Using the northern spotted owl as a surrogate, environmentalists took eight years to win a legal victory and the public's attention in the decade-long effort that stopped old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest's national forests by the early 1990s.
Today, environmentalists are ahead of that pace in what they anticipate will be another decade-long forest campaign, having scored victories in the courtroom and public spotlight five years into an effort to force the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its firefighting mission and practices.
Rather than using an endangered owl as their icon, environmentalists this time are spotlighting aerial fire retardants, saying the chemical red slurry is an environmental hazard - not a critical firefighting tool, as the Forest Service maintains.
"Stopping the war on fire won't be as sexy as saving God's ancient forests - that's like saving Yosemite or Grand Canyon - but everyone knows the Forest Service's whole war on fire is ecologically and financially bankrupt," said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics and a former Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund resource analyst who helped end old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest.
FSEEE, an Oregon-based watchdog group, contends a century of aggressive wildfire suppression has drastically changed the health, structure, characteristics and fire behavior of Western forests, resulted in thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths and wasted billions of dollars.
The group wants the Forest Service to stop putting out wildfires unless they threaten people and property, and to focus on fire prevention around communities.
That will create healthier forests, safer conditions and allow the agency - which devotes nearly 50 percent of its budget to fire suppression - to spend more on recreation, wildlife habitat and other needs on national forests, FSEEE says.
The group also wants local and state governments and insurance companies to enact tougher standards for new construction in the West's fire-prone forests, just as they have restricted building in the East's floodplains.
But the Forest Service says its stop-all-fires policy ended long ago, giving way to a more sophisticated strategy that reflects the latest in fire science, land management and public expectations.
George Weldon, deputy director of fire, aviation and air for the Forest Service's Northern Region, said managing fires as a natural force has to be balanced with protection of people, property, infrastructure and natural resources.
"It's more complicated than people think," Weldon said. Depending on fuels, weather and topography - the three primary drivers of fire behavior - "a fire that's 30 miles from a community can be more dangerous than one that's a quarter of a mile away."
In recent decades, Forest Service officials have come to agree that fire is essential for America's ecosystems, where frequent low-intensity and occasionally severe blazes once maintained a mosaic of open and dense woodlands.
When the Forest Service went into the firefighting business in 1911, a year after the "Big Blowup" charred 3 million acres of western Montana and north Idaho in 48 hours, the agency adopted a "10 a.m." fire policy that aimed to extinguish all blazes by the morning after they started.
But agency officials say that aggressive policy began changing 40 years ago when land managers and scientists started to realize that excluding fire from fire-dependent ecosystems creates unhealthy, fuel-laden forests.
Since then, officials say, they have adopted fire suppression as one tool in a larger policy that balances fire's natural function, hotter and drier conditions wrought by climate change, and the growing number of people building houses in Western woodlands.
Today, the National Fire Plan and the Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative are intended to get the federal government out of the fire suppression business, the Forest Service insists.
It's a process that employs thousands, from scientists in the laboratory to firefighters on the ground to air tanker crews overhead; that uses tools from computers to bulldozers; that analyzes fuels, weather, topography, safety and other factors.
The reason fire suppression costs have skyrocketed, Forest Service officials say, isn't because the agency is fighting every little fire but because it's trying to limit catastrophic fires.
"There's this notion that Smokey Bear has driven our fire policy," said Ed Nesselroad, director of public and governmental affairs for the Forest Service's Northern Region. "But the fact is our approach has evolved greatly over the years."
Perry Brown, dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana, said fire management has become far more complex.
"The world is changing socially and ecologically, so we have to have a serious discussion on how we can adapt," he said.
Since the 1970s, dozens of studies have shown that chemical fire retardants are toxic to fish and more recently that they promote the spread of invasive weeds.
The retardants, which are about
85 percent water, slow wildfires by cooling and coating the fuels, robbing the fire of oxygen, and slowing the rate of fuel combustion with inorganic salts that change how the fire burns.
Starting in 1992, the Forest Service contracted with the U.S. Geological Survey to conduct field and laboratory studies on the ecological effects of ammonia salts, cyanide compounds, and other chemicals in fire retardants and fire suppressant foams.
Results showed the formulas were extremely toxic to aquatic organisms, including fish, algae, insects and crustaceans, although the kill rate depended on the amount of retardant that enters the water, the streamflow and other factors.
The Forest Service has stopped using slurry containing a cyanide compound because studies showed it was highly toxic to fish when exposed to water and sunlight.
