July 17, 2004

Biscuit and Bitterroot: once burned, twice shy

By Larry Campbell

The more I learn about the Forest Service's approach following the Biscuit fire in the Siskiyou National Forest the greater the sense that history, unfortunately, is about to repeat itself.

Some people might wonder why a 55-year-old man living in a cabin surrounded by Montana's Bitterroot National Forest would have such a keen interest in the massive logging plan for Oregon's Biscuit fire area.

I lived through the Bitterroot fires of 2000, when lightning and human caused fires burned over 300,000 acres, including much of the land surrounding my home.

Even before the flames were out and we could return to our homes following evacuation orders, the Forest Service and logging industry were busy fanning the public's newly piqued fear of fire.

Using buzzwords such as "restoration" and "fuel reduction" the public was lead to believe that the best thing for the Bitterroot following the big fire was an equally big salvage logging plan.

When the Forest Service released their final Bitterroot "Recovery Plan" it called for logging 181 million board feet of trees from 46,239 acres, with over half the logging in unroaded wildlands or core habitat for the endangered bull trout and threatened cutthroat trout. At the time, this was one of the biggest Forest Service logging proposals in modern history.

Of course, the Forest Service has outdone itself with their so-called Biscuit Post-Fire Recovery Project. This logging plan would cut down enough trees from the Siskiyou National Forest to fill 76,000 log trucks lined up for over 650 miles. The plan would also log 8,173 acres of inventoried roadless wildlands and 6,756 acres of ancient forest reserves.

While the places have changed, much of the rhetoric about restoration, community protection and future fire hazard remains the same on the Biscuit project as it was in the Bitterroot. I guess the Forest Service figures that if they can fool the public once, they can fool them again.

However, what can't be dismissed here on the Bitterroot is how the Forest Service's rhetoric and promises have failed to matched up with reality on the ground. You see, unlike the proposed project on the Siskiyou, we've been seeing the actual results of our "recovery" plan in action for two years.

A month before the project started, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth defended his Bitterroot plan by stating, "The most important thing to me is getting on with the restoration work. There's lots of other work we wanted to do - roads we wanted to obliterate, watershed work, reforestation. The idea of the whole project was fire restoration."

The fact of the matter is that two years into this "recovery" plan only 17 percent of the total required road and watershed restoration work is completed and $16 million in restoration funds are gone, meaning that the restoration work may never get done.

While the critical restoration work may never be completed, the vast majority of the logging has occurred far from the nearest community and logging companies have also systematically cut down the largest, most fire-resistant trees, while leaving the smaller, uneconomic but fire-prone trees. Now we have the small, fire-prone trees left standing amidst logging slash tinder.

Yet, the unscientific specter of a possible future "catastrophic reburn" was highlighted repeatedly - as it is in the Siskiyous. If the specter of "reburn" really lives in these mountains I wonder why Lewis and Clark found the healthiest forests we have seen since. These Bitterroot forests - just like those in the Siskiyous - had burned many times and never been salvage logged.

Real recovery, as well as public trust, got burned on the Bitterroot by Forest Service rhetoric. I can only hope the Biscuit "Recovery" isn't a rhetorical reburn.

Larry Campbell is a former miner, logger and carpenter who lives and works in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. He can be reached at lcampbell@bitterroot.net.