Michael Anderson
Reprint of a Special Report to The Seattle Times

President Bush is cynically using the specter of homes threatened by forest fires to promote an irresponsible anti-environmental agenda. Bush's timber industry-inspired plan to increase logging of the national forests illustrates a maxim from former Montana Congressman Pat Williams: "The only thing that burns hotter than a wildfire in the West is the demagoguery of some politicians trying to take advantage of it."

Bush has prescribed a treatment for our public forests that will only worsen their condition and do nothing to improve public safety. At a time when we need to be thinning forests near homes and communities, the president proposes to dispatch chain saws to the remote back country and old-growth forests to bring down the biggest, most fire-resistant trees.

The problem is not environmental laws, appeals or lawsuits. There's ample authority and discretion in the laws for the U.S. Forest Service to clear away the flammable brush and thickets of small trees that threaten rural communities. According to the General Accounting Office, only 1 percent of Forest Service hazardous fuel reduction projects in fiscal year 2001 were administratively appealed and none was litigated.

Nor is reduced timber cutting the problem. To the contrary, logging has significantly worsened wildfire problems in many areas, such as California's Sierra Nevada. The real tragedy of Bush's blundering forest plan is that it misses a historic opportunity to build broad public consensus for a scientifically sound plan to reduce wildfire risks. Most environmental organizations agree that there is excessive brush and too many small trees in the dry forests of the interior West. We also concur that more thinning and controlled burning of these forests is needed to restore more natural, fire-resistant conditions.

Last year, The Wilderness Society worked with the Western Governors Association and a broad group of stakeholders to produce a 10-year Comprehensive Wildfire Strategy. The authors of that collaborative strategy agreed that they could accomplish the goals of protecting lives and homes from wildfire without changing any laws. They also agreed that a mix of commercial and non-commercial thinning would be needed.

Rather than devote more federal money and resources to the problem, Bush seems to have a two-fold strategy to reduce fuel loads. First, he wants to cut costs and move more projects faster through the administrative pipeline by slashing environmental safeguards and limiting citizen participation. Second, Bush would give the timber companies more taxpayer-subsidized timber to make it worth their while to thin the forests.

However, Bush's tight-fisted strategy is fatally flawed. Eliminating environmental controls will greatly increase public opposition to fuel-reduction projects. And logging larger, more valuable trees only serves to defeat the objectives of reducing fuel hazards and creating healthy forests. As University of Washington forestry professor Jerry Franklin told The Oregonian last week, "You achieve no ecological or fuel hazard goal by cutting old, large trees. If you're really trying to carry this out and pay for it with timber, you're going to do bad things to the forest and reduce the resiliency of the system."

A much better approach would be to focus the government's limited resources where the need is the greatest and public support is the strongest; in the areas nearest to people's homes and businesses. By building public confidence, the Forest Service should be able to build broad-based support for increased funding to accomplish the fuel-reduction work that really needs to be accomplished.

Unfortunately, Bush's misguided attack on environmental laws, appeals and lawsuits is threatening to derail much of the progress made toward rallying public support behind a more enlightened fire policy. To many environmentalists, Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative" looks like a Trojan horse, designed to dismantle environmental safeguards and promote timber industry profits, rather than restore ecological health.

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