile Wildfire, which has burned mainly on private land (and is burning mainly toward more private land and BLM land) would have prevented this wildfire from either starting and/or spreading.  Incredible….

According to inciweb, the 19 Mile Wildfire in Montana has burned through grass, brush and timber on about 3,000 acres of mostly private land west of Whitehall, Montana.
Another map of the 19 Mile fire from the official inciweb site of the U.S. Forest Service clearly showing this fire has barely burned any Forest Service land. Also note that the fire is moving towards the northeast, towards more private, BLM and state of Montana lands, and away from any Forest Service lands.
This screen shot taken from the official Montana land ownership map (http://svc.mt.gov/msl/mtcadastral) shows that the 19 Mile Wildfire has burned mainly on highly-subdivided private land with small portions of BLM, State of Montana and U.S. Forest Service lands also impacted.

Report: Prior fuel treatments ineffective at moderating Fourmile Canyon Fire

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station has just released an August 2012 study titled, “Fourmile Canyon Fire Findings.”   We’ve discussed the 2010 Fourmile Canyon wildfire outside of Boulder, CO a few times before on this blog, including this post from Andy Stahl titled, “Fourmile Canyon Fire Report Confirms Firewise.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Rocky Mountain Research Station’s abstract to their new study:

“Fuel treatments had previously been applied to several areas within the fire perimeter to modify fire behavior and/or burn severity if a wildfire was to occur. However, the fuel treatments had minimal impact in affecting how the fire burned or the damage it caused….This report summarizes how the fire burned, the damage it caused, and offers insights to help the residents and fire responders prepare for the next wildfire that will burn on the Colorado Front Range.

On Tuesday, Bob Berwyn wrote this article for the Summit County Citizens Voice titled, “Report: Wildfire mitigation work largely ineffective in moderating Fourmile Canyon Fire.” Below are some excerpts from Mr. Berwyn’s article:

A report on the 2011 Fourmile Canyon Fire will probably raise more questions than it answers for firefighters and land managers, concluding that, in some cases, the ferocious fire near Boulder may have burned more intensely in treated areas than in adjacent untreated stands.

That may have been due to the relatively high concentration of surface fuels remaining after treatments, as well as the higher wind speeds that can occur in open forests compared to those with denser canopies, Forest Service researchers concluded in the report published last month….

The report also concluded that beetle-killed trees had “little to no effect on the fuels within the area burned by the Fourmile Canyon Fire, the fire’s  behavior, or the final fire size,” explaining that crown fires are “driven by abundant and continuous surface fuels rather than beetle-killed trees.”….

In the end, the report found no evidence that fuel treatments changed the progression of the Fourmile Canyon Fire, and that the treated areas were “probably of limited value to suppression efforts on September  6.” Large quantities of surface fuels in the treatment area also rendered them ineffective in changing fire behavior.

Satellite photos taken after the fire clearly showed that the fire burned just as intensely inside treatment areas as it did in adjacent untreated stands. In some cased, the fire appears to burned more intensely in treated areas, the investigators said, explaining that additional surface fuels, as well as higher wind speeds, may have been factors….

[T]he report once again calls for a change of approach — instead of increasing expensive fire protection capabilities that have proven to strategically fail during extreme wildfire burning conditions, efforts should be focused on reducing home ignition potential within the immediate vicinity of homes, the investigators concluded.

Certainly one new study about one wildfire isn’t the be-all, end-all. However, how does the new research and scientific findings coming from a comprehensive look at the Fourmile Canyon Fire mesh with the constant drum-beat supporting logging for “fuel reduction” and “thinning” we see coming from some quarters at this very blog?

NPR: Wood Energy Not ‘Green’ Enough, Says Massachusetts

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You can listen to the National Public Radio segment from All Things Considered here.  The opening snip is below:

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:  When it comes to renewable energy, wind and solar get a lot of attention. But wood actually creates more power in the U.S., and Massachusetts state officials are scaling back their efforts to encourage wood power. It may be a renewable resource, they say, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the environment. NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren has that story.

ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Power plants that turn wood into electricity aren’t anything new. They’re called biomass plants. They’ve become more popular as states have tried to reduce the use of fossil fuels. The idea is wood is a renewable resource. You can always grow more, but the state of Massachusetts decided it wasn’t enough to be renewable. It wants climate-friendly fuel, so it kicked most power plants that burned wood out of a program that helps renewable electricity plants earn more revenue.  Mark Sylvia is commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.

MARK SYLVIA: I think what it says is that Massachusetts is very curious about focusing on our climate goals.

SHOGREN: Massachusetts wants to cut its greenhouse gases 25 percent by 2020 and power plants are a huge source of greenhouse gases, so the state asked some scientists to take a hard look at the greenhouse gas footprint of power plants that burn wood.  John Gunn of the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences was one of the researchers who did the study. He says the results challenged conventional wisdom.

JOHN GUNN: Basically, we found that if you’re going to switch from using fossil fuels for energy to using more wood for energy that, for a period of time, the atmosphere would see an increase in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Richard Manning: Forest Service is fighting every fire, but at what cost?

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Read the entire article here.  A little intro snip is below:

On July 12, lightning sparked a forest fire in western Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex — a place where wildfires are common this time of year. Usually, if they’re small and don’t threaten to get out of control, the U.S. Forest Service will let them burn. Small fires are good for the forest ecosystem, burning off dead timber and creating habitat for many woodland species; because of that, all U.S. agencies adopted a policy in 1995 to reintroduce fire on federal land.

So what happened last month was unusual: the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the 1.5 million-acre Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and an additional 35 million acres of federally designated wilderness land nationwide, ordered a full-on attack of the fire by smokejumpers, bucket-bearing helicopters, and four lumbering slurry bombers that each dumped more than 2,000 gallons of red chemical fire retardant on an ecosystem that is otherwise treated as pristine.

This has been happening all across the West this summer, as the Forest Service throws its already-thin firefighting resources at blazes that in previous years would have been allowed to spread naturally and burn out on their own. The stated reason is cost: the Forest Service is so worried that the hot, dry conditions will cause one or more of those small fires to burn out of control — consuming not just acres of forest, but also the agency’s strapped budget — that it’s willing to pour money and resources into fighting blazes that threaten little and are usually considered healthy for the forests.

“Thinking Differently and Acting Alike” from Roger Pielke, Jr.

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Here’s a link to a Roger Pielke, Jr., piece in Foreign Policy. Here’s a link to yesterday’s post on his blog about it. The comments are fairly interesting also.

Of course, climate issues are of interest to people on this blog, but I especially liked this quote:

The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished. To paraphrase the great columnist Walter Lippmann, politics is not about getting people to think alike, but about getting people who think differently to act alike. The climate issue will never be solved completely, but it’s still possible for us to make things better or worse.

I wonder what would be the equivalent in our public lands debates for “results that can actually be accomplished”?

Below is an excerpt of the Foreign Policy piece that focuses on “what should we do next?”

So what’s the next step? For years — decades, even — science has shown convincingly that human activities have an impact on the planet. That impact includes but is not limited to carbon dioxide. We are indeed running risks with the future climate through the unmitigated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the schemes attempted so far has made even a dent in the problem. While the climate wars will go on, characterized by a poisonous mix dodgy science, personal attacks, and partisan warfare, the good news is that progress can yet be made outside of this battle.

The key to securing action on climate change may be to break the problem into more manageable parts. This should involve recognizing that human-caused climate change involves more than just carbon dioxide. This is already happening. A coalition of activists and politicians, including numerous prominent scientists, have argued that there are practical reasons to focus attention on “non-carbon forcings” — human influences on the climate system other than carbon dioxide emissions. The U.N. Environment Program argues that actions like reducing soot and methane could “save close to 2.5 million lives a year; avoid crop losses amounting to 32 million tons annually and deliver near-term climate protection of about half a degree Celsius by 2040.”

Some of these opportunities are political. For instance, in the United States, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a loud and theatrical opponent to most action related to climate, supports action on non-carbon forcings, particularly efforts to reduce the amount of particulates in the air. As he explained to the Guardian “Al Gore probably would be against automobile accidents and I am too. This has nothing to do with the CO2 issue.” The lesson here is that if Gore and Inhofe can find common political ground on one important aspect of the issue, then there is plenty of hope for progress.

