Reuters
Chris White
Tech Reporter
Former President Bill Clinton made a
significant change to federal land management nearly 30 years ago that
created the conditions necessary for massive wildfires to consume
portions of the West Coast, according to one fire expert who predicted
the problem years ago.
Shortly
before leaving office in 2001, Clinton limited the ability of the
United States Forest Service to thin out a dense thicket of foliage and
downed trees on federal land to bring the West into a pristine state,
Bob Zybach, an experienced forester with a PhD in environmental science,
told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The former president’s decision
created a ticking time bomb, Zybach argues.
“If you don’t start
managing these forests, then they are going to start burning up. Thirty
years later, they are still ignoring it,” said Zybach, who spent more
than 20 years as a reforestation contractor. He was referring to
warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling fuelling fires.
Such
rules make it more difficult to deploy prescribed burns, which are
controlled burns designed to cull all of the underbrush in forests to
lessen the chance of massive fires, Zybach noted. Years of keeping these
areas in their natural state result in dead trees and dried organic
material settling on the forest floor, turning such material into
matchsticks soaked in jet fuel during dry seasons, he said.
Zybach’s comments come as wildfires continue churning through parts of California, Oregon, and Washington, media reports
show. Fires have killed 26 people in West Coast states since August,
including 19 people in California, and have culminated in more than
half-a-million people evacuating Oregon, a number representing roughly
10% of the state’s overall population.
Roughly 100 massive fires
are blazing Saturday in the West, including 12 in Idaho and nine in
Montana, the National Interagency Fire Center said Saturday. All told, the wildfires have churned through more than 4.5 million acres in 12 states.
(RELATED: Wildfires, Blackouts And High Gas Prices: Californians Fight Familiar Foes Amid Pandemic)
Former President Bill Clinton
(LUKE FRAZZA/AFP via Getty Images)
Shortly before leaving office, Clinton introduced the Roadless Rule that
restricted the use of existing roads and construction of new roads on
49 million acres of National Forest, making it difficult for officials
to scan the land for the kind of kindling that fuels massive
conflagrations.
The move was part of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), a resolution adopted by Clinton in 1994 to protect forests from being over-logged.
Ten years before Clinton’s rule, the Fish and Wildlife Service placed the northern spotted owl
on the Endangered Species Act, forcing the Forest Service to adopt a
new policy that resulted in a greater reduction in timber harvests. The
amount of timber removed from federal lands plummeted, according to data accumulated in 2015 by the Reason Foundation.
An
average of 10.3 billion feet of timber was removed each year from
Forest Service land between 1960 and 1990, the data show. Those numbers
dropped between 1991 and 2000 and continued dropping — an average of
only 2.1 billion feet of timber was removed from the land between 2000
and 2013, according to the data. That’s an 80% decline.
“They’ve
gone and left hundreds of thousands of acres of burnt timber, a fire
bomb waiting to happen, standing in place because the black back
woodpecker prefers that habitat,” Zybach said. “It’s great for lawyers,
but it’s bad for people who breathe air or work in the woods.”
“The
prescribed burns are an ancient form of management for keeping the
fuels down so these events don’t happen,” Zybach added, referring to
Native American Indians who used controlled burns to ward away pests and
prevent wildfires from licking their homes.
The Clinton
administration’s plan to turn forests in the West into pristine land
free of human interference risked fueling “wildfires reminiscent of the
Tillamook burn, the 1910 fires and the Yellowstone fire,” Zybach, who is
based in Oregon, told Evergreen magazine in 1994, when the NWFP came into effect.
Western
Oregon had one major fire above 10,000 acres between 1952 and 1987,
reports show. The Silver Complex Fire of 1987 snapped that streak after
torching more than 100,000 acres in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness area,
killing rare plants and trees the federal government sought to protect
from human activities.
Fire Experts Agree: Prescribed Burns Are Critical
Overzealous
fire suppression across California are helping to build up wildland
fuels, which contribute to wildfires, according to Tim Ingalsbee, a fire
ecologist who began a career in the 1980s as a wildland firefighter.
The solution is “to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of
that fuel load,” he told ProPublica in August.
“It’s
just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the
science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from
Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said, referring to the Cassandra
Syndrome, a Greek metaphor people use when they believe their valid
warnings are not heeded.
“Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
Other experts have made similar arguments in the past.
A US forestry firefighter cools a burning modular home
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Overgrown
grasslands, forests, and woodlands contributed to California wildfires
in 2017, Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, told High Country News that
year. “I’m more certain than ever that there’s a lot we can do between
now and the next time this happens to make it so that the negative
consequences to people are nowhere near as dramatic,” she said.
The
devastating fires that ran through California’s wine country in October
of 2017 killed 42 people and destroyed nearly 7,000 buildings, High
Country News noted.
The solution might be easier said than done.
Nearly 20 million acres in California, or an area about the size of
Maine, will need to experience controlled burns to limit catastrophic
wildfires, a January study from Nature Sustainability found.
Blaming Climate Change
Former President Barack Obama suggested in a tweet Thursday that California’s wildfires are a result of climate change.
“The
fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very
real ways our changing climate is changing our communities,” Obama wrote in a tweet that included pictures showing how soot and ash from the wildfires are turning San Francisco’s sky bright orange.
Obama isn’t the only prominent Democrat tying the fires to global warming.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, published
a tweet Saturday that read: “The proof of the urgency of the climate
crisis is literally in the air around us.” Schumer included a link to a
Sept. 10 article from CBS blaming climate change for the fires.
Zybach
is not convinced. “The lack of active land management is almost 100
percent the cause,” he told the DCNF, noting that climate change has
almost nothing to do with fire kindling gathering across the forest
floors. Other researchers share his skepticism.
“Global warming
may contribute slightly, but the key factors are mismanaged forests,
years of fire suppression, increased population, people living where
they should not, invasive flammable species, and the fact that
California has always had fire,” University of Washington climate
scientist Cliff Mass told TheDCNF in 2018.
Mass’s critique came as Mendocino Complex Fire was spreading across California on its way to becoming the largest wildfire in the state, engulfing more than 283,000 acres.
EDITOR’S
NOTE: A previous version of this article stated that an average of 10
million feet of timber was removed each year from Forest Service land
between 1960 and 1990. The actual number was 10,3 billion. The article
has been updated to reflect the change.
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