Politically-Correct Forestry

Mill Creek Canyon 18 years after the so-called "stand-replacement" fires of 2000

 

Note: I submitted the below Letter-to-the-Editor to the Bitterroot Star a couple weeks ago in response to an article they ran about a forest fire deep in the Selway-Bittterroot Wilderness that the Forest Service over-reacted to. This kind of forest mismanagement is of local significance but also of national interest. The current Bitterroot National Forest (FS) supervisor, Matt Anderson, is trying to implement a run around the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which was passed in the '70s to require federal land agencies to have meaningful public involvement in their projects. The FS has long complained about having to do Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) on every logging project so Anderson wants to include the WHOLE Bitterroot Front, 150,000 acres, into a catch-all fuzzy-edged Environmental Assessment (EA), so the Forest can literally just cut-and-paste any massive, industry-friendly disturbance they choose within those boundaries under the rubric: "Trust us but if you don't too bad cuz we have the legal t's crossed and i's dotted so see ya later suckers....hahahaha......!) He attempted this at his old post on the Tongas in Alaska, got his (read: our) agency's ass sued over it, but it looks like it might go through this time cuz of false fire fears and wing nut local officials. I'm putting it here more so I can find it in the future than anything else.

Your Oct. 18^th article quoted Stevensville District Ranger, Steve Brown, at length about his reasoning for carrying out a logging operation at the mouth of Mill Cr. Canyon under the guise of “fuels reduction” and “forest health” and was amazed at how effortlessly he seemed to present himself as a forester just doing his job mitigating fire danger instead of an ideologue violating core wilderness principles in favor of “getting the cut out”.  

I have a long list of disappointments concerning Brown’s statements on what he thinks his job is supposed to be, which I think Mill Cr. landowners, Jim Miller and Dr. Eric Keeling, who were also quoted in the article, covered pretty well, with the proper mixture of intelligence and cynicism appropriate for such bureaucratic shenanigans. Brown’s statements and actions were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes, maybe the biggest one being the fact that the father of one of the landowners he blew off was Dr. Charles Keeling, the internationally-renowned climate scientist who was among the first to notice Climate Change and to develop the first accurate system for measuring carbon in the atmosphere still used today: the Keeling Curve. I have to admit I smiled when I read that and realized that, notwithstanding recent and vigorous efforts to kill it, irony’s not quite dead yet.

More to point: Brown used a wildfire deep in the wilderness that posed no danger to people’s ill-placed houses in the woods to invoke the worn-out, anti-wilderness boogie-man of “fires roaring out of the canyon” to carry out a logging operation using firefighting funds. I have lived through many intense fire seasons here, I’ve been evacuated, helped with evacuations and actually have firefighting experience. I watched both the Mill and Kootenai Canyon fires from our home on the west side, read the Inciweb reports and the weather reports accessible to anyone with a laptop(!) and I was not only not worried about it “roaring out of the canyon” but was wondering what the h… the Forest Service was doing running helicopters up there in the wilderness at thousands of dollars a trip! Wilderness fires are far cheaper and more beneficial to the environment than non-wilderness fires precisely because they aren’t supposed to be “fought”. Everyone who knows anything about wildland fire knows (whether they publicly admit it or not) that $10,000 bucket drops in steep mountain canyons far from any structures is not only not a serious firefighting effort, it’s a political air show. “A big bank in the sky that opens up and showers money.” To put a finer point on it, wasteful air shows in wilderness areas is the “politically-correct” thing to do in our current, facts-optional times, but are not based on any provable forest management techniques. To sharpen that point to where it actually might sting: a district ranger who authorizes them in a designated wilderness area is demonstrating either his profound ignorance of wilderness laws and ethics or his inexplicable disregard for them. When one considers that tens of thousands of acres within Brown’s district are within designated wilderness that includes much of the most pristine headwaters of our Bitterroot River and is also some of the most prized wildlands in the country for its own sake and that his job is actually to promote wilderness values rather than degrade and ignore them, his statements and behavior are jarring. 

Even on Brown’s own terms, an actual “shaded fuel break” as a firefighting technique is supposed to be a couple hundred feet in width, not the size and shape of the logging project shelved by his district in 2014. His assertion that his only choices were to log the mouth of the canyon to protect the public from a fire not threatening them or to wait for the evil fire to advance multiple miles in wet weather and then punch an ugly dozer line in and  “kill all the trees” in a backfire is just plain fearmongering, and clumsy fearmongering at that. His absolute silence about Climate Change being the real driver in today’s fire behavior speaks volumes about his perspective. Logging mature trees to “save the forest” while ignoring the fact that those are the trees that actually have the best chance of survival after a fire (and did survive above Bass Creek campground notwithstanding his inexplicable statement to the contrary!) and that logging them for the sole and obvious purpose of feeding short-term profits to mills while eliminating what’s left of those real heroes of carbon-storage has been standard fare for foresters since the ‘90s. But to wink and nod at wilderness detractors and “golden-days” logging proponents by claiming he’s merely trying to take the forests back to the way native people used to manage it is just plain insulting to those of us who’ve felt the brunt of such winks and nods. 

In the past I have often told folks who complain about the Forest Service “letting fires roar out of the canyon” that they have nothing to complain about. Given the complexities these bigger and bigger conflagrations present to firefighters due to defending homes in the foothills built on the assumption that tax-funded fire suppression will be provided when politicians panic, along the Forest Service’s own reputation for muddle-headed bureaucracy, on-the-ground firefighters do an amazing job at protecting the public’s life and property year to year. If district rangers like Brown would pay more attention to science than politics and leave the fire-resistant, carbon-sequestering mature trees alone (the very ones the mills want) rather than create next decade’s weed patches and scraggle-forests by using fire as an excuse to “get the cut out”, they could extend their amazing job by decades. It’s too bad that “politically-correct forestry” like Brown’s undermines public confidence, and adds to their confusion.

Finally,  I understand that some of my language in this LTE is charged, but I have a long, informed connection with these mountains and canyons and this latest violation of trust comes on the heels of BNF’s proposed Bitterroot Front Project which could give the BNF the green light to turn our Bitterroot faces right up to their peaks into a hundred thousand acre “shaded fuel break”. Again, by his own terms, a “shaded fuels break” by definition has to be “retreated” every 10 years in order to be “effective”. Will Brown promise us any such multi-decades treatment even on this relatively-tiny logging project of his? Of course not, and so I can’t help but look at this Mill Cr. chop-job as a sort of pilot program for the whole forest and feel well within bounds to opine: Really, who does he think he’s kidding?