What can be done to reduce the danger of wildfires in the American West?
Wildfires are a constant threat during the summer months to anyone living the American west. Wildfires damage or completely destroy millions and millions of acres per year of fragile forests, meadow, desert, and tundra. Especially during years of drastic drought, such as we are experiencing right now, wildfires are an almost constant presence and danger from Alaska to Montana to Arizona, and even the California coast, as evidenced last year and this summer when people’s homes were destroyed by wildfires that annihilated hundreds of thousands of acres, and destroyed people’s homes and property. So, what exactly can we do to protect the environment, one another, and the earth itself from the danger of fire that is faced? Should we prescribe burns, or open all of our forests to logging?

Environmentalists despise both ideas, mostly because neither common “solution” benefits the forests and the environment at home. Can we take steps at home, such as storing combustible products and items far away from our houses, and cut all trees down around the property? This is proven to work, but what about brush fires? Some of the deadliest fires are brush fires. I have seen this myself, in 1996. I lived in Three Rivers, California at the time. Two cars parked on some extremely dry grass sparked a fire, which raced up the hillside at an astonishing speed.

How have people tried to solve this problem? First, prescribed burns thin the forest and underbrush, making natural fire lines, or areas that a fire becomes easier to control because of less underbrush. Unfortunately, any time you are dealing with fire, you are dealing with something unpredictable. Weather can escalate prescribed burns past their predetermined lines, often out of control, while firefighters can only stand by and watch. Obviously, this cannot be the best way to control the fire problem. The environmental outlook for this answer is not pleasant either. You have smoke, lots of it, being spat into the atmosphere, obstructing visibility, agitating those with conditions like asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Some environmentalists don’t like this answer either because you are still killing the trees, which is true. The common rebuttal for this is obvious: fires happen naturally anywhere in the world. This fact is backed up by more information than I care to list.

The other popular solution is clear or selected cut logging. Clear cut logging is chopping down every tree in a given area for lumber. Selected cut means cutting down, say, every other tree in that area, so that trees still remain, though not as many. Again, this helps firefighters by creating fire lines, and reducing combustible materials in the area. The environmental consequences, however, are nothing short of potentially disastrous. In clear-cut areas, erosion destroys whatever soil might potentially carry life in the near future. The dust put up by new roads for logging trucks, and the now treeless areas can create serious amounts of pollution. The impact can destroy wildlife habitats for centuries, without letting anything new move in. Obviously, logging is nowhere near the best answer for solving this problem.
As an environmentalist and the son of National Park Service employees, a prescribed burn, though unstable, unpredictable, and sometimes damaging, is the best way to keep our forests healthy (some trees and plants depend on fire). I do see the drawbacks though. The smoke is definitely a pollution problem and possible a health risk to some. Logging, on the other hand, is disastrous to everything but possibly the economy of the area. Cutting down the trees that are left is not the answer for anything.

There is no easy answer for this problem. Eventually, however, we will think of an easy answer. In the mean time, there is no way we can ignore this problem, or more homes and lives will be lost. Forests will hopefully still continue to burn, as it has been proven healthy for the environment. The problem is keeping these fires, as natural as they may be, away from us. The way the drought has been here in the west, we need to worry about ourselves and our families and homes, and fires are a constant summertime threat.