Woodman: Taming the wildfires

The best way to tame a wildfire is to let it burn. The reason firefighters risk their lives battling fires driven by 80-mile-an-hour winds is property protection. The October fires that consumed 2000 homes in southern California had nothing to do with the temperature or global warming. They had to do with people building mansions in fire's way, then struggling against Mother Nature to keep them there.

   This is where bogus science and fear-mongering cause real damage. Instead of educating people to the perils of nestling their homes in canyons that will explode into flame, these pseudo-ecologists want to blame the wreckage on climate change and ascribe it to man's energy consumption.

   Extinguishing a wildfire usually means the next wildfire will be even more devastating. That's because the fuel is unspent. Fire is nature's way of cleaning house, and unless it's allowed to burn off the fuel that feeds it, it will burn with that much more intensity the next time around.

   The federal government owns 65 percent of all the land west of Denver, but it's never learned how to take care of it. When wildfires ate through a million acres of California four years ago, President George Bush proposed a "Healthy Forests Initiative" to allow lumberjacks to harvest trees instead of paying people out of tax dollars for living where they do.

   All 83 million acres comprising the National Park Service are off limits to commercial logging, mainly because Congress doesn't want to offend the Sierra Club, which views logging as a vested interest awash in sin. Also under protection are 191 million acres that make up the National Forest System, which was established "to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States." Why would Congress ban logging in 191 million acres of timber that was set aside for logging? Because the Sierra Club hates logging, that's why.

   In 1993, Rep. Wally Herger (R-Cal.) complained, "Our forests are detonating like napalm bombs. We need to remove dead and dying bug-killed timber." The Natural Resources Defense Council called that "a pretext for accelerated logging in the Sierra Nevada." Three million acres burned that year, killing 14 firefighters. In 2002, wildfires claimed almost seven million acres and 23 firefighters. The 2003 wildfire in Southern California took 20 lives and 3,000 homes.

When half of Yellowstone National Park went up in a firestorm 20 years ago, the "landlord" should have learned that little fires that remove fuel can save vast forests. Yellowstone is healthy today. Unfortunately, so is the Sierra Club. They will probably collide again.

Wendell H. Woodman is a freelance writer living in Boston.