Ellen Engstedt - July 30, 2007
Montana Wood Products Association
Fire Season
A simple look out the window provides the sad evidence that Montana is once again on fire. The ash on my car this morning and the bright red sun in the east was more damning evidence. The Gates of the Mountains is burning and the population of Helena is struggling to breathe. Anyone with lung conditions, small children, and the elderly are advised to stay indoors even though it is impossible to escape the smoke even in homes.
Obviously there are other fires tearing through Montana’s landscape as well – Missoula County, Glacier Park, Bob Marshall Wilderness now headed toward Augusta, and Wisdom – all out of control despite heroic efforts by trained firefighters. Humans can only do so much under these conditions when the fuel loads are so heavy and the fires so intense that they make their own weather.
The fire experts are telling the public that it will take a weather event like snow to tame and finally put out the largest and most violent of the fires. This could mean the Ahorn, Meriwether, and the Glacier Park fires could burn well into September taking with them thousands of acres of Montana forests.
Frankly, the advice being handed out by some officials to people whose homes are at risk is well meaning, but too little too late. The time to fire proof one’s home is not when the flames are in full view. And, people must assume responsibility for their own actions of not keeping firewood away from structures, branches from hanging over the house and deck, and all small brush and trees trimmed away.
However, even the proactive homeowners are put at risk by unmanaged forests surrounding them. Years ago when an ad for a house for sale said “surrounded on three sides by national forests” that was a good thing. Now, it is a message that the home is most likely surrounded by overcrowded, bug-infested acres with a high fire risk.
The most immediate danger to all of us is either the fires themselves or the carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and thus into the air we are attempting to breathe. According to California officials, the 3,000-acre South Lake Tahoe fire burned for 17 days and released 190,000 tons of greenhouse gases into the air. This tonnage is equal to driving 34,000 cars for a year. Like other severe burned areas the land looks like a moonscape of grey ash and blackened dead tree trunks.
Montana has hundreds of thousands of acres that still years after fires continue to suffer the effects and unless a proactive plan is developed thousands more will follow year after year. The answer is active management on the 22 million acres of forests in our State. Private forest landowners and ranchers already manage their lands because they know the value of the land both for the dollars timber provides and the habitat it provides critters.
The State of Montana has an active timber harvest program that is both sustainable for the resource and one that provides dollars for education for Montana’s school children.
The time is over for anyone to think the best policy for federal lands is hands off except in the case of extreme fires and smoke pumping into the air. Wildfires consumed 10 million acres in 2006 with almost 10 percent of that in Montana. The cost of suppression was nearly $2 billion. I envision putting that kind of money and those human resources into prevention instead of cure.
Healthy, green, growing trees are at least part of the solution for the much hyped issue of climate change. Trees have a double impact on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Vibrant, healthy trees sequester carbon while growing and when harvested and made into a valued-added product those same trees sequester that same carbon for generations.
The wrangling needs to stop and reasonable people must prevail. Otherwise, it appears the last person standing at the end of the battle will be awash in smoke and black stumps. Frankly, that is not what my folks want for Montana’s beloved forests.
On behalf of the Montana Wood Products Association, I’m Ellen Engstedt. Thanks for listening.
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