Results also showed that retardants acted like a short-term fertilizer on vegetation, increasing its growth, decreasing native plant diversity and invigorating weeds.
In the mid-1990s, a few years after the old-growth logging tumult in the Pacific Northwest, FSEEE decided to target the federal government's fire policy because of a growing number of large, so-called "catastrophic" fires in the West.
In 2003, FSEEE sued the Forest Service in federal court in Missoula, a year after a retardant airdrop killed 20,000 fish in a central Oregon stream.
In the first legal challenge to the Forest Service's firefighting policy, the suit said the agency had never conducted an ecological review of aerial fire retardants, and that their use violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
In 2005, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy agreed, ruling that the Forest Service had failed to properly analyze the environmental harm from ammonium phosphate, the primary ingredient in retardants.
Last month, the Forest Service finally presented its environmental review - a general evaluation rather than a more detailed environmental impact statement - after Molloy threatened to hold the agency in contempt of court.
That threat, which drew national attention, included the possibility of jailing Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, the Bush administration's top forest official, and grounding the nation's firefighting air tankers until the judge's order was obeyed.
During several days of testimony, Forest Service officials defended their use of retardant airdrops and said an environmental impact statement wasn't needed. They painted a dire picture of a Western landscape ablaze and virtually undefended if retardant airdrops were banned.
The agency's review, signed by Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, said aerial retardants have no significant impact on public health, safety, firefighters or the environment.
"Because a limited number of effective firefighting tools exist, it is essential that firefighters are able to utilize every available means - including retardant - to fight wildland fires," Kimbell wrote. "All firefighting tools help contain and control fires, as well as prevent damage to human life, property and valuable natural resources."
Kimbell rejected the options of using only water airdrops or stopping all retardant airdrops until a less toxic formula is found.
Instead, she chose to stick with current federal retardant use guidelines, which prohibit drops within 300 feet of waterways unless people or property are threatened, although she said studies show that a 3-meter buffer zone is adequate.
But the Forest Service also made a concession when it agreed to expand its testing and monitoring of aerial retardants - before and after they are dropped near waterways - because of concerns of two sister agencies.
In their biological opinions, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service said the Forest Service's review had seriously underestimated the ecological impact from the accidental delivery, drift and surface runoff of fire retardants into waterways.
Those agencies said retardants jeopardize 45 endangered or threatened fish, plant, insect, mussel and amphibian species and their critical habitats. And they said retardants have caused massive fish kills in the past, and will cause even more in the future as the use of slurry increases.
But the two agencies also said the Forest Service could follow "reasonable and prudent alternatives" to lessen the ecological impact of firefighting retardants, ranging from field inspections to lab tests to making a concerted effort to keep the slurry away from waterways.
The Forest Service agreed to those measures but refused to change its operational guidelines for using retardants, saying it must be free to make airdrops near waterways if people, property or natural resources are threatened.
FSEEE, which considers the "reasonable and prudent alternatives" inadequate, plans to file another lawsuit soon in Missoula - the second half of its original legal strategy - to challenge the validity of the Forest Service's environmental review.
Stopping the war on fire, Stahl said, will only succeed if federal courts enforce environmental laws, local governments restrict development in the so-called wildland-urban interface, and public schools teach fire ecology.
"This issue doesn't have an easy answer," he said. "It's not a case of all fires should burn or we should fight all fires. It's do we approach fire with a war-like mentality in which cost is no object, or do we address fire as part of a larger land-use issue?"
From the 1930s to the 1980s, the Forest Service built a massive firefighting complex that was aided by a generally wet climate cycle in the West, both of which resulted in fewer large wildifires.
The resulting fuel buildup, drier climate and population shift will take a partnership between government agencies and local communities so that people can live safely in the new West, said Weldon, of the Forest Service.
"After all those years of putting out fires, we still struggle sometimes with the concept of 'Holy cow, we can't put all of them out anymore,' " he said. "We have to learn how to live with fires because fire will be with us, like it or not. As a society, we're still coming to grips with that."
Brown, the UM forestry dean, said the Forest Service's fire policy has become more nuanced in recent years as the agency tries to balance ecological, social, financial and safety concerns.
Changing an entrenched bureaucracy takes time, "but some of that momentum has changed," he said. "It's been slow in coming, but they're taking a broader perspective."
Full Story And Video: http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/03/24/news/local/znews03.txt
