The May 1, 1997 Oregonian, unknown to me, juxtaposed my op-ed response to the forest health plan against one on forest fire by an industry forester, adding bold caps and a provocative pictue of a crowning fire. Had I known they were going to do this, I would have focused my dialogue on a "logging will not stop fire" discourse.

Noelle Colby-Rotell of Prairie Wood Products made a lot of claims that beg for refute. I can't fire the first return, but here's a chance for the Eastside forest conservation movement to move the dialogue forward. Her fire "facts" and assumption that logging will fire proof Eastside forests is wide open for countering, as are the economics of logging and supporting the local timber industry at federal expense. Perhaps you can get one of the big guns at the Wilderness Society or National Wildlife Federation that's involved in the Eastside process to set the issue straight in a timely manner!

I wrote one on fire earlier in the Oregonian and anyone responding should

freely reuse any part of it that might help:

Forests, Fires and Logging

by Roy Keene

Out of the ashes of the seasonal fire frenzy, the forest health "crisis" has re-emerged. Some politicians, scientists and forest managers are insisting that more logging will fix what they perceive as an unhealthy forest by mimicking the effects of fire.

Forest life spans and cycles continue for centuries, while human lives are measured in decades. It seems a bit precocious for managers and scientists to look at the forest through their narrow window in time and announce that the forest is critically unhealthy because it appears to be temporarily out of balance. Fire, insects, and pathogens at various times and intensities are not a "crisis," but rather vital parts of the normal forest life cycle of Western forests. In the absence of fire (nature's "reset button"), insects and pathogens often work together like "slow fire" to restart forest succession or reduce the density of overstocked stands. The scale of their interaction within the forest ecosystem is affected (but not necessarily controlled) by climate changes, existing forest conditions, local weather patterns, and ongoing human manipulation.

Natural fires, if allowed to burn in the uninhabited realms of our national forests, will not cost taxpayers the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that public logging currently does. In national parks and wilderness areas, fires often burn themselves out without intervention unless they threaten other ownerships or human lives. Fire, like logging, may provide temporary employment, but, unlike logging, does not build roads, remove all the trees from a site, compact soils, or permanently reduce biological diversity. Fire did not eradicate the valuable Western White Pine, logged to remnants and then fatally infected with blister rust from imported and replanted seedlings. Fire has not, over time, methodically decimated forest watersheds. If there is a forest health crisis, a good part of it is due to excessive logging. The most "successful" national forest management might be to retire the Forest Service from an incredibly inefficient career of logging and re-establish our heritage lands to their original status as reserves.

In 1871 in the Great Lakes region, a huge holocaust fueled by excessive logging debris burned one million acres and killed several thousand people. The 1910 fire complex that burned 3,000,000 acres in the Northern Rockies occurred in less dense forest conditions then unaffected by fire suppression.significant changes in fire policy and logging practices, more logging could simply result in further forest health deterioration.During Renaissance times, climates were cooler, fires were less frequent, and the forest was, at times, probably as dense as it is today. The assumption that logging will counteract a conflagration by reducing forest density and restoring healthy forest equilibrium is naive.

While the uncontrollable fires of 1910 were burning, a controversy over the use of controlled fire smoldered in Northern California. Lumber men and ranchers were trying to convince the Forest Service that controlled burning would maintain healthy forest conditions in pine and mixed-conifer forests by reducing density. Agency managers and scientists, realizing that thinner forest stands would grow less trees and result in lower harvest levels, shrewdly resisted the controlled burn proposal and instituted the fire prevention and control program we have inherited today. This program enjoys a virtually unlimited budget and, in return, offers only limited capabilities for saving forests or lives from fire. It also results in a more dense and what some might call an "unhealthy" forest. It seems capricious to continue in this expensive and seemingly futile management scheme while simultaneously attempting to mitigate its impacts.

If taxpayers are to continue to subsidize federal forestry, management "success" should be more than a measure of how many fires we throw money and lives into or how many logs we extract. To achieve success and public trust, the Forest Service should renew its mission and begin to prudently restore and maintain America's national forests. Restoration and ecosystem maintenance imply allowing fire, insects, and pathogens to interact as part of the natural forest cycle. Congress should empower a period of restoration by refocusing the Forest Service budget on the number of acres cared for rather than timber volumes produced. If there is a forest health crisis today, it is action based on the short-term, self-serving forest values manifested by those who fail to see public forests as a trust to be kept functional and intact for future generations of all species, including humans.

Roy Keene is a private forestry consultant and the founder of the Public Forestry Foundation, a group of public interest foresters and scientists based in Eugene, Oregon.