Other human influences on climate, such as those caused by chlorofluorocarbons, which are also known to impact the ozone layer, offer other tantalizing opportunities for progress while circumventing the most gridlocked parts of the debate. Similarly, the global demand for huge amounts of energy in coming decades provides a compelling rationale for energy technology innovation independent of the climate issue.

Of course, we can’t ignore carbon dioxide. Carbon emissions will remain a vexing problem because they are so tightly bound to the production of most of the world’s energy, which in turn supports the functioning of the global economy. But even here the situation may not be hopeless. America’s recent boom in the production of shale gas illustrates the virtuousness of innovation: In the United States, shale gas has become widely available and inexpensive due to technologies developed by the government and private sector over decades and has displaced large amounts of coal in a remarkably short time, dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the process. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, carbon dioxide emissions in 2011 were lower than those of 1996, even though GDP increased by more than 40 percent after inflation.

Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, because it is still carbon intensive, but the rapidly declining U.S. emissions prove an essential policy point: Make clean(er) energy cheap, and dirty energy will be quickly displaced. To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation — technological, but also institutional and social. Nuclear power offers the promise of large scale carbon-free energy, but is currently expensive and controversial. Carbon capture from coal and gas, large-scale wind, and solar each offer tantalizing possibilities, but remain technologically immature and expensive, especially when compared to gas. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation — not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price — is where we’ll make process.

The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished. To paraphrase the great columnist Walter Lippmann, politics is not about getting people to think alike, but about getting people who think differently to act alike. The climate issue will never be solved completely, but it’s still possible for us to make things better or worse.

I’m all for doing better.

MT Groups Petition Montana to Halt Trapping of Rare Wolverine

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Photographer Chad Harder captured these images of a rare wolverine running across a snowfield on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest earlier this summer.

The Western Environmental Law Center, on behalf of eight local conservation groups and one individual, submitted a formal petition Tuesday to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Commission (“MFWP”) to halt the trapping of wolverine in Montana – the only state in the contiguous U.S. that still allows the imperiled animal to be trapped.

Wolverines resemble a small bear that is custom built for high-elevation, mountain living.  They have large, crampon-clawed feet designed for digging, climbing, and walking on snow, and an extremely high metabolic rate. Its double fur coat includes a dense inner layer of wool beneath a cover of frost-shedding guard hairs and is the reason trappers target the animal.

Once prolific across the West, the wolverine population in the Lower 48 is now down to no more than 250-300 individuals. Montana has the highest concentration of wolverine in the Lower 48, but still only about 100-175 individuals.  A substantial number of the remaining wolverines in Montana are likely unsuccessful breeders or non-breeding subadults.  This means Montana’s “effective population” of individuals who are able to breed is significantly smaller, perhaps less than 40.

So rare are these native carnivores that in December 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“Service”) designated the wolverine a species that warrants protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, but the level of protection has not yet been determined.  The Service determined that an already small and vulnerable population of wolverine in the lower 48 will continue to decline in the face of climate change, which is causing a reduction in suitable wolverine habitat in Montana (wolverine depend on late spring snow and cold temperatures) and increasing the speed by which isolated populations vanish. Warming temperatures are also increasing the distance, and thus fragmentation, between islands of suitable habitat.

“Authorizing the trapping of wolverines under these circumstances is making a bad situation worse,” said Matthew Bishop, a local attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center, who is representing the petitioners. “Wolverines are the polar bear of the Lower 48 and need all the help they can get right now in the face of a warming planet, shrinking habitat, and increased isolation. Montana shouldn’t be kicking them when they’re down,” added Bishop.

Trapping is a major source of wolverine mortality in Montana and has had significant negative effects on wolverine inhabiting Montana’s small, isolated island ranges. In one study, of the 14 wolverines tracked in the Pioneer Mountains during a three-year period, 6 were killed in traps, including 4 adult males and two pregnant females.  As a result of trapping, the wolverine population in the Pioneers was reduced by an estimated 50%.

In another study of wolverine on the Flathead National Forest, trapping killed five times more wolverine than natural causes in a population that can ill afford it, killing nearly two-thirds of the wolverines being studied in just five years.

