We forgot our lessons from the Hayman fire. Exactly a decade later and the current wildfire season is on track to surpass 2002 as Colorado’s worst. So far, the High Park fire has burned nearly 90,000 acres and cost $33.5 million in suppression costs alone. We are still reactively managing our forests for fire instead of proactively managing them for sustainable health.
Spending large sums for fire management is not new. In 1991, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) spent about 13 percent of its budget on fire suppression activities. Now, it spends nearly half, meaning agencies have been forced to spend more on fire suppression and less on recreation, wildlife and timber management.
There are reasons for this shift. Fire suppression is more complex and more expensive because more people than ever live in and around our forests. Fire seasons have become longer and more intense as the climate has been warmer and drier. Much of our forests are unhealthy after a century of fire suppression and other human impacts. Since Colorado forests evolved with fire, natural fire cycle disruptions allow many of the smaller, weaker trees and dense underbrush to thrive. As a result, forests are denser and are much more susceptible to large-scale insect epidemics and high-intensity infernos, increasing our expense.
These issues can be addressed through active forest management, but we need the resources and political will to do so. Costs to restore forest lands in Colorado can exceed $1,000 per acre. More than 6 million acres in Colorado are at high risk for catastrophic wildfire, which would require — conservatively — $6 billion to treat. Public land managers simply do not have the resources to restore forest health on their own.
The private sector is not faring much better. Since the late 1960s, the amount of timber processed in Colorado declined by 80 percent. During the past 20 years, nine sawmills in Colorado and southern Wyoming closed. Other sawmills would have collapsed had the federal government not mutually canceled cost-prohibitive timber contracts last year. Without a sustainable, robust forest products industry to maintain forest health, managed forests that economically benefitted communities have now become a liability to taxpayers.
In Colorado, the public and private sectors harvest about 80 million board feet or about 5 percent of the state’s net annual tree growth. In other words, we harvest a tiny portion of the interest and never touch the principal. Neither the public nor the private sector can address this daunting problem by themselves. The solution to keeping Colorado’s forests healthy requires public-private partnerships supporting a sustainable forest products market.
Public land managers and the forest industry together play critical roles. Industry can help agencies achieve resource management objectives in a more cost-effective manner through sustainable operations. Agencies must provide guaranteed, sustainable timber supplies for a viable industry. The federal project planning process is time-consuming and expensive, and efficiency is needed. For example, agencies could use landscape-scale planning.
Public officials must also help. Federal agency contracting authorities called Stewardship Contracting and Good Neighbor are set to expire in September 2013 and need to be reauthorized. State and local officials need to provide incentives for a sustainable, market-based, “home-grown” wood-to-energy industry. For example, officials could include biomass in public facilities planning. Using clean-burning forest biomass to heat buildings can be up to 90 percent efficient while creating local jobs and utilizing the byproducts of reducing fire hazards and restoring forest health while minimizing taxpayer burdens.
Consumers can also partner. More than 90 percent of our wood and paper products, including most of our homebuilding materials, and almost all of our Christmas trees, come from out-of-state. We even import firewood from Mexico and house log kits from Canada and Finland. Instead, consumers can support local industry and jobs by looking for the Colorado State Forest Service’s Colorado Forest Products (CFP) logo. All CFP-labeled products obtain at least 50 percent of their raw materials from forest management work in the state.
If we want to reduce the severity of fires like Hayman and High Park in the future, we need to make changes now. Increasing active management by nurturing public-private partnerships and empowering consumers to support a sustainable forest products industry will help keep Colorado’s forests healthy.
Mike Eckhoff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University and Policy Chair for the Colorado/ Wyoming Society of American Foresters.
