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Peter Triandafillou is a retired professional forester. He has managed forestland in Maine and other states, including Oregon.
The catastrophic wildfires in the western U.S. have understandably generated media attention and political sparring. The president claims that the problem is due to poor or a lack of forest management. Others claim a consensus that the central cause is climate change. Assigning blame to a single cause ignores decades of public policy decisions and natural processes in our forests.
There is little doubt that the climate of the West is changing, and that recent trends in precipitation have made a dangerous situation worse. However, the causes and effects of fire are much more complex than that one change.
Catastrophic fires require large fuel loads, which include brush, woody debris and dead trees. Of these, we have plenty. With the best of intentions, a century of public policy has allowed fuel loads to accumulate to unnatural levels in forest ecosystems that were naturally adapted to regular fires. Iconic public campaigns with Smokey the Bear taught us to prevent all wildfires, and we were successful for many decades. Unfortunately, this prevented more frequent, low-intensity natural fires from consuming accumulations of fuel, setting the stage for much larger and intense fires in recent years.
In the 1990s, again with the best of intentions, we essentially ceased harvesting timber on federal lands. Harvesting mature timber removes wood before trees die and become fuel for a fire. Allowing forest stands to die and remain standing adds larger amounts of fuel to the already unnaturally high levels brought about by our effective fire prevention.
Like many forests, the West is subject to naturally occurring insect infestations. These insects frequently attack older trees, and many eventually succumb. The lack of natural fires or forest management to reduce densities of trees increased stresses on them, making them even more vulnerable to insect attack and death in dry periods. This has happened over millions of acres in the West, resulting in large areas with standing dead trees. Many of the areas are inaccessible, but others could have been harvested to reduce the accumulation of dry, dead wood.
We then chose to ignore these basic forestry principles and proceeded to build homes in many of these areas. I recall driving in California some years ago and marveling at the size and beauty of ex-urban homes built on a forested slope. I also noted with some alarm that fuel loads were dangerously high, and that exiting the area on the one narrow access road in a fire would be very difficult. We’ve now seen the results of these policies in action.
Could forest management entirely remove the risk? Of course not. Many areas of dead trees and forest floor fuel are inaccessible. Our overdependence on fire prevention set the stage for large, catastrophic fires. Even with forest management, fires will occur in the western landscape, and some of them will be large. However, we can look at the managed forest landscape of the U.S. Southeast. That forest is fire adapted, and forest owners have practiced controlled burns and timber management for many decades. Wildfires still happen, but they are rarely severe. We can surely do much better at managing fire risk in our western landscape.
Even though climate is changing and the resulting drought has made western fires larger and more dangerous, it is counterproductive to ignore decades of mistaken public policy that have worsened the risk and effects of fire. Doing so almost guarantees that we will make similar mistakes again. Forestry, including timber management, fuel management and controlled fire are essential tools that can help mitigate the fire risk in a fire dominated ecosystem. We ignored these tools for decades, and we are witnessing the results. The public will be much better served when officials admit these mistakes and adopt better management policies to protect both the forest and humans who leave near and in it.