USA: Bush’s Healthy Forest Scheme from the Review Mirror
Last June, a fire that began at a campground about a mile to the west
spread eastward, burning around — but not through — the summer home
tract. “It was like an island — fire pushed around the edges, but
stayed clear of here,” said Bradford, district ranger for the forest’s
Monterey District. He credits the tract’s largely unscathed condition
— the fire scorched only a single wall — to a collaborative effort
between homeowners and the Forest Service to remove brush and thin
crowded trees around the homes last winter.
“If we hadn’t cleaned this
up, we probably wouldn’t have seen anything left,” Bradford said. It
is this kind of success story that Forest Service officials hold up as
testament to the effectiveness of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act,
signed into law five years ago next month. But as one of the country’s
most massive wildfire seasons comes to an end, a close look at a
half-decade of the law in action reveals a mixed record. Whether the
act is accomplishing its goal of reducing hazardous fuels is the
subject of dispute. So far, about 213,000 acres of forest land have
been treated nationwide under HFRA authorities — far less than the 20
million acres authorized for expedited thinning under the act.
Meanwhile, wildfires have burned 5 million acres this year — 1.5
million more acres than burned in 2003, the year the act was passed.
The worst fire seasons of the last eight years were in 2006 and 2007,
with 9.1 million acres and 9.4 million acres burned, respectively.
Environmental advocates — many of whom skewered the law when it was
passed in 2003 — say HFRA has largely been ineffective. “I don’t
think it was nearly the silver bullet they thought it would be,” said
Bryan Bird, who works on forest conservation issues for New
Mexico-based WildEarth Guardians. “Two hundred thousand acres —
that’s a pretty paltry figure,” added Matthew Koehler, executive
director of the WildWest Institute in Montana, an environmental group.
“We’ve still had fires, we’ve still lost homes.” Last year, Senate
Forest Subcommittee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called HFRA a failure,
citing a lack of money as the culprit. While the bill authorizes $760
million annually for hazardous fuels reduction, the Bush
administration and Congress have allocated less than $300 million each
year (E&E Daily, Dec. 14,
2007).http://www.eenews.net/public/Landletter/2008/11/06/1
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