Western Wildfires are Another Self-Inflicted Wound

It's wildfire season in the West again; time for a lot of typically-revisionist claptrap about why we're seeing fires of such unprecedented ferocity.  Of course, the sweeping and simplistic explanation for everything, “climate change,” conveniently gets most of the blame, as does Trump. But the root causes of the crisis, as I understand them, go much deeper than that.

It's a complicated question, worthy of book-length treatment, but the bottom line, from the point of view of someone who has been carefully watching the issue for more than 20 years, is that this is largely a man-made catastrophe. 

Western wildfires largely result from more than a century of lousy, short-sighted forest management, compounded by disease outbreaks that bureaucracy-bound Washington failed to address in a timely fashion. The idiots blaming Trump for a crisis many decades in the making are either misinformed or willfully stupid.

Then, conveniently for the bureaucrats and organized extremists who helped build this tinderbox trap, "climate change" came along as the intellectually-lazy, simpleton-satisfying, catch-all explanation for how we got here, further dooming any practical efforts to get a handle on the situation. Why try tackling the beetle blight problem, after all, if "climate change" is the root cause? You can't manage your way out of such an insurmountable problem; no steps short of overthrowing capitalism and reversing the industrial revolution will do!! Meaning, once again, that "analysis paralysis" and climate hysteria blocked any meaningful effort to fix our forests.

The lesson of the Western wildfire crisis, if you're looking for one, is that massive federal bureaucracies can't manage anything well, including (and maybe most of all) our far-flung Western lands, This should make Americans extremely wary of putting any additional power or authority in Washington's hands -- unless they want the bureaucrats mismanaging their healthcare (and the rest of your lives) the same way they historically mismanaged "federal lands." 

While Bureaucracies Fiddle . . .

A former Forest Service chief coined the term "analysis paralysis" to describe how too much red tape, too much analysis, too many legal fights and too much prolonged public "process" was tying his agency in knots, making it impossible to deal with public lands challenges in a coherent and timely fashion. This Arizona inferno is one result of analysis paralysis. And it might have been prevented, as this report points out, if federal public lands policymaking wasn't such a slow, complicated, belabored process.

The complexity and contentiousness involved in getting almost anything done on federal lands has gotten to the point where managing them has become virtually impossible. Federal agencies therefore have defaulted to a policy of complacency, passivity and non-management. That's made it impossible to get on top of the forest health crisis ravaging the West. And the consequences are becoming even more visible, from runaway wildfires to the bark beetle blight that is browning-up vast swaths of Colorado.

Imagine the public outrage if a rogue band of loggers clearcut 336,000 acres of national forest in an act of mass vandalism. People would be going to jail. But when 336,000 acres is destroyed, due in large part to federal incompetence, mismanagement and paralysis, all we get is a collective sigh. The destruction of America's national forests is a scandal that can and should be laid at Uncle Sam's doorstep. Yet a clueless public thinks these are all acts of nature or God.

Nature is playing a part, but don't let anyone fool you: This is a man-made disaster.

Partners in Crime

Terry Barton, and not her former employer, the U.S. Forest Service, was solely responsible for starting the Hayman fire in 2002, a federal judge ruled this week. As a result, the agency can't be held liable for a blaze that scorched a vast swath of forest, and more than a hundred homes, in the mountains West of here. And this means certain lawyers can stop salivating.

But I wouldn't so easily let the agency off the hook on the question of what role it played in creating the explosive forest conditions that turned what should have been a manageable situation into a disaster. Barton struck the match, and she's done her time for that act of recklessness. Yet her former employer has dodged responsibility for decades of regulatory malpractice that contributed to the current forest health crisis, of which extreme wildfires are one symptom.

In that sense, the Forest Service is an accessory to Barton's crime. But Barton becomes a scapegoat while Smokey Bear gets away with criminal negligence.

Am I really blaming a cartoon character, who warned kids against playing with matches, for the forest health crisis we’re facing today? Yes, in part.

As the cartoon character at the top, the buck stops with Smokey. Playing with matches in the forest is unquestionably something to be discouraged. But it’s even more dangerous these days, thanks to the simplistic, anti-fire attitudes Smokey long personified, which mirrored a century of short-sighted fire suppression policies by the U.S. Forest Service. Fire is a natural and even beneficial part of the natural environment. But the natural fire cycle was dramatically disrupted in North American a century ago, when good old Smokey and his colleagues began systematically stamping-out every fire that flared up.

That institutionalized fire phobia helped create the forest health crisis we face today, yet neither Smokey nor the agency he represents have adequately atoned for this. They put the focus on blaming errant or stupid individuals who spark the blazes, but the tinderbox conditions were created on their watch.

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt put it this way in the midst of the 2000 fire season. "These forests are too thick,” he said. “They are explosive, they are dangerous and the reason is that fire has been excluded for 100 years and there is too much fuel in the forests, too many trees." Babbitt called for an overhaul of federal fire policy, including taking a more enlightened view of fire’s role in the natural scheme of things.

But the first problem with that is that it’s risky reintroducing fire into an overfueled environment. The second problem with adopting a more hands-on approach is political and ideological. Active management doesn't sit well with green extremists, because it clashes with their non-interventionist ideas about nature -- their belief that man can do nothing but harm in the wild. Thinning the forests would mean cutting trees. And cutting trees, in the eyes of extremists, might reopen the forests to hated loggers and profiteers. Better to let the forests die and burn, according to this warped way of thinking, than to admit that man, having already altered the forest and disrupted the natural fire cycle, might be able to correct the problem by returning to active management.

Of late, agency insiders and environmental groups have been blurring the issue by blaming wildfires, the beetle blight and other elements of the crisis on -- what else? -- global warming. But not that long ago, before climate change became the explanation of first resort for every phenomenon, there was consensus that human factors and policy decisions played a large part in the present crisis. By making fire seem a healthy forest’s enemy, rather than its ally, Smokey was blowing smoke up the public’s behind. But like the bureaucracy he represents, he emerged from the resulting firestorm unscathed, when it all blew up in his face.

Terry Barton has been held accountable for recklessness and stupidity. When will the Forest Service be?