“We’re lucky to see wolverine on rare occasions here in the Swan Range of Northwest Montana, where they were first studied back in the 1970s,” said Keith Hammer, Chair of petitioner Swan View Coalition. He asserted, “Trapping must stop if these rare and wonderful animals are to return from the brink of extinction.”

Arlene Montgomery, Program Director of petitioner Friends of the Wild Swan, stated, “Trapping adds insult to injury for the wolverine.” She added, “They are already teetering on the brink from climate change and other threats. Trapping them is unnecessary and not sport.”

The petitioners are asking MFWP to close the wolverine trapping season now, before the 2012 trapping season begins on December 1, 2012, and to not reopen it until wolverine populations have recovered enough to no longer need protection of the Endangered Species Act.

“This is the right thing to do – morally, scientifically, socially, and ecologically – for the future of wolverine and the future of trapping in Montana,” said Gary Ingman, a board member of the Helena Hunters and Anglers Association, a local sportsmen’s group and petitioner. “The biological models show that the current population levels simply are not self-sustaining,” concluded Ingman.

The following organizations and individual joined WELC’s petition: Friends of the Wild Swan, Helena Hunters and Anglers Association, Montana Ecosystem Defense, Native Ecosystems Council, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Swan View Coalition, WildEarth Guardians, Footloose Montana, and George Wuerthner.

Bye-Bye Biomass: Increasing Exports to Europe

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Note: I heard from eastern readers of this blog that they would like more information relevant to the East, so here is one story. It’s nice to have a break from wildfires and associated topics.

A while back, I heard from folks in the forest industry in the southeast that they felt they were facing competition for trees from the European biomass industry. While people in the US may argue that biomass is not really a good substitute for fossil fuels, the fact is that Europe has their own system and their own beliefs about this.

Hence the market. Now, is this a problem? Fossil fuel use is reduced, landowners get money to keep their land in trees instead of real estate development and fragmentation? Sounds like a win-win?

The folks I was talking with raised the question about jobs and value to communities of exporting low value products instead of producing higher value products (hmm.. sounds familiar). The key difference from the West seems to be that these are private lands and private landowners producing the biomass, and hence no opportunities for litigation of the feds. I am sure the universities and/or others have written about these trends.. would appreciate links to such studies so that we can learn more.

Here’s an article from January about Virginia:

The Port of Chesapeake in Virginia has officially entered the biomass shipping business. On Dec. 31, Enviva LP, sent 28,000 metric tons of wood pellets to one of Enviva’s European utility customers aboard the MV Daishin Maru.

The inaugural shipment was the result of a construction process that started in February 2011 and included more than 25 independent contractors. The deep water terminal outside of Norfolk, Va., includes a 157-foot-by-175-foot wood pellet storage dome that can receive, hold or store up to three million tons of woody biomass set for export each year, all while withstanding large-scale hurricanes and earthquakes. Enviva’s new Ahoskie, N.C., pellet mill is currently supplying the Port of Chesapeake shipping site.

As the biomass industry grows and export volumes reach the millions of tons per year, Enviva will need to focus on terminal operations including issues relating to safety, quality, product reliability and product storage, according to John Keppler, chairman and CEO for Enviva. “We expect Enviva’s Port of Chesapeake facility to be a flagship operation, demonstrating excellence in this area and proving our capability to build the sustainable infrastructure necessary to support the tremendous growth that is projected for solid, renewable biomass sources,” he said.

After opening the Ahoskie facility in November 2011, the company also announced plans to build two more facilities, one in North Carolina and one in Virginia, both of which are strategically located to cut transport costs to and from the Port of Chesapeake. The deepwater facility currently employees 14 and Enviva expects that number to double in three years.

