Increasingly, the agency is being asked to pay for fire suppression at the expense of other priorities and needs. Last year, firefighting consumed 45 percent of the agency's budget, leaving less to spend on campground maintenance, trail work, wildlife and fish habitat restoration, and many other worthwhile programs.
There are, of course, several reasons for rising firefighting costs. The first is drought. It's an axiom of fire ecology that you get big fires with extreme drought. There is little one can do to control drought. Under drought conditions, fires blaze through all kinds of woodlands - and proposed solutions to reduce fire hazards like thinning forests ultimately has little effect upon fire spread under severe drought conditions.
Not surprisingly, we are experiencing some of the largest fires in recent memory, in part because we are experiencing some of the most severe drought conditions in history. For instance, this past year, Southern California has had the least amount of precipitation ever recorded. Fires are already whipping across that landscape and it's not even the late summer when Santa Ana winds historically blast out of the desert to propel blazes across the Southern California landscape.
In the Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico have experienced the worst drought in 500 years. Not since the Anazasi Indians abandoned their pueblos in the canyon country and moved to more permanent water sources along the Rio Grande has the Southwest experienced such dry conditions.
Under conditions of drought coupled with low humidity, high temperatures and, most importantly, high winds, wildfires are unstoppable. It is not a failure of federal firefighting agencies that is contributing to our growing firefighting costs, but a failure of state and local governments to bite the bullet and begin to halt the construction of new homes that are being built outside of established towns and cities throughout the West.
In recent years, the majority of the firefighting effort has focused on “structure protection.” In other words, firefighters are no longer fighting the fires themselves, but spending the majority of time and effort defending homes created by rural sprawl.
Fire-related costs, both in loss of life and tax dollars, are almost totally avoidable. Nearly 85 percent of the half-mile fire hazard zones surrounding U.S. communities is found on private lands. And it is largely the responsibility of state and local governments to regulate and minimize the risk posed by wildfires.
If states would enact urban growth boundaries such as Oregon has done, confining new construction in or near existing communities, wildfire would be a minor threat to humans. But due to the failure and even hostility of many of the West's state and local governments to control sprawl, we have a growing mess and crisis.
Next time fires burn down someone's home, ask the local county commissioners or state legislature why they are allowing homes to be constructed in fire-prone areas? Constructing homes in the “fireplain” is no different than building a home in the river's floodplain. Sooner or later, you are going to lose your home and maybe even your life.
With global warming creating conditions favorable for large unstoppable fires, we are going to see more and more large blazes. Either we continue to keep our heads in the sand refusing to make adjustments in our behavior and suffer the consequences, or we can begin to change our behavior so when the inevitable large fires do occur, we aren't victims of our own ideological rhetoric.
George Wuerthner is the editor of “Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy.” He can be reached at (541) 255-6039.
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