|
The U.S. Forest Service was recently caught using misleading photos in a public-relations brochure to promote a plan that would triple logging levels in Sierra Nevada national forests. A 1909 photo was used by the agency to show how "open and parklike" Sierra Nevada forests were in the 19th century, and to argue for a huge increase in logging of mature trees supposedly to "restore" our forests and prevent severe fire.
The problem was that the century-old photo was taken in Montana, not California, and it was shot after most of the trees had been removed in a timber sale. The pre-logging photo shows a pine forest dense with trees. Indeed, as the 1996 Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project reported, many of the early historical accounts of Sierra Nevada forests recorded dense forest conditions.
This issue raises important questions about wildland fire that go beyond simple photographic misrepresentation. For instance, are severe fires really as pervasive now in Sierra Nevada forests as the Forest Service's brochure would have us believe?
The brochure reports that approximately 15,000 acres of forest now burn at high severity in the Sierra Nevada each year, yet this is less than 19 percent of the total acreage that burns annually, according to the Forest Service's own figures. Low-severity fires, which slowly creep along the forest floor, predominate. In addition, the Sierra Nevada contain roughly 15 million acres of forest, which means that less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the forest burns at high severity each year.
Fire ecologists generally agree that logging and fire suppression have created excessively dense underbrush conditions in some areas -- including forests near urbanized areas in the Bay Area and Southern California -- and removal or thinning of such underbrush and saplings can be an appropriate step. Congress has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for such work, which should be focused on areas adjacent to homes, instead of in remote wildlands.
The Forest Service brochure also contains copious rhetoric about how destructive severe fire is. But, ecologically speaking, is this view accurate? During the summer months, it is common to turn on the TV news and hear about how a wildfire "devastated" or "consumed" some forest or another. Hyperbole sells.
The truth, however, is that some amount of severe wildland fire is natural, and a number of forest species depend upon severely burned forest for nesting and foraging. Several woodpecker species feed upon the bark beetle larvae in fire-killed trees and excavate nesting cavities in larger dead trees, or "snags." Researchers believe that some of these species, such as the black- backed woodpecker, depend upon these "snag forests" and cannot maintain viable populations outside of recently fire-killed stands of conifers.
Interestingly, the scientific literature indicates that severely burned forest habitat may support an equal or greater richness of bird and plant species than green, unburned forest. A 1995 study by an ornithologist at the University of Montana found 87 bird species using heavily burned forest for foraging and/or nesting, and some species used severely burned forest substantially more than any other forest type.
Unfortunately, the efforts of the Bush administration and the U.S. Forest Service to demonize wildland fire have diverted attention from the scientific evidence. Even more troubling is the prevailing policy that seeks to "salvage log" nearly all severely burned stands on national forest lands within a year or two after a fire. Invariably, such commercial logging projects are creatively packaged as restoration or fire-risk
reduction plans, though they typically destroy important habitat and tend to leave behind extreme levels of surface fuels. The Forest Service, which keeps 100 percent of the receipts from salvage-timber sales, and the timber industry reap obvious economic benefits from post-fire logging, but many of the wildlife species that prefer burned forest are suffering the consequences. As a one scientific study concludes, the black-backed woodpecker is "vulnerable to local and regional extinction" as a result of salvage logging and fire suppression.
It is true that fire obviously destroys houses, and we must be diligent about spending the resources and effort to help homeowners fireproof their homes and properties. At the same time, we must bear in mind that, unlike logging, fire does not destroy forests.
Chad Hanson is the director of the John Muir Project, based in Cedar Ridge near the Tahoe National Forest.
|
|