Washington’s forests will lose stored carbon as area burned by wildfire increases

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this is a Forest Service photo, credit Tom Iraci.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt:

A new study conducted by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington has found that, by 2040, parts of Washington State could lose as much as a third of their carbon stores, as an increasing area of the state’s forests is projected to be burned by wildfire. The study—published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Ecological Applications—is the first to use statistical models and publicly available Forest Inventory and Analysis data to estimate the effects of a warming climate on carbon storage and fluxes on Washington’s forests. “When considering the use of forests to store carbon, it will be critical to consider the increasing risk of wildfire,” said Crystal Raymond, a research biologist based at the station’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory and lead author of the study. “Especially in the West, where climate-induced changes in fire are expected to be a key agent of change.” Trees remove and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide, acting as important stores, or “sinks,” of carbon that help to offset its accumulation in the atmosphere. When trees and other woody material in the forest are burned by fire, they release carbon back to the atmosphere, mostly as carbon dioxide, where it may once again act as a greenhouse gas that promotes warming. This land-atmosphere exchange of carbon is increasingly of interest to land managers seeking ways to actively manage forests to store carbon and help mitigate greenhouse gases. To explore what effect climate-driven changes in wildfire might have on the ability of Washington’s forests to act as carbon sinks, Raymond and station research ecologist Don McKenzie used a novel approach. They combined published forest-inventory data, fire-history data, and statistical models of area burned to estimate historical and future carbon carrying capacity of three regions in Washington—the Western Cascades, the Eastern Cascades, and the Okanogan Highlands—based on potential forest productivity and projections of 21st century area burned. Ads by Google EHR Software Demo – Watch the EHR Demo Online Now Meaningful Use with Ease of Use! – AdvancedMD.com/Elec-Health-Record “Forests on both the eastern and western slopes of the Cascade Range will lose carbon stored in live biomass because area burned across the state is expected to increase,” Raymond said. “Even small increases in area burned can have large consequences for carbon stored in living and dead biomass.” The researchers looked at live biomass, which includes living trees and vegetation, as well as nonliving biomass in the form of coarse woody debris, which includes dead standing trees and downed logs. Both contribute to the carbon cycle, but in different ways—living biomass removes carbon from the atmosphere as vegetation grows, and coarse woody debris releases carbon over time as the material decomposes. Raymond and McKenzie projected forests of the Western Cascades to be most sensitive to climate-driven increases in fire, losing anywhere from 24 to 37 percent of their live biomass and from 15 to 25 percent of their coarse woody debris biomass by 2040. These forests store significant carbon and typically burn with high severity, killing many trees and consuming coarse woody debris. On the other side of the mountains, the researchers also projected a decrease in live biomass by 2040—of anywhere between 17 and 26 percent in the Eastern Cascades and in the Okanogan Highlands—but no change in coarse woody debris biomass, or possibly even an increase, because coarse woody debris biomass increases as trees are killed by fire and subsequent low-severity fires burn only a small portion of it. “Changes in fire regimes in a warming climate can limit our potential to use forests in the Pacific Northwest to store additional carbon and to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Raymond said. Understanding the possible effects of more area burned by fire can help managers decide whether forests need to be actively managed for their fire potential to minimize carbon loss. More information: To read more about the study, visit www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-1851.1

from the summary…

Carbon sequestration in PNW forests will be highly sensitive to increases in fire, suggesting a cautious approach to managing these forests for C sequestration to mitigate anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Read More: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-1851.1
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-washington-forests-carbon-area-wildfire.html#jCp

Dousing the Claims: Extinguishing Republican Myths about Wildfire

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Democrats on the House Resources Committee released a new report on Tuesday.  Phil Taylor, a reporter with E&E, has a story out about the report and subsequent hearing.  Unfortunately, E&E doesn’t have a free link to the entire story, so some snips from the story are below.

Environmental groups over the past three years have appealed less than 5 percent of projects on federal lands designed to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire, and, of those, less than one out of five involved endangered species issues, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee….

“Environmental laws, land management agencies, litigation, endangered species and even immigrants share the Republican blame for this year’s devastating wildfires,” Markey said. “These accusations are just a smokescreen.”

Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management data obtained by committee Democrats seemed to back up his claim.

Out of 8,000 fuel reduction projects in federal forests over the last three, less than 1 percent of all of the work was affected by appeals, according to the Democrats’ report. Endangered Species Act challenges affected less than 0.05 percent of all hazardous fuels work on roughly 10 million acres of land, the report found.

