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This AP article, which ran in most all Montana newspapers, caught my eye yesterday. I’d like to use it to point out a few things related to wildfires.

The title of the article is “State’s wildfire season second-biggest so far this decade.”

For starters, what’s sort of bizarre, is that the reporter only looked at a 6 year time frame (since 2010) not a decade.

When you dig deeper into the article you see that so far the 2015 wildfire season in Montana (which is quickly coming to a close on account of some weather events last week, as well as more snow and rain coming this week) has only burned 27% of the total acres burned in the 2012 wildfire season in Montana (334,221 acres in 2015 vs 1,220,646 acres in 2012).

Wanting to know more I spent about 30 minutes at this link via the Northern Rockies Coordination Center, which ironically was provided to me by the reporter when I asked him some detailed questions. Why the reporter was unable to apparently spend a few minutes checking out these statistics is a mystery.

So, I copied down all the wildfire burned acres totals in Montana from 2015 going all the back to 2000 (see chart above).

What quickly becomes apparent is the wide range of acres burned from year-to-year.

In fact, based on these numbers a more accurate frame for the AP story about the 2015 wildfire season might have been that so far Montana has seen a little less than the average acres burned going back to 2000.

It’s also worth pointing out that another way of looking at this year’s wildfire season in Montana is that, to date, we’ve only burned 27% to 45% of the acres burned in Montana during the wildfire seasons of 2012, 2007, 2006, 2003 and 2000.

While technically the title of the article, and framing of the story is correct, I’d put forth that there are much more accurate (although, perhaps less ‘flashy’ and ‘sensationalistic’) ways of looking at Montana’s 2015 wildfire season.

Looking at the chart going back to 2000 another issue that becomes apparent, to me anyways, is that there appears to be no correlation whatsoever between the total burned acres and the amount of national forest logging and/or national forest lawsuits; although that fact certainly doesn’t stop some from within the logging industry or politicians from trying to always make that case.

Of course, it goes without saying that weather conditions such as drought, heat and wind have a huge impact on the total number of acres burned, as do long-term climate factors. Another issue is total number of ignitions (whether by people or dry lightening storms) and what part of the state the ignitions occur in (i.e. eastern grasslands vs western forests).

I’ve lived in Montana since 1996 and have to say that compared with my home state of Wisconsin it always seems very dry out here, whether or not we are technically in the grips of drought, which we certainly are in now.

So perhaps ignitions are even more of a key factor in the total number of acres burned in Montana in any given year, rather than drought.

I also suspect that wind plays a huge role in all of this. Really, the common denominator in all major wildfires is wind. No wonder some people find wind so annoying.

This information is not meant to discount specific experiences communities, homeowners or citizens have had with wildfires this year, but just serves as a bit of important, fact-based information and context, at least as far as Montana’s wildfire season goes.

As I’ve said before, information like this is especially important in the context of recent statements (and pending federal legislation) from certain politicians blaming wildfires on a lack of national forest logging or a handful of timber sale lawsuits.

If politicians are going to predictably use another wildfire season to yet again weaken our nation’s key environmental or public lands laws by increasing logging (including calls by politicians like Montana’s Rep Ryan Zinke for logging within Wilderness Areas) then the public should at least have some facts and statistics available to help put the wildfires in context.

Just so you know.  Local custom and culture have been preserved.

With so much media and political attention focused on wildfires – and in some cases public lands management and calls to greatly increase logging on national forests by reducing public input and environmental analysis – it may be helpful to take a look at this year’s wildfire stats to see what’s burned and where.

Here’s a copy of the National Interagency Coordinator Center’s ‘Incident Management Situation Report’ from Tuesday, September 1, 2015.

• As of today, a total of 8,202,557 acres have burned in U.S. wildfires. In 1930 and 1931, over 50 million acres burned each year and during the 10 year (hot and dry) period from the late 1920’s to the late 1930’s an AVERAGE of 30 million acres burned every year in the United States. Additionally, the 2001 National Fire Plan update indicates that an average of 145 million acres burned annually in the pre-industrial, conterminous United States.

[NOTE: Under the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal government agencies largely purged all records and information about wildfire acre burned stats from before the period of 1960].

• This year, 63% of ALL wildfire acres burned in the U.S. burned in Alaska, much of it over remote tundra ecosystems. According to federal records, since 1959 the average temperature in Alaska has jumped 3.3 degrees and the average winter temperature has spiked 5 degrees.

• Less than 8% of ALL wildfires that have burned this year in the U.S. have burned in the northern Rockies.

• National Forests account for ONLY 15% of all wildfire acres burned in U.S. this year.

