SOS Forests

An Open Letter to the SAF Policy Committee

Dear Committee,

I am a practicing professional consulting forester. It has come to my attention that the Wildland Fire Leadership Council will be holding a meeting on Feb. 5, and that they have invited the Society of American Foresters to present a position statement on wildland fire.

Here is my view of the WFLC: they have been captured by pro-fire entities including the Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Society, two big international non-governmental organizations (BINGO’s).

For the last few years the WFLC has been heavily promoting the idea of let-it-burn, variously termed WFU’s, Wildland Use Fires, Wildland Fires Used for Resource Benefit, or “suppression” fires that are more or less unmanned and unfought (de facto WFU’s).

Although no NEPA process has been followed, the WFLC has promulgated maps, models, and statements of intent to let burn more than 50 percent of the entire National Forest system, and is adding more acres all the time. Record fire seasons and record fires have resulted. The largest fires in state recorded history, and/or the most expensive, have occurred in the last ten years in OR, WA, ID, MT, CO, UT, NV, AZ, NM, and CA.

Megafires originating on Federal land have escaped and burned tens of millions of private acres, rural and urban alike. Suppression costs have soared into the $billions per year. But much worse, the damages to forest resources and other assets, public and private alike, has been in the tens of $billions each year this century, and is getting worse year by year.

The WFLC has consistently expanded the WFU acreage and program at the expense of initial attack. Initial attack has become far slower and far less effective under the new WFLC guidelines, directly resulting in fires that blow up to mega proportions, and in fire suppression costs that have soared to consume more than half of the USFS budget. For example, in 2006 fire suppression costs were $1.875 billion in a USFS Budget of $2.5 billion total.

The WFLC has adopted the bizarre fire suppression goal of minimizing suppression costs per acre! This has resulted in larger fires and greater total fire suppression costs, not lesser ones. Not to mention far greater destruction of forests and natural resource values.

Formerly in the USFS, and still the case in the private sector, fire suppression goals were/are to minimize total cost-plus-loss, the time-honored, actuarially-based, and only logical fire accounting method. The WFLC does not consider losses at all, and ignores total suppression costs, in their cost-per-acre minimization directive.

To make matters worse, the WFLC has joined with the USDA OIG in calling for federal investigations (and prosecutions) of Incident Commanders who “overspend” on fires. (By the way, it was the USDA OIG who promulgated the federal charges against the fire crew boss on the Thirty Mile Fire. That resulted in a loss of insurance indemnities for IC’s, and a difficulty in recruiting qualified individuals for Incident Management Teams.)

The WFLC has paid the BINGO’s to develop a “public awareness” campaign which is little more than propaganda for catastrophic fire. That is the extent of their public out-reach.

Last year the WFLC shut down their website after they were warned under FACA for violating the rules of Federal Advisory Committees. They re-emerged on the Healthy Forests Initiative site, a huge irony if you ask me. However, no meeting minutes or notices have been publicly posted since last June. In October WFLC lawyers issued an MOU stating that they were not a Federal Advisory Committee, and so not bound by FACA. The WFLC has gone into hiding, essentially.

However, rumor has it they are expanding the WFU program once again. And last December the USFS adopted an “Open Space” program that promises to spread WFU’s to 400 million acres of private land, which the USFS now calls “wildlands,” (just as they so refer to USFS forests).

In light of all the above, the positions of the SAF Policy Committee, expressed to the WFLC next week, ought to be that:

1. Stewardship is preferable to abandonment in terms of forest values

2. We must tend our forests or we will lose them

3. Wildfire is not silviculture

4. Foresters are pro forests, and opposed to catastrophic forest fires

5. Catastrophic wildfires destroy forests and convert them to brush

6. Accidental fires at accidental times and accidental places (WFU’s) are not good for forests

7. Black, dead, charred forests are not beautiful

8. Streams running thick with soot, ash, and accelerated erosion are not good for fish

9. The WFU program should be discontinued immediately

10. The USFS should immediately prepare mile-wide fire buffers within their boundaries so that no private property anywhere ever gets burned in a Federal fire

11. The National Interagency Fire Center should reinstate rapid initial attack and the 10AM policy during fire season

12. The USFS should institute Prepared Fire, wherein stands are pre-treated to receive fire without being totally incinerated, and then underburned safely on a regular, non-fire-seasonal basis

13. The USFS should expand Healthy Forests Initiative activities to a minimum of 10 million acres per year mechanically treated within USFS boundaries

14. The WFLC should excuse the BINGO’s from their table

15. The WFLC should become transparent to the public by publishing their meetings and minutes, allowing full press coverage, and inviting public testimony

16. The fire community as a whole had best grasp the idea that they are operating in forests, which are biological and multi-valued, and are not merely piles of fuel waiting for the fire community to burn them. As professional foresters, we grasp the big picture; the fire community needs to do the same.

Those are my positions, more or less, and the ones I recommend to the SAF Policy Committee.

Sincerely yours,

Mike Dubrasich

Ex. Dir. W.I.S.E and doyen of SOS Forest