Since 2002, six of 11 Western states have set records for the amount of acreage burned in a single season.
California has done it twice.
That's despite the fact that California fields one of the largest fire departments in the world. Every year, the state spends $3.1 billion to fight wildfires.
Welcome to what Jerry Williams calls the West's "new reality."
The retired U.S. Forest Service director of fire and aviation management said today's wildfires burn with such intensity that it often takes some help from nature to put them out. In an age with record temperatures and drought, firefighters are sometimes overmatched, he said.
That's despite their impressive record of stomping out close to 99 percent of all fire starts.
The 1 or 2 percent that escape initial attack burn about 95 percent of the acreage and account for 85 percent of all firefighting expenditures, Williams told a packed room Thursday at Missoula's Holiday Inn Parkside.
"The last decade, we've seen wildfires that can't be controlled until there is a break in the weather," Williams said.
Williams was one of three participants in a panel discussion on "Fire in the Woods: Perspectives on Forest Restoration." The panel was part of a two-day conference hosted by Western Progress, a progressive policy group, and it focused on building a restoration economy in the Rocky Mountain West.
It included Wally Covington, founding director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, and Rob Davis, president of the Forest Energy Corporation of Arizona, who talked about the challenges of finding markets for wood products produced during forest restoration projects.
Williams said that as fires grow larger and more difficult to control, the Forest Service is spending a larger percentage of its annual budget on suppression each year.
In 2007, the agency will spend close to half its budget to fight fire. In 1990, the figure was closer to 15 percent.
That shift is eating up money needed for wildlife, recreation and water quality programs - "all of the things that define the Rocky Mountain West," Williams said.
Williams believes it will take major changes in policy and a change in the Western mindset to open the doors wide enough for the kind of restoration efforts needed to turn the tide.
Environmental laws that guide the Forest Service in managing national forests were passed with good intentions decades ago, in a time of cooler temperatures and more precipitation, he said.
Those laws "simply favor no action over action," he said. "Now we're seeing there are consequences to no action."
Williams said "well-intentioned laws" shouldn't be abandoned. Instead, they should be modified to take into account the West's "new reality" of global warming and stressed forest ecosystems.
Covington has advocated thinning and reintroducing fire into fire-dependent forests for years.
The ecological damage of excluding fire from fire-dependent forests was documented in this country back in the early 1920s, Covington said.
Early foresters encouraged heavy grazing in the wide-open ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest as a way to control the forage that traditionally carried low-intensity fires. Once fire was eliminated, young seedlings had a chance to get a foothold.
The result was a population explosion of trees and a shift away from the open forests of old, Covington said.
When the forage disappeared, so did wildlife species like pronghorn antelope.
Once a forest ecosystem is "out of whack," it becomes vulnerable to a variety of vectors, including invasive plants and insects.
It takes time for the changes to show up on the human radar screen. It can take 40 or 50 years for some of these conditions to occur, Covington said.
"These lags tend to lull people into a false sense of security," he said.
To illustrate his point, Covington showed three photographs of the same plot. The first photo was taken in 1909 and showed a few large ponderosa pines in an open parklike setting. The second was shot in 1938. Young trees were filling in the grasslands.
In the 1997 photograph, the area had become heavily forested. The three old-growth trees - one was almost 700 years old - were nearly hidden.
Covington advocates restoration management treatments that lead to a healthy ecosystem.
What's healthy?
"It's a system that is self-regulating," he said. "It has all its natural components and processes."
In forested stands that haven't burned for decades, Covington said it's often important to reduce fuels before reintroducing fire. If that doesn't happen, old-growth trees are sometimes killed when fire burns through years of accumulated bark and duff around the base of the tree.
Covington said the results of reintroducing fire into a fire-dependent forest can be remarkable. On one project, researchers removed 1,190 of the 1,200 stems per acre. The large trees were left standing. Once the other trees were removed, grasses and forbes flourished and the trees left standing became healthier.
To make it work, managers have to be committed to thinning enough trees to keep fire out of the forest crowns.
"Half-hearted measures won't work," he said. "If you only take half of what's needed, you can actually create worse conditions."
Covington said one project required workers to leave trees over 5 inches in diameter. When fire burned through the area, it killed every tree.
It's also important that the restoration work be accomplished on a landscape scale, rather than 1,000 acres here and 100 acres there, he said.
Perhaps most important, Covington said, the treatments should be based on the best science available and developed in a collaborative fashion so the public has a chance to voice its opinions.
Wildfires are burning more forest every year, he said.
In the 1950s, an average of about 160,000 acres burned in the Rocky Mountain West each year. By the 1960s, the number was closer to 230,000 acres. In the 1970s, fire swept over closer to 400,000 acres every year.
Since the late-1980s, it's not unusual for wildfire to scorch more than 1 million acres in a season, Covington said. With the impacts of global warming, it is likely wildfires could burn even larger areas over time.
"We're not finished yet," he said.The Billings Gazette
