An article I’m reading says:
“These days [rampaging forest fires] are caused mostly by federal eco-regulation preventing traditional prudent stewardship such as basic brush-cutting”
I’m sure this could start any number of great debates, but what I’m concerned with is what specific regulations this might be referring to and what the regulations are supposedly* keeping people from doing.
*Yes, it’s really hard keeping this from becoming a debate. Please help!
This USA Today article from 2002 might help explain the situation regarding US criticism of forest stewardship:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-08-21-1acover_x.htm
Do you have a link to the article? I seriously doubt there’s any regulations prohibiting brush clearing on private land(unless it’s something like a HOA covenant or something)-- to the contrary there are many regulations requiring it. Brush clearing on public lands in the sense of sending people out to physically remove them is far too labor intensive to be feasible and doesn’t usually happen on a large scale, but that’s a practical issue not a regulatory one.
The statement is true, however, though not for the reason the author is likely thinking of. One of the major problems with many forests in the inter-mountain west is that for centuries Native Americans would periodically burn them (for various reasons), which would clear out the underbrush and thin them out. As a result many of the tree types in the area, in particular Ponderosa Pine, are dependent on frequent low-intensity fires (on the order of 2-20 year intervals) and if they’re not burned the underbrush gets too thick and the trees get much denser because the weaker ones aren’t killed by fire. As a result, when fires do get started, there’s much more avaliable fuel and you get the catastrophic fires that kill everything. So if by “federal eco-regulation” they mean anti-arson laws and the “traditional prudent stewardship” is the VERY traditional practice of periodic burning, the statement is absolutely right!
A lot of the controversy is that one solution to this problem would be thinning by logging companies, which I suspect is what is being hinted at. The article in the The USA Today does an okay job of describing the problems with this, mostly that the harvest goals of commercial logging outfits are not usually the best for reducing fuels. One other solution that has been used lately is prescribed burning done during periods when fires are unlikely to get out of hand (See The Death of Smokey?), but that doesn’t really work on the fringes of the wildland-urban interface where people live, which is the biggest area of concern.
This might be skirting Great Debate territory, but I could go on about how the logging industry in the drier areas of the inter-mountan west isn’t sustainable because trees don’t grow fast enough in this climate to conduct profitable tree farming type logging that the timber companies have gone to on the west coast. Since they’ve run out of non-protected timberland to cut, the industry has been in decline in the region since the mid-70’s and they’ve been trying to come up with reasons to log some of these protected areas for years and the last decade or so of intense fire seasons has led them to come up with the “thinning” argument. I think it’s a case that can be made in some areas, but making a blanket statement like I think is being made in the article in the OP is not really honest. And suggesting that historic logging practices were a substitute for low intensity fires is simply not true.
(sorry to blather on, I’m taking a class right now that deals with a lot of these issues so it’s fresh in my head)
Also, just to make my last paragraph a little less “incendiary” (sorry) I’ll just clarify that by “protected areas” I don’t mean things like National Parks or Wilderness areas, but usually BLM and Forest Service land that for whatever reason those agencies have chosen not to allow logging on. So I don’t mean to say that those mean old logging companies are trying to log our national treasures or anything melodramatic like that.