Forest Management and Wildfire

Each year, millions of acres of forest are lost to wildfire. In 2005, more than 57,000 fires burned 8.3 million acres. The year before, it was California. Fifteen catastrophic fires burned 750,000 acres over two weeks, killing 24 people, forcing thousands to evacuate and destroying more than 3,700 homes.

Ironically, the necessary act of fighting fires to protect homes and communities has had the unfortunate consequence of provoking fires that are much, much worse.

Throughout history, fire has contributed to the overall health of forests — often burning the underbrush and small trees and leaving large trees mostly intact. By fighting fire, we create an unnatural build-up of what is best described as kindling on the forest floor, providing fuel for fires that burn hotter and longer, kill everything in their path and create dangerous levels of air and water pollution. These fires are extremely hard to contain and pose considerable danger to fire fighters.

To reduce the risk of catastrophic fire, the scientific solution is to actively manage our forests by removing dead wood and thinning the underbrush. This can be accomplished with selective logging or, in areas that aren't too close to homes, carefully controlled burns.

In the past, national forests had to go through a lengthy environmental assessment before the land could be properly thinned, which often occurred too late to avoid wildfires. But in 2002, Congress passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, streamlining the process so high risk areas can be addressed soon after they're identified.

The Web site for the Healthy Forests Initiative describes the reasoning as follows. "Wildfire requires three elements: heat, oxygen, and fuel. We can manage neither heat nor oxygen, but we can remove hazardous fuels and make them unavailable for fire's inevitable appearance."

Since 2001, 11 million acres of public forests have been treated to remove hazardous fuels, which don't go to waste. As with other forest practices, the debris — referred to as woody biomass — is used to produce wood and paper products and bio-based products such as ethanol and diesel, or burned for energy.