Solution to fires: privatize Idaho's forests

Bryan Fischer
August 22, 2007

As forest fires now threaten the homes of the rich and the famous in the Sun Valley area, it's worth taking another look at possible solutions to what has been a catastrophic fire season in Idaho.

Common sense tells us that people are inclined to take better care of property they own than property they don't, and, as even the Idaho Statesman's environmental reporter Rocky Barker reveals, perhaps the solution to devastating forest fires is to take timber management out of the hands of the federal government and put it in the hands of private enterprise through lease arrangements or sales.

Barker revealed in a story that appeared in the Sunday edition of the Statesman that the number of fires burning in private forests in Idaho is "effectively zero."

Private forest fires are extinguished almost immediately by the quick response of owners. One manager of private timber lands says the worst fire he's seen on private land is about 100 acres, which is a long ways from the well over 700,000 acres currently ablaze in national forests in Idaho.

The reason: better and more intensive forestry practices, which include thinning forests to reduce the fuel load, and a system of roads which makes access to fires much easier.

Around 64% of forest lands in Idaho belong to the federal government but more than half of that land is either roadless or wilderness, making fighting fires a daunting task. Just 5% of Idaho's forests are in private hands.

Private forest lands have 24-hour fire lookouts, a practice abandoned by the Forest Service for airplane surveillance. Said the private manager, "We get to our fires before they burn a tenth of an acre on average."

He counted just 86 trees per acre in the private forestland he manages, while the adjacent Forest Service land has 200 to 300 trees per acre, trees which compete for water and nutrients and add fuels that carry ground fires like ladders to the forest crown.

Plus, thinned forests which don't burn are good for the planet, according to environmental doctrine, since the air is not filled with smoke and carbon from burning trees. And environmentalists should celebrate such forest management, because fires turn forests from places where carbon is sequestered and kept from being released into the atmosphere into raging sources of global warming gases.

Said this private forest manager, "How much carbon are we putting in the atmosphere right now that could be locked up in homes and timber products?"