Many Factors in Placing Blame for Fires, Experts Say

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

By Tania Soussan
Journal Staff Writer

Even as some people pointed the finger at environmentalists for the devastating fires burning around the West, a noted Southwestern fire expert said a combination of other factors is to blame.
    
Tom Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said livestock grazing at the turn of the century, decades of government fire suppression, people building homes in the forest and severe drought have led to the current crisis.
    
"There's cumulative and collective responsibility for the predicament we're in, and it goes back more than a century," Swetnam said.
    
The Arizona Republic reported Monday that Western governors meeting in Phoenix "launched a broadside against environmentalists" for their opposition of some efforts to reduce forest fuels.
    
"The policies that are coming from the East Coast, that are coming from the environmentalists, that say we don't need to log, we don't need to thin our forests are absolutely ridiculous," said Arizona Gov. Jane Hull. "Nobody on the East Coast knows how to manage these fires, and I for one have had it."
    
But Gov. Gary Johnson, who is attending the Western Governors' Association meeting, said in a telephone interview that he does not blame environmental groups.
    
He did say government resources that have been used to defend lawsuits filed by environmentalists could have been used to thin forests.
    
Johnson said the last century of federal forest management is the real problem.
    
"Around 1900 you could see through all the forests," he said. "There wasn't all the undergrowth that there is today ... as a result of the federal government putting out fires. So, now when we have fires, they're devastating."
    
Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians aggressively litigates to block some timber harvesting projects in national forests.
    
"It's predictable but also irresponsible to lay the blame of a legacy of 100 years of fire suppression and logging and overgrazing at the feet of the environmental community," said the group's conservation director, John Horning.
    
He said some blame should be placed on the people who build homes in fire-prone areas. Property owners in flood plains and beachfront hurricane zones are reconsidering building houses in natural disaster areas. Now, Westerners should consider whether it's smart to set up house in a forest, he said.
    
"There are some places where people just shouldn't be building homes," Horning said.
    
Johnson agreed that it's time to consider the impact of subdivisions in forested areas.
    
And Swetnam said homeowners often worsen fire danger by resisting thinning projects because they like living among trees and protesting prescribed burns because of the smoke they cause.
    
More people living in the woods also means more chances of a human-caused fire, he said.
    
On a visit to the Arizona fire Monday, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth said he does not blame environmentalists.
    
"There's a lot of blame to go around, and we did a lot of things in the Forest Service with good intentions" such as suppressing fires, he said.
    
That policy has increased the density of the forest near Show Low from 25 or 30 large trees per acre to 700 or as many as 2,000 trees on an acre, he said.

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