Faulty Practices, Logging Methods 
Fanning Flames

By Sandy Bahr
June 25, 2002

Comments from several Arizona politicians regarding environmentalists and the fires in Arizona are misguided and misinformed. They have made allegations without having the facts about the forests, about forest management or about the work that groups like the Sierra Club are doing.

The many factors that have contributed to the fires in Arizona this year include:

•  Decades of fire suppression and 100 years of logging the large trees that have left a forest dense with small trees and a huge fuel load.

• Extreme drought and high wind that have made this situation especially dangerous. There is about one-fourth the normal rainfall in these areas.

• Careless or deliberate actions by people. Both fires were human-caused.

While fire is a natural part of the forest and has a role to play in healthy forests, the severity of this summer's fires has been augmented by decades of suppressing fires too effectively. Dead wood, underbrush and smaller trees have not been cleaned out periodically by smaller fires, as would happen under more natural conditions.

A century of managing our national forests for large-scale logging has left a more fire-prone forest today. The Sierra Club has urged the U.S. Forest Service to stop subsidizing logging and to instead invest in fire prevention through thinning the forests near communities, where these activities will do the most good.

There is no way to avoid fire in the forest. It has always been as much a part of the forest as the weather.

But minimizing the impact of fire is possible. With scarce dollars and millions of acres of dense, smaller trees, the priority should be to focus on thinning forests closest to communities (within a half mile or less of structures is what experts recommend) and on informing homeowners on ways they can limit the fire risk: clearing brush and wood from next to their houses and freeing their roofs of twigs and pine needles. This year, the intense drought conditions are clearly a major additional factor in the fires.

Conservationists have urged saving the large, fire-resistant old-growth trees and thinning the forest of underbrush and smaller trees (12 inches or smaller in diameter).

The Sierra Club also has supported controlled burning to remove the underbrush, under the right weather conditions when there is moisture in the forest and low winds. These types of activities would better mimic natural conditions and leave in place the most fire-resistant trees: the large, old pines.

Nearly a year ago the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, looked at all 1,671 Forest Service fire-prevention projects on the national forests and found that only 20 had been challenged by industry, recreation, individual or environmental interests.

Only one was in Arizona, near Flagstaff, and all the parties reached a compromise.

The Forest Service simply is not being stalled on fire prevention by citizen groups. Their controversies come from continuing to log their few remaining fire-resistant, old-growth trees for timber sales.

We urge Gov. Jane Hull, Sen. Jon Kyl and other elected officials to get their facts straight before pointing fingers.

What we need now from our elected officials is leadership and an effort to bring people together to solve problems, help the people who have lost their homes and promote better management of the forests for the long run.

What we don't need is more rhetoric which serves only to fan the flames of hate and divisiveness.

Sandy Bahr is the conservation outreach director for the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter.

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