How government failures make wildfires even worse

WHILE East Coasters are heading off for their August vacations, many families out West are worried that if they leave their home, it may not be standing when they return. That’s the reality when there have been 4,500 wildfires this year so far.

This year’s fires have so far burned more than 400,000 acres, a land area equivalent to Denver and Los Angeles combined. The wreckage and smoke is so bad that it can be seen from space, and fires in California and Washington state can cloud the skies as far away as Idaho and Montana.

Everyone is quick to blame global warming for this and all other natural disasters. But changes to local weather in this or that part of the country are by no means part of the same scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused in large part by human activity. Western droughts and forest fires have been around a long time, and so has climate change, but the fires have gotten much worse very recently. Government mismanagement of forests is part of the reason.

One of the biggest problems is the overcrowding of Western forests with dead trees, and the areas between stand with dry, flammable grasses. Part of the problem is that logging and grazing have been discontinued or discouraged in too many places. To most Westerners, who have watched the severity of forest fires grow dramatically since the late 1980s, this is common sense and the common wisdom.

“There are some places where there may be four times as many trees as there should be,” Krystal Beckham of the Little Hoover Commission told the Washington Examiner. “When you have trees that close together, they can’t get the water they need, so they are more susceptible to drought, insects and disease. And when they start dying, they become a terrible fire threat.”

Instead of clearing out fuel and conducting controlled burns in order to moderate wildfires before they happen, the government puts its money toward suppressing active wildfires. This is done on the theory that it’s more natural to let forests grow on their own than to let fires rage except in areas where structures are threatened.

And yes, fire is part of nature (even if many of the fires are man-made) and that approach to forestry is indeed more natural. But that doesn’t make it the best approach for people, for whose sake governments exist. This year in California, nearly two dozen people are dead and hundreds more are homeless due in part to failed forest management. Nor is it good for people anywhere who pay taxes that more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget is now spent on suppressing active wildfires instead of managing forests.

Congress has now given the Forest Service more funding for prevention, and the Trump administration is finally taking forest treatment and mitigation more seriously. But according to the Property and Environment Research Center, the backlog of restoration work could take decades to complete.

Forest management is not a panacea. Fires will happen either way. But they don’t have to be quite so intense or destructive. And the prevention and moderation of wildfires is a much more attainable goal than changing the planet’s climate. The Western fires that rage and drive people from their homes should serve as a reminder of this every summer.

— Washington Examiner