Is U.S. Wildfire Policy a Smoke Screen?

TravelWatch
By Jonathan B. Tourtellot
National Geographic Traveler

Updated August 15, 2003

TravelWatch is produced by the geotourism editor for National
Geographic Traveler magazine, Jonathan B. Tourtellot. TravelWatch
focuses on sustainable tourism and destination stewardship. This
column, updated for National Geographic News, appeared
originally in the print magazine. Look for TravelWatch every Friday.

"Everybody is trying to hijack the fire issue for their own agendas" —Fire historian Stephen Pyne

If you like driving among towering Sierra Nevada ponderosa pines older than the Constitution, or hiking Montana's Bitterroot in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, you may be making one of the year's half billion visits to America's national parks and forests.

Except, of course, to the forests that are on fire. In Montana alone, 19 fires were burning at last report. One has closed part of Glacier National Park.

Wildfires have been getting worse over the years. In response, the government now plans drastic tree-thinning under its Healthy Forests Initiative. Skeptics call it a pretext for logging, one that flies in the face of our forests' overarching value as places to visit and appreciate.

Today's fires can grow unusually fierce because Smokey Bear went overboard. For decades, the well-meaning policy of suppressing all forest fires allowed too much fuel—dead wood, underbrush, small trees—to build up on public lands, especially in the fire-prone West. What might have once been a minor grass fire now turns cataclysmic, like last year's Hayman Fire in Colorado.

All parties generally agree that many forests need tidying up—by cutting, or carefully controlled burning, or both.

There, agreement ends. Citing cost efficiency, the Bush administration will invite loggers to do the thinning and let them cut what they need for profit. Critics say they'll take the best, biggest trees.

To sort it out, I consulted the nation's best-known fire historian, Dr. Stephen Pyne, based at Arizona State.

"I am dismayed that they are coupling fire management with commercial logging," he says of the White House plan. "Usually fire takes the little stuff and leaves the big, while logging takes the big stuff and leaves the little." Logging debris, he adds, is a worse hazard yet.

But both sides, Pyne says, oversimplify. Forests are naturally adapted to fire, but in different ways. The open grass-tree mix typical of ponderosa pine needs frequent, mild grass fires. The bigger trees survive, providing key habitat and pools of cooling shade. Lodgepole pine forests, by contrast, grow thickly and regenerate every century or so from "self-immolating burns," as in the seemingly catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988.

Jim Furnish, a former deputy Forest Service chief, agrees. In Yellowstone today, he points out, "you can see all the young lodgepoles growing the way they're supposed to. Yellowstone is performing exactly as a wild park should." Lodgepole, in fact, relies on fire to open its seed-laden pine cones.

What are national forests for? A faithful political conservative on most matters, Furnish wants "to manage forests for values like wildlife and recreation." Economics back him up: Whether fishing or camping or touring, visitors now account for 78 percent of the national forests' contribution to the overall economy, according to a 2000 Department of Agriculture report. Logging has slipped to only 12 percent.

Furnish offers a way to have both visitors and timber, minus fire: He started demonstration plots in the 1990s to show how loggers can thin second-growth forests, leaving the large trees and using new lumber technologies to get the most out of smaller ones. [Indeed, the market for old-growth timber is declining. Few mills can still handle the big logs, as thick as 50 inches (127 centimeters), but political pressure to cut old growth persists.]

Furnish wants to see forest habitats preserved, not just for that feathered political football, the spotted owl, but for whole ecosystems, including vulnerable salmon streams. Take away the big trees, he says, "and you're taking away the engine that God built."

Geo-savvy tips: To see what a ponderosa forest should look like, check out the one that the logging town of Condon, Montana, created around its Swan visitor center (406-754-3137). In Yellowstone, take a ranger-led tour of the open, now flourishing areas burned in '88. For a taste of logging traditions, many of which are themselves endangered, visit Libby, Montana, next July for Logger Days (406-293-4167).

A Lighter Footprint on Land?
Cruise Ships Alter Course

Cruise lines over the years have garnered numerous headlines about pollution at sea. Royal Caribbean, for instance, paid hefty fines in 1998 and 1999 for discharging oily bilge water. While dumping incidents may still occur, Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and many of the other lines have done much to clean up their act at sea, often adopting environmental safeguards far more stringent than the law requires.

The record on land, though, is not so stellar. Cruise ships habitually pour hundreds of people onto small islands and towns with little thought given to the consequences. Onshore excursion companies are one area of concern. A cruise passenger on a snorkel excursion near Tahiti, for instance, reported how the local guides tried to amuse their clients by breaking off bits of living coral and tossing a hapless octopus through the air. The cruise line's response when notified of the abuses: "We have no control over local companies."

Royal Caribbean and Carnival may be about to change that. Working with Conservation International, the lines have agreed to a new initiative that will develop and apply environmental guidelines to onshore excursion operators. After all, says Royal Caribbean senior vice president Captain William Wright, "the product on which we base our business is a clean ocean and pristine islands."

Passengers should cheer this effort and help out by reporting irresponsible shore-excursion companies. As Captain Wright says, "Guests clearly play a role."