Senator Larry Craig of Idaho is currently attempting to pass legislation that would promote salvage logging to "restore forest health." Anyone familiar with Craig's biased attitude knows that his real interest lies more with promoting the timber industry than promoting forest ecosystem health. Nevertheless, to the uninformed public, his contention that our forest ecosystems are "unhealthy" appears to have some legitimacy.
According to Craig and other salvage logging supporters, our forests are "overstocked" and "dying" as a consequence of fire suppression policies. Increases in insect outbreaks, disease and large catastrophic fires are all blamed on fire suppression. I might note that scientists dispute the suggestion that there are any real measurable increases in insect outbreaks, disease or even fire intensity, and suggest that such claims may be more imaginary than real. However, just for argument's sake, even if there has been an escalation in these tree mortality factors, that doesn't mean there is a forest health problem. Ecologically speaking, an increased incidence of dying trees is a normal response to increased stocking density, as well as other factors like drought. In other words, while trees may be dying, the forest ecosystem is functioning perfectly. To view dead trees as an indication of imbalance is to fail to see the forest for the trees.
Furthermore, though fire suppression has changed the structure, age and species distribution within forest ecosystems, fuel accumulations seldom influence the occurrence of large blazes. Climatic variables such as severe drought, wind and local weather conditions, not fuels, ultimately control the size and intensity of subsequent blazes. Thus, reduction of fuel may not significantly affect so-called "catastrophic" blazes.
Climatic conditions, more than anything, contributed to the large 1988 Yellowstone fires╤and every other large fire in history. Salvage logging won't change the frequency or occurrence of the forest conditions favoring fire.
Even if fuel reduction by salvage logging could prevent large blazes, there is an issue of scale. To make any appreciable difference in landscape-scale blazes╤the kinds of fires salvage logging is purported to stop╤would require the removal of fuel over tens of millions of acres. The cost of road building, sale layout and administration necessary to effectively remove fuel on this kind of scale has never been addressed. Because salvage logging is supposed to be directed toward removal of the smaller, understory trees, the economic viability of harvesting timber is further reduced. Not surprisingly, congressional studies have demonstrated that nearly all salvage timber sales lose money.
Why should we care if millions of acres of marginal timber burn up or die from insects and disease? Quite simply, most of the economically marketable timber was cut years ago. Aren't we spending a lot of money to protect trees with little timber value?
The other justification given for salvage logging is home-owner protection. Yet constructing a house in most western forests is no different from building a structure in a river floodplain╤sooner or later, you're going to lose your property to natural forces. Fighting fires to protect cabins and homes built in the hinterlands is nothing more than a subsidy for the rich. If people wish to build their homes in the forest let them╤not the taxpayers╤suffer the economic consequences of their decisions. I might add that a reduction in fire fighting might be one of the best ways to stem the spread of subdivisions and sprawl in the rural West.
In addition to the very high economic costs associated with salvage logging, we must keep in mind that logging of any kind is not ecologically value-neutral. There are a lot of ecological impacts associated with timber harvest, including increased road density and access which often negatively affect wildlife, invasion of weeds, removal of down woody debris, loss of snags, and other ecological changes that occur with logging and are not typically associated with fires. Even if we could conceivably log enough acres to make a difference in fuel loading, we would be creating a lot of other ecological problems, many of them far worse than anything associated with large fires.
At best, "strategic" salvage logging can create effective "defensive positions"╤for instance, thinning a forest around a town might enable firefighters to deflect a big fire around the community. Such site-specific fuel reductions might have a role to play in community protection schemes. Nevertheless, this is very different from seeking to eliminate all large fires across the landscape.
Finally, one has to question why we need to eliminate or suppress large fires in the first place. From a forest ecosystem viewpoint, large fires are not "abnormal." Ecologically speaking, there is no such thing as a catastrophic fire. Again, it's a matter of scale. Over any hundred-year period, small frequent burns may have been the norm in some ecosystems such as the ponderosa pine forests that are common in many lower-elevation forests around the West. Yet a careful reading of fire history and other paleobiogeographical evidence suggests that large fires are the norm in nearly all western ecosystems at some time or other. If viewed over a time period of 500 to 1,000 years, nearly all western forest ecosystems, even those characterized by frequent, low-intensity burns, are found to experience large, infrequent, so-called catastrophic fires.
While fire suppression has changed the timing and intensity of fires in some ecosystems, it would be wrong to conclude that large fires are an aberration or beyond the normal range of variability. For example, the 1910 fires that burned 3.5 million acres of northern Idaho and western Montana involved a lot of low-elevation forest that "normally" experienced frequent, low-intensity blazes. Yet the 1910 fires consumed millions of acres of timber long before effective fire suppression could have affected fuel loadings.
Forest ecosystems are not "destroyed" by large fires, only changed. From a landscape-wide perspective, it is clear that a very small number of very large fires account for the majority of acreage burned. Large fires are not abnormal, just rare.
Large fires can "reset" the ecological "clock." One or two large fires will reduce fuel loads across a broad landscape with far less ecological impact than logging, and at a fraction of the cost. If we are truly interested in forest health, not protecting trees as fodder for the timber industry, then a far more sensible plan would involve fuel reductions in a few strategic locations, such as the borders of towns. Salvage logging and prescribed burning would reduce fuel loading while larger fires would be tolerated, even encouraged, throughout the remainder of the landscape.
A truly enlightened forest health policy would advocate a major reduction in timber harvest throughout the West, and the restoration of large fires as an ecological and evolutionary force. Big fires are as necessary for ecosystem health and forest evolution as predators are to the "health" and evolution of prey. To quote the poet Robinson Jeffers: "What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine, the fleet limbs of the antelope?" Fires are to the forest what the wolf is to the antelope.