Third Spring Environmental Symposium Healthy Forests and Healthy Economies: Finding the Balance

Summary

The relatively cool, relatively dry interior of the North American continent might be almost too favorable a climate for both trees and people. Both thrive in a climate that lacks some of the natural controls — diseases, parasites, et cetera — that enforce a life-death balance in hotter, wetter climates. And when trees do die in cool dry places, the “regeneration through rot” of decay and decomposition is much slow- er. Rocky Mountain forests accordingly build up an over-abundance of living and dead material — similar in ways to the over-abundance of humans that leads to slums, underemployment, poverty and other forms of societal dysfunction. The stress in forests that have an over-abundance of living and dead material is usually resolved by the “rapid oxidation” we call fire. But for most of the 20th cen- tury, fire in the forests was considered to be one of the enemies against which America waged war - resulting in a worsening of the natural tendency for Temperate Zone forests to stress themselves with too much living and dead mat- ter. Today, there are around 40 million acres of forest land — much of it public lands — that need substantial fuel reduction. This increasingly explosive situation has been exacerbated in recent years by a drought in most of the western forests. For several decades now, foresters have been increasingly aware of this problem, and the need for fuel reduction in the forests. Foresters who grew up fighting for- est fires are now doing what Native Americans did for millennia before the arrival of Europeans — setting (mostly) controlled “prescription burns” to reduce the over-

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