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The Fire This Time

August 24, 2007

Cheeky headlines and playful captions make The Economist a newsweekly unlike any other. With its droll humor and traditional conservative ideas about politics and economics, this London-based publication, or "newspaper" as its editors prefer to call it, provides a useful outsider's perspective on American goings-on, including environmental matters.

The latest edition, for example, takes a look at the wildfires burning across the northern Rockies and in southern California. The article avoids the apocalyptic language typical of fire stories in U.S. media. On the contrary, The Economist seems almost cheery, starting with the headline: "Burn, baby burn." The article listed reasons why the growth in wildfires has its up sides: there is less willingness to put wildland firefighters at risk, greater willingness to let fire assume its natural role in fire-prone ecosystems.

Every fire season, there is a call to step up commercial logging in national forests as a way to "fireproof" the forests. Like everything else with natural resources management, it's not that simple. Logging the forests to save them is a bromide that overlooks the variables that influence wildfire behavior. In northwestern Montana, for example, fires have broken out this summer on thousands of acres of intensively managed timberlands and old clearcuts, as well as in sickly, dog-hair stands that could stand some thinning. When the weather is as dry as it's been, trees are more likely to burn. If global warming results in more intense, frequent droughts, fire seasons as tough as 2007 may become the norm.

Site-specific forest management that removes ladder fuels, removes dangerous brush around homes, and carefully re-introduces fire in the back-country can help reduce the odds of conflagrations. But fire cannot be excluded from Western forests, any more than hurricanes can be kept away from Florida. A fireproof forest is a foolish oxymoron that invites cheeky headlines from The Economist.