The executive director of the Bitterroot Valley's Big Sky Coalition believes large-scale thinning to reduce fuels on national forest lands should be part of the answer.
LaSalle will offer his vision Thursday in testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee in Washington, D.C.
In 1991, fire suppression cost the agency about 13 percent of its total budget. By 2000, it was 20 percent. This year, the Forest Service predicts it could reach 48 percent.
As a result, the agency increasingly has trouble finding funds to repair roads, maintain campgrounds and trails, and perform other general forest management.
“Both bills do basically the same thing,” LaSalle said. “They are both trying to find a way to pay for the cost of fire suppression without taking it directly out of the regular Forest Service budget. It's an issue that's hammering the agency right now.”
But just coming up with more money for fire suppression doesn't address the underlying reasons behind large wildfires, he said.
While the 20th century was the wettest in the past thousand years, the West is now facing a warmer and drier climate. That's set the stage for longer periods of drying and hotter wildfire seasons.
The combination of abundant moisture and a century of fire suppression helped create forests that are stocked more densely with trees than can be supported during years of normal precipitation, LaSalle said.
Those overstocked unhealthy forests have been ripe to insects and disease, and that's helped to fuel ever-larger wildfires, he said.
The agency's attempts to address fuel reduction through thinning have sometimes been slowed by environmental challenges. The current system of appeals and litigation facing the Forest Service “has progressed to the point where it is extremely difficult for the agency to act decisively, timely and efficiently on large-scale thinning and restoration projects,” LaSalle said.
While Congress can't do anything about climate, it can address fuel reduction on national forest lands and the legal issues, LaSalle said.
“Treating half of the problem is analogous to a patient going to the doctor with intense pain and the doctor prescribes a strong painkiller without identifying or treating the root cause,” LaSalle said. “The Forest Service is in immediate and intense pain, and the painkiller is a different funding formula, but that does not significantly reduce the cause of the pain to the agency or the people they serve.”
LaSalle will suggest that Congress define the Forest Service's mission to include a focus on reducing hazardous fuels to both reduce the risk for large catastrophic fires and improve the health of the forest.
He will also ask the agencies to work with state governments to develop strategies to identify communities at risk and then work to reduce that risk through thinning projects. To ensure those projects are accomplished, LaSalle will tell Congress it needs to suspend the appeals process and require a significant bond from groups that file lawsuits to stop the projects.
“Thinning will not prevent forest fires, but it will reduce the chances for a fire to grow in intensity due to accumulations of fuel,” LaSalle said. “I have personally seen moving uncontrollable fires reduce their intensity, rate of spread and resistance to control when burning into a thinned area.”
LaSalle is a retired Forest Service employee who served as supervisor of the Payette National Forest in Idaho. The Big Sky Coalition is headquartered in Hamilton.
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