BOULDER, Colo., Nov. 5 (UPI) -- The recent wildfires in southern California have accelerated approval in the Senate of the Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative -- legislation that would not have addressed the causes or reduced the impact of those fires even if it already had been in place.
"It is indisputable that the southern California wildfires pushed the Healthy Forests legislation through the Senate," Niel Lawrence, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's forestry project, told United Press International. "Scenes of flames threatening houses dominated national news for days prior to the bill coming to a vote and its backers successfully capitalized on those images.
"They ran an effective but highly cynical misinformation campaign where national discussion about how to keep our forests healthy or to protect communities in southern California became impossible," Lawrence added.
The Healthy Forests Initiative, in the administration's words, "calls for more active forest and rangeland management. It establishes a framework for protecting communities and the environment through local collaboration on thinning, planned burns and forest restoration projects."
The facts were the first casualty of the situation. Most of the acreage burned -- especially in the San Diego area, where the television cameras were most active -- was not forest at all, but chaparral ecosystems common to that part of the state.
In forest thinning, to reduce the danger of devastating hot fires, older trees that burn more easily and carry crown fires are burned through prescribed burning or cut down by logging. This allows younger trees, more resistant to fires, to replace them.
This strategy will not work in chaparral.
"Under Santa Ana conditions, fires carry through all chaparral regardless of age class," Jon Keeley, a fire researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Three Rivers, Calif., told UPI.
Keeley was referring to the Santa Ana wind, a dry, sometimes hot and dusty wind that blows westward in the region through the canyons toward the coastal areas. Santa Anas occur mostly during fall, winter and spring, and tend to peak in December.
"Therefore, prescribed burning programs over large areas to remove old stands and maintain young growth as bands of firebreaks resistant to ignition are futile at stopping these wildfires," said Keeley, who studies both southern California shrublands and Sierra Nevada forests.
Keeley said changing land uses in southern California have resulted in the introduction of non-native species, especially cheatgrass, that increase the frequency of fires.
"The more fires we get," he said, "(the more) shrublands are decimated and replaced. In southern California, especially in the eastern portion of the Los Angeles basin, anywhere you see highways got through; you can see it, an increase in the alien grasses and a decrease in the shrublands. People throw cigarettes out the window. Fires in southern California follow roads. Most of the fires are started by people."
Though most of the fires were not in forests, some were. Among the hardest hit was the San Bernadino National Forest, which already had suffered a number of tree deaths due to bark beetle infestations. News columnists and talk radio hosts in the region had blamed environmentalists for blocking fire reduction measures.
Appeals and delays of forest thinning will be more difficult after the Bush program passes, because the plan specifically reduces environmental review on timber sales of less than 1,000 acres.
"We are speeding up the process of environmental assessments (as) required by law," President George W. Bush said in an Aug. 21 speech in Redmond, Ore. "We want people to have input. If somebody has got a different point of view, we need to hear it. This is America. We expect to hear people's different points of view in this country. But we want people to understand that we're talking about the health of our forests, and if there's a high priority, we need to get after it before the forests burn and people lose life."
Despite the president's words, a review of U.S. Forest Service records by the San Jose Mercury News showed since 1977 there has not been a single environmental appeal to stop a tree-thinning project -- so there was nothing to speed up.
In addition, though the Healthy Forest Initiative covers all federal forest land, only a small percentage of that land actually presents a risk to people and dwellings. Almost by definition, the homes are on private land, not public land.
The Wilderness Society analyzed the towns listed in the Federal Register as being in the "red zone" for HFI purposes. Taking a half-mile buffer around the community, the analysis showed 17 percent of the land is federal. The state of Colorado conducted a similar analysis of the rapidly growing Front Range area of the Rocky Mountains, cutting an imaginary 2 kilometer swath around each red zone town, and found only 20 percent of the land was federal.
Nearly 20,000 communities in the country face wildfire hazards.
"Development is roaring into the hills," Robert Harriss of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told UPI. The national fire plan, he said, "is not appropriately structured to deal with urban areas at the frontier regions of the country."
The legislation passed by the Senate does contain some amendments that make it a little more palatable to conservationists. It directs, for instance, that areas near communities be priorities for thinning, old growth be protected and alternatives to thinning be considered.
Nonetheless, said NRDC's Lawrence, "It remains a bad bill. ... Instead of focusing scarce federal resources on urgent protection of communities that might have been helped, such as those around Arrowhead Lake or Big Bear Lake, it will work instead as a blank check for commercial logging far away from homes. It won't protect communities and may make fires worse."
The House approved its version of the administration's forest legislation last May, so it and the Senate bill now move to a joint conference committee. President Bush has indicated he can accept the Senate version, so the program in some form likely will become law.
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Dan Whipple covers environmental issues for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected]