“This report shows that political fact-checkers should create a new category called ‘pants on wildfire’ for the ill-informed Republican myths on forest fire prevention,” Markey said. “When climate change is baking the country in drought and actually increasing the risks of catastrophic wildfires, these half-baked ideas from Republicans do a disservice to the people who have suffered from wildfires.”….

Democrats said the findings are consistent with a Government Accountability Office report in 2010 that found less than 20 percent of the 1,191 fuel reduction projects on about 9 million acres from 2006 to 2008 were appealed. About 2 percent of all fuel reduction projects were litigated and those involved about 124,000 acres, the report says.

 

Climate, Man-Created Landscapes Feed Wildfires

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The following guest post is from Bryan Bird, Wild Places Program Director for WildEarth Guardians. He writes from Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Bird received his Masters in conservation biology from New Mexico State University in 1995 and holds an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He has undertaken conservation research, planning, and protection projects in Central America, Mexico, and the Southwestern United States. Since first working for the Guardians in 1996, Bryan has focused on restoration of national forestlands and their critical ecological processes, as well as monitoring, reviewing, and challenging destructive Forest Service logging proposals and land management plans.  – mk
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An incendiary situation is rising in the West’s wildlands – but it’s not just wildfire. It’s the explosion in the number of homes and structures in highly flammable landscapes and climate change-driven conditions that are leading to a public policy crisis.

We need to revisit our commitment to military-scale fire-fighting at massive taxpayer expense as well as federal, state and local policies that promote development into the West’s “fireplains.” As we recover from the largest single wildfire recorded in New Mexico history as well as the most destructive to homes and communities, we must consider effective and economical solutions.

Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman, Mont.-based think tank, points out the tremendous development potential in the West for the remaining 86 percent of forested private land adjacent to public land – known as wildland urban interface, or the red zone.

It calculated the astronomical costs of battling these fires. If homes were built in just half of the red zone, annual firefighting costs could range from $2.3 billion to $4.3 billion per year.

Here in New Mexico, Bernalillo, Lincoln and Otero counties have the largest portions of their red zone already developed. Sadly, these are foreseeable and expensive disasters.

A paradigm shift in how people live in fire-prone landscapes is upon us, similar to floodplain regulation in the 1970s. Insurers are taking notice, and so should county policymakers examine their building codes.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated last week at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, “Though the number of fires across the country is actually less than last year, and the acreage burned is less than last year, the number of structures and infrastructure burned is significantly higher, and that’s in part because of where the fires have been, and the growth of the wildland-urban interface.”

The latest science suggests weather and climatic conditions, rather than fuels, drive the large fires we are now witnessing. But despite all the rhetoric about “historic” fire seasons, the total acreage burned over the last decade, 7 million acres on average, is quite low by historic standards. Over 140 million acres burned annually in the U.S. in pre-industrial times. As recently as the 1930s Dust Bowl years, the number was close to 40 million acres. The past 50-70 years may actually be an abnormality in terms of acreage burned as well as fire severity.

Any single year’s fire activity, according to recent science, is related more closely to high temperatures than to previous fire suppression efforts, age of trees, or other factors. Higher spring temperatures, especially, lead to more fires. Scientists have found that the period from 1987-2004, compared to the 16 years prior to that, averaged a longer fire season, by two and a half months, four times as many fires, a fivefold increase in the time needed to put out a wildfire, and 6.7 times as much area being burned.

We simply cannot fireproof forests, but we can fireproof homes and structures. Thinning and logging far into the backcountry forests may or may not have any effect on saving communities in the red zone. But with changing climate and recurring droughts of biblical proportion, it’s a safe bet that expensive thinning and logging will not make a difference under such extreme conditions. In fact, it could make the fire hazard even worse.

When people build and live in the “fireplain,” it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to look after them.

In addition, we cannot ask taxpayers to foot the bill for costly thinning of public forests far from home in an uncertain attempt to change fire behavior. Homeowners must be required to treat their own landscapes and build with fire-resistant materials: a proven practice known as Firewise.

Western forests have burned since time immemorial, and this natural process is both intimidating and worsening with climate change. But we do not have a wildfire problem as much as a people in flammable landscapes problem.