Congress can do more to prevent megafires
Washington Examiner
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It is usually difficult to get people on the East Coast to care about public land management, but with an assist from Canada, wildfires were the top topic along the Eastern Seaboard this week.
Over 2,000 separate fires burned about 10 million acres of forest this week, blanketing states from Massachusetts in the north to Georgia in the South with a thick, smelly haze. Western senators from both parties were not impressed.
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“I think America is waking up, at least on the East Coast, to this problem,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Thursday. “We certainly have known all about it on the West Coast for some time now.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) added, “Most Easterners aren’t used to dealing with this level of smoke, and by Easterners, I mean basically anybody to the east of Colorado. But this is an unfortunate recurring reality for us in the West.”
Cantwell and Lee are correct. Large wildfires burning millions of acres and blotting out the sun have become far too common in the West. But the culprit is not, as the Left generally claims, a changing climate. The West is getting drier, but it has been dry for centuries. Fires have always erupted in lands west of the Mississippi. The difference now is that when they do, they are bigger and spew more pollutants into the atmosphere.
There are two main reasons for this. First, the federal government owns most of the land in Western states (47% of Wyoming, 63% of Utah, and 80% of Nevada). Second, the federal government manages its land badly.
Forest Service policy has been to suppress all wildfires as quickly as possible. Before the environmental movement came along, that wasn’t much of a problem because the federal government leased timber rights to logging companies that thinned the forest by harvesting trees and built access roads deep into the forests for that purpose.
But after the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl as an endangered species, the Forest Service reduced the number of timber leases sold. President Bill Clinton then restricted the construction and maintenance of roads in national forests, reducing timber harvests further. Between 1960 and 1990, an average of 10 billion board feet of timber were produced from Forest Service land. By 2000, that number dropped to 2 billion. That’s 8 billion board feet of wildfire fuel accumulating every year.
In recent years, states and the federal government have begun to be more proactive forest managers, starting controlled burns to clear dead fuel. But here again, federal law hamstrings what forest managers can do. The National Environmental Policy Act empowers anyone to delay a controlled burn by claiming in federal court that the agency doing the burn didn’t properly study the environmental impact of the action. The Clean Air Act also limits how much any agency can burn at one time since, as East Coasters now know, forest fires can affect air quality.
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Congress has the power to change all these laws. It can mandate that the Forest Service sell more logging leases. It can allow the creation and maintenance of new roads in national forests. In addition to making it easier to cut down trees, these roads are invaluable in wildfire suppression. Congress can also exempt forest management activities from NEPA and the Clean Air Act. There is much that federal legislators can do.
But it won’t while the Left continues to treat forests as pristine natural shrines that must be kept free from human interference at all costs. This was never true. Long before European explorers came to the continent, native peoples set their own controlled burns to manage the forest for their needs. All we accomplish with a vacuous romanticism that insists on leaving nature in its “natural state” is create an unnatural accumulation of fuel that will eventually rage in an uncontrollable inferno. As the East Coast discovered this week, that isn’t a good outcome for anybody — or for the environment.