Forest chief says wildfires show urgency for restoration

As firefighters battle blazes in New Mexico and Colorado that have forced evacuations and destroyed hundreds of structures, the U.S. Forest Service chief is renewing his call to restore forests to a more natural state, where fire was a part of the landscape. Experts say a combination of decades of vigorous fire suppression and the waning of the timber industry over environmental concerns has left many forests a tangled, overgrown mess, subject to the kind of superfires that are now regularly consuming hundreds of homes and millions of acres. The Forest Service is on a mission to set the clock back to zero and the urgency couldn’t be greater, Tom Tidwell said. The plan calls for accelerating restoration programs - everything from prescribed fire and mechanical thinning - by 20 percent each year in key areas that are facing the greatest danger of a catastrophic fire. This year’s target: 4 million acres. The budget: About $1 billion. “We need to understand the conditions we’re facing today,” Mr. Tidwell said. “They’re different than what we used to deal with. We’re seeing erratic fire behavior, more erratic weather.” With more natural fires, experts contend the forest has a better chance of recovering. Severe fires tend to sterilize the soil, destroy any banks of seeds stored in the ground and leave mountainsides primed for erosion. The accelerated restoration effort is focused on several landscape-scale projects, the largest of which is a 20-year plan that calls for restoring 2.4 million acres across four forests in northern Arizona. The Forest Service recently awarded a contract to start thinning the first 300,000 acres. A similar project is planned in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, where a historic fire ripped through 244 square miles and threatened one of the national’s premier nuclear laboratories just last summer...more