Workers World Aug. 24, 2000: Western wildfires and the profit motive

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 24, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Western wildfires

Blame the profit motive

By G. Dunkel

Since June, wildfires in the western United States have burned an area larger than the state of Connecticut--almost 4.4 million acres. Some won't be controlled until the snows come.
Hundreds of houses have been destroyed and thousands more damaged. An electric transmission line from Montana to the West Coast melted. Another was badly damaged and put out of commission.
This loss of power--topped by a heat wave--pushed California's power grid to the edge of a meltdown Aug. 1-2. (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12)
Smoke, ash and flames have closed major highways and small roads. In some areas, the fires' heat sterilized the soil, which won't recover for decades. When the wet fall and winter weather comes, the burned-over areas will face rockslides, mudslides and flash floods because of the absence of ground cover.
Federal experts project the cost of controlling these fires to be $1 billion. Estimates of the property damage done so far are not available. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 14)
The fire season will last at least six more weeks.
An election issue?
In this election year, the magnitude of the losses has given Republican politicians a chance to blast the Clinton administration.
"The Clinton administration didn't cause these fires, but their policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis," Gov. Marc Racicot of Montana charged. Racicot claimed Clinton has "a philosophy ... that leads to explosive fires that destroy everything." (New York Times, Aug. 12)
The American Forest and Paper Association, a group closely identified with the Republican Party, chimed in its support for Racicot's attack. The AFPA, a proponent of ecologically damaging logging practices, claimed the Clinton administration did not understand "that to save a forest you have to cut a tree."
The White House dismissed Racicot's charges as "nonsense."
But the administration also had to answer more serious charges made in a memo leaked by a former U.S. Bureau of Land Management official. The memo charged that the department was under-funding the training of federal and local firefighters and the staffing of fire suppression efforts.
The Clinton administration admitted that funding had been cut. But it asserted the cuts were reasonable.
The BLM's preferred approach to controlling wildfires is called "prescribed" fires. These are fires that are intentionally set and controlled to remove the fuel that otherwise allows explosive fires to take off.
This approach has its limits. Earlier this year a BLM-set fire raged out of control in Los Alamos, N.M. It destroyed over 200 houses and threatened the government's premier nuclear research laboratory.
100 years of logging
Ecologists, firefighters and other experts say that before 1900 numerous small fires marked the Western areas of the United States and Canada every year. These natural fires--many of them started by lightning--cleared the forests of accumulated dead leaves, grass and other fire fuel. They promoted plant growth and left between 30 and 80 widely spaced large trees per acre--trees that could survive most fires.
The expansion of the logging industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a lot of brush on the forest floor and promoted the growth of crowded stands of small trees. Fires grew bigger and more explosive, culminating in the Bitterroot Blaze of 1910, which produced hurricane force winds, killed 87 people, and burned up to 4 million acres of prime forest.
The government's response was the "10 a.m. policy." In 1910 the U.S. Forest Service, the predecessor of the BLM, mandated that every wildfire be put out by 10 a.m. the day after its detection.
The rigorous suppression of wildfires protected the most profitable resource the forests contained--timber. At the same time, it allowed a hazardous buildup of brush, dead trees, grass and other fuels.
Today the situation is potentially even more deadly than it was 90 years ago, given the increasing number of "dream homes" built deep within Western forests.
Laird Robinson, a former Forest Service smoke jumper who collaborated with the late author Norman MacLean on the book "Young Men and Fire," has joined scientist Kevin Ryan of the Forest Service Fire Laboratory in Missoula, Mt., and others in calling for a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort to solve the problem.
According to the Aug. 11 Seattle Times, their plan calls for thousands of forest restoration workers to cut and burn through the dangerously choked timberland of the West.
But even its proponents know that such a plan, while it meets an obvious need and would supply employment to thousands of people for years, won't fly. It would have to be organized by the federal government, which is in the process of shedding its responsibilities for welfare and health care and doesn't intend to take on any new ones, however necessary.
The BLM won't even completely fund the 1,300 full time firefighters it has, much less train thousands of new recruits in the rigorous and complicated techniques.
Those capitalist profiteers interested in cutting timber want it done in the cheapest, quickest way possible. They don't want to cut a few trees here and there over thousands of acres of forest.
Meanwhile, capitalists interested in selling "unspoiled vistas" to tourists or building "dream houses" oppose any mechanical removal of trees, which they see as an opening wedge for full-scale logging.
The government shows no sign of trying to resolve this conflict. From year to year the potential for a much greater catastrophe grows. Only a system that assesses the needs of society as a whole can carry out a careful plan to reduce the wildfire risks to a manageable level. Socialism is the name of that system.

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