Smoke is rising right now from the trees of Washington state as the Okanoga Complex, the largest wildfire in state history, continues to burn through its forests. In its wake it has left 305,000 acres of scorched land, 170 destroyed homes and three dead firefighters.
Tragic though this story may be, it is no longer unique. In fact, wildfires like the Okanoga Complex have been occurring with increasing frequency. This year is one of four in recorded history in which wildfires have burned more than 9 million acres of land, and the three remaining years are all within the last decade. The increase in wildfire occurrence is not an accident but a trend that has resulted from human interference in a natural process. We have, through actions both well meant and nefarious, left forests vulnerable to the specter of wildfires.
Ironically, some of this vulnerability comes from benign intentions. In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt created the Forest Service in a move meant to protect forests that ultimately backfired. Over the past century the Forest Service has made it its mission to extinguish every blaze that appears, no matter how small. But in doing this, it overlooked the crucial role fire has in environmental growth cycles, where it acts to signal tree growth and provides new habitat. The real danger, however, is that constantly preventing fires on a small scale eventually leads to the creation of a huge fuel load to power future fires. As forests grow denser and fill up with dead and drying brush, they not only become more susceptible to fire, but create blazes that are larger and harder to control than their predecessors.
A subtle effect that is more difficult to quantify has come from the advent of climate change. Shifting weather patterns leave forests hotter and drier, a trend that will only continue. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted that by 2050, wildfires will consume 20 million acres per year in the United States, more than twice the current record. The price tag for dealing with this danger would be shocking: up to $62 billion dollars a year on fire suppression alone. That number may sound high until one considers the fact that the government tripled its spending on fighting wildfires in just the last decade.
This prediction is made even more disturbing considering the fact that the relationship between wildfires and climate change is not unidirectional. In fact, wildfires contribute to carbon dioxide release and climate change on a scale that may not be fully understood. This was seen most visibly in the 1997 Indonesian Forest Fires, which released an amount of carbon anywhere between 13 and 40 percent of the mean annual global emissions from fossil fuels. This event helped to create the largest increase in carbon dioxide concentrations seen since records have been kept. Moreover, fire use to clear land is a practice that goes back centuries. In fact, a research team at the University of Arizona at Tucson estimated that “deforestation due to burning by humans is contributing about one-fifth of the human-caused greenhouse effect.”
The effects of climate change are a danger we will likely have to deal with for decades at the very least, but there are moves to make on a local or state level that can still help. Key steps would be to implement preventative strategies on government-owned land, including controlled burning and forest thinning to reduce fuel load. Both of these techniques are already in use, and the only change that must be made is the scale at which they are enacted. In fact, looser laws on tribal land have led to higher rates of controlled burning and commercial thinning, and as a result fires there are on average three times smaller than those on Forest Service land.
While the funding should be moving towards prevention, it is in fact heading mostly toward fire control. In 1995, firefighting made up 16 percent of the Forest Service’s budget. In 2015, that number has risen to 50 percent. The Forest Service has been forced into this change by past mistakes. Now, fires are too large and too fierce to burn free, and have to be stopped even if it means diverting funds. They are trapped in a deadly revolving door: the more fires they have the less they spend on prevention, and the less prevention the more fires they have.
Something must be done, and politicians have not been unmindful of the need. Both the White House and Congress have proposed plans to introduce more federal assistance into fire suppression, most notably the Wildlife Disaster Funding Act currently on the floor of the House. But it is likely these bills will not move far enough or fast enough to stop wildfire. What is needed are aggressive measures in fire prevention, making it simple for the Forest Service to push through layers of bureaucratic rules and regulations to pursue necessary thinning and burning with the vigor they require.
Alex Mink is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.mink@cavalierdaily.com.
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