• 88% of all BLM (Bureau of Land Management) acres burned in wildfires this year were in Alaska, again much of tundra, not forests.

This information is not meant to discount specific experiences communities, homeowners or citizens have had with wildfires this year, but just serves as a bit of important, fact-based information and context  regarding what land ownerships have burned and where they are located.

Again, this information is especially important in the context of recent statements (and pending federal legislation) from certain politicians blaming wildfires on a lack of national forest logging or a handful of timber sale lawsuits.

If politicians are going to predictably use another wildfire season to yet again weaken our nation’s key environmental or public lands laws by increasing logging (including calls by politicians like Montana’s Rep Ryan Zinke for logging within Wilderness Areas) then the public should at least have some facts and statistics available to help put the wildfires in context.

Finally, please keep in mind that right now the U.S. Forest Service has the ability to conduct an unlimited number of ‘fast-track’ logging projects on over 45 MILLION acres of National Forest nationally – and on 5 MILLION acres of National Forests in Montana. This public lands logging would all be ‘categorically excluded from the requirements of NEPA.’

UPDATE: Below is a chart showing annual hectares burned in 11 western states from 1916-2012 showing a very strong correlation between wildfire and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin.

OP-ed by David Allen, president and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

Allow the Forest Service to do its job without frivilous lawsuits

The focus is on Michael Garrity and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

“We must do something right now to allow the Forest Service and other federal land management agencies to do their jobs. If Mr. Garrity wants to do something to “secure the ecological integrity of the Wild Rockies Bioregion” as his website states—instead of filing lawsuits, he should think about mobilizing his members to get their hands dirty working on habitat enhancement projects like thousands of RMEF volunteers do every year. We have not filed a single lawsuit to get this done.”

Which again brings up the question I’d ask Garrity: If not these plans, then what? Do nothing? If not, then how would you manage the lands involved in the lawsuits you’ve lodged? “Do nothing” isn’t much of answer when so many in a collaborative have agreed on some form of active management.

According to this information complied by Michael Kellett of RESTORE: The North Woods, the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland fire budget is about 10 times larger per acre than the National Park Service fire budget.

Kellett writes: “There are some differences in the details of each agency’s budget. But the big-ticket items appear to correlate to each other. Regardless, it is clear that the Forest Service fire budget is magnitudes larger than the NPS fire budget. (And this does not include ‘restoration,’ much of which is supposedly for ‘fuel reduction,’ or post-fire ‘salvage’ logging, which together total more than $800 million of the USFS budget.)”

Today, NASA posted this image of forest fires burning around Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. A drought has gripped the region throughout 2015. As in Alaska this year, these boreal forest fires are burning unchecked.

Question for our readers. Would fuels treatment, thinning or other logging have prevented these fires?

This is about the coal industry and climate disruption, but it reminded me of the changing policies on national forest lands and their effects.  Not the same, but some common threads.

One is the idea that is hard to talk about solutions when there is still hope that the problem will go away.  Forest planning has an important role to play in establishing common, reasonable expectations.  I think it could do better than it’s done.

Every now and then, Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O’Toole returns to his public land policy roots. Today he plays a familiar riff on firefighting spending.

Twenty years ago, one could have imagined a congressional coalition of Blue Dog Democrats and sensible Republicans working together to come up with a new fire policy. No longer. The Blue Dogs are almost extinct, now numbering only 15 members and “sensible Republican” is an oxymoron. Which leaves the legislative arena to western senators of both parties who want the CNN air show to continue, welcome the federal dollars spent in their states, and are scared to death of offending heroic firefighters (they remember that Conrad Burns lost his Montana seat after dissing a firefighting crew).

This article describes a lawsuit by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council over the East Deer Lodge Valley Landscape Restoration Management project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. It is interesting that the project is “part of a restoration effort that began in 2006. That’s when the Forest Stewardship Program — made up of eight entities including the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Powell County commissioners; and Trout Unlimited — approached the Forest Service about the idea of working together to improve the banks of the Clark Fork River.”

The project area is about 40K acres, and commercial salvage and commercial thinning would occur on about 2,500 acres.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council lay out their objections in detail in the complaint. They oppose the project for a number of familiar reasons — the harvesting, threats to grizzly bears and lynx, threats to water quality, and so on. What I’d like to know is this: If these two groups were the land managers, what would they do? Nothing. An objection letter states that “We recommend that the “No Action Alternative” be selected.” The groups describe significant environmental problems that already exist — sediment in streams from roads, low-quality wildlife habitat, etc. Have the groups proposed an alternative management plan, other than “no action”?