Arizona update
It was another warm and dry spring day when Arizona Gov. Jane Hull and Northern Arizona University's Ecological Restoration Institute Director Dr. Wally Covington took to the air over the crowded ponderosa pine forests.
“We took off at Show Low and flew over all of the development on the Mogollon Rim and Flagstaff,” said Covington. “We saw, up close, new and existing homes located in very dense forests. We flew over some of the fires that had burned during the last 15 years and observed the lack of regrowth. If one of those fires had been 4H miles one way or the other, we would have burned a lot of homes.”
Burning homes have been a continuous concern of leaders in the Southwest since the devastating wildfire seasons of 1996 and 2000, particularly in the wake of one of the region's driest winters on record. But as Covington pointed out, “What we have is not just a structural fire problem, but a greater ecosystem health problem. Instead of just focusing on houses burning up we need to focus on entire ecosystems, and forest restoration treatments should be the fundamental approach.”
Covington heads up the Governor's Forest Health/Fire Plan Advisory Committee, which was created as a result of the National Fire Plan to help guide and implement strategies and actions to solve the wildfire problem. The committee has taken on the responsibility of ensuring that Arizona residents have the opportunity to be involved in how federal government dollars are spent and how the National Fire Plan is coordinated to reduce wildfire and restore forest health to the state's ailing ponderosa pine ecosystems.
This committee is one of three groups working together to coordinate the implementation of treatments on the ground. The other groups are the Executive Committee of the Southwest Strategy, composed of land management decision-makers, and the Arizona Interagency Coordination Group, made up of agency project implementation leaders.
The Governor's Forest Health/Fire Plan Advisory Committee, a group with representatives from environmental organizations, Native American tribes, the logging industry, firefighting agencies, local governments, Arizona's universities and the forestry industry, is charged with the task of developing strategies to ensure continued public and political support for funding and resources required for community and ecosystem protection.
In mid-May, as wildfires delivered an early entrance and raged in New Mexico and Arizona, tearing through thousands of unnaturally dense acres and homes in the woods, Covington and other committee members delivered to Hull the Southwest Regional Plan for Reducing Unwanted Wildfire Risk and Restoring Ecosystems.
“It's time for a healthy dose of preventative medicine,” said Covington. “We need to thin out trees, protect old-growth trees and reintroduce fire into the ecosystem.”
Covington and others have long maintained that more than a century of human activity in the southwestern forests, including fire suppression, has resulted in degraded forest ecosystems, and that those degraded forest ecosystems are the underlying problem leading to unnatural crown fire and the decline of biodiversity.
The committee states that ecological restoration treatments will facilitate the recovery or re-establishment of native ecosystems. “These treatments seek to return forest health and reduce the risk of crown fires,” said Covington. “They are designed to treat the forest so that fire may again play its natural role with low-intensity ground fire.”
The committee has identified two major goals for wildfire risk reduction. The first is to reduce risk to communities, noting that communities and forests are inextricably linked. The second is to manage sustainable forest and wildland ecosystems.
Topping the list of how to achieve these goals is the recommendation to reduce the wildfire threat to communities identified as “at risk.” There are 90 of them in Arizona. The next step would be to identify additional communities for wildfire risk reduction.
The committee also recommends more cost-sharing incentives to encourage private property owners to treat their property through thinning and prescribed burning projects.
In addition, the committee suggests that communities plan and design treatments intended to reduce the risk of wildfire in the wildland/urban interface.
With more than 5 million acres of public land deemed to be at high risk of damage or loss in New Mexico and Arizona, the committee is calling for landscape level planning and treatment, recognizing that landscape-level analyses can result in the strategic placement of fuel breaks to protect valued resources. An earlier plan had called for 100,000 acres of treatment annually in Arizona alone.
The committee wrote, “Wildland planning should identify and reduce risk to ecosystem sustainability. Special attention should be given to: roadless areas, old growth and mature forests, riparian areas and aquatic ecosystems, fish and wildlife including endangered and threatened species, and critical habitat.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge the governor faces is determining how to follow through on the recommendation that comprehensive forest restoration, along with research, is adequately funded.
So far, U.S. senators have been highly critical of the Bush administration, claiming not enough funding is being allocated for aggressive thinning and restoration treatments to avoid costly fire suppression in the future.
“In Oregon, the [U.S. Forest Service] spent $86 million suppressing fires, but only $17.5 million on hazardous fuels reduction,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) before a recent Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the outlook for the wildland fire season.
Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (N.M.) said he agrees with calls from the Western Governors' Association to fund the National Fire Plan at 2001 levels for at least 15 years to make a substantial difference in the nation's firefighting abilities. The National Fire Plan was funded at $2.9 billion in 2001. Funding in 2002 is at $2.3 billion, and the 2003 budget proposal is $2.1 billion.
Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), who has been calling for more funding every year since 1994, said, “We're getting nowhere fast.”
Senators from both parties say the Forest Service and the Interior Department have been spending too little to remove the dense thickets of trees that are fueling wildfires.
Meanwhile, as lawmakers, agencies and citizens work toward tackling the daunting task of restoring forest ecosystems and reducing the massive fuel load, fires continue to burn in the severely parched Southwest.
“The fires we're seeing are burning in areas of overly dense forest vegetation due to 120 years of fire exclusion. The damage could have been prevented if ecological restoration treatments had been implemented,” said Covington. “This is a fire season that's stacking up to be the worst ever. Never has a drought coincided with the fuel buildup we have today.”
