As fire issues grow, forest management more important

The trend toward larger, hotter wildfires in this part of the country is rapidly becoming the new normal. In the four decades between 1960 and 1999, wildfires in the United States scorched more than 7 million acres in a single year just once. Since 2000? Eight times, with 2012 at 8.8 million acres and still climbing. The annual number of wildfires exceeding 25,000 acres in 11 Western states has quintupled since the 1970s, according to a Climate Central report released last month.  The fire season across the West, according to the Climate Central analysis, is 2½ months longer than it was 40 years ago. This year’s Yakima and Wenatchee Complex fires didn’t even begin until the second week of September, and in extending the statewide burn ban last week, Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark said Washington had "not seen wildfire conditions this bad in October in a lifetime." But it almost certainly will again. Soon. And for years to come. Eighteen years ago, U.S. Forest Service officials proposed setting aside large blocks of forest as spotted owl habitat, in which there would be little management. When they bounced the idea off Agee, then the service’s forest fire consultant, he told them in no uncertain terms: No. Bad idea. Minus active land management — thinning operations and prescribed burns — those de facto reserves, Agee warned, would simply fuel increasingly larger wildfires. "If you could treat about a third of the forest area, that would have a major impact on the rate of spread of these large wildfires, and they would also have less debilitating effects on the vegetation," Agee said. "But the rate we’re treating is maybe 1 to 2 percent per year at most, out of the context of being effective at all."...more