Maybe you could expand more on this concept of active management [or mismanagement as the case may be] such as what is not being done that you think should be done. Is there a lack of buffer zones/firebreaks around towns and cities? Should a homeowner who chooses to build in a forest setting be required/allowed to create a clear cut zone so fire won't reach his property. How would thinning out a spot in the forest 50 miles from nowhere stop or minimize fires? How would thinning out trees from 500 per acre to 250 per acre stop fires? For those of us not in the know about such things, what in your opinion needs to be done?
The best person to give these details would be a forester that works or has worked in the PNW. Now I am not a forester, but I lived in the PNW from 1960-1983 and then again since 2007. The intervening 24 years I was in the USAF and I came home very year or so. I also worked in the forest products industry from 2007 - 2019. So here is my take, and I am completely open to being corrected by a PNW forester.
Logging ramped up in Oregon around 1910ish or so. I will focus on Oregon because Oregon is the largest wood producer in the USA. When logging first started, little thought was given to the environmental impacts. They would log right down to a stream bed, plugging up the stream and creating a lot of mud and silt. Those little streams were places where salmon and steelhead spawned and the logging practices were hurting the fish runs. There were also issues with erosion that caused issues.
In the 1960s people began to pay attention to the environmental impacts of those logging practices. In the early 70s Oregon passed legislation that addressed a lot of these issues and logging practices improved dramatically, pretty much solving the earlier problems. The demand for timber was great and public land was being actively logged and there was a strong focus on fire prevention.
Through the 70s and into the early 80s they were logging, clearing, and making roads in these dense forested areas. My dad told me in the 70s that it was 200 miles of new road each year on federal land. Part of the requirement for a company to harvest timber on public land was to maintain it and keep the understory cleaned out. A friend who owned a logging company told me yesterday that that would build roads and trails that allowed quick access to any area that caught on fire.
There weren't many devastating forest fires when they were actively logging. Wildlife liked the logging as well and numbers increased. Though animals will shelter in it, not much lives in an old growth Douglas Fir stand because little sunlight gets to the ground and so not much grows there.
Through all this, the environmentalists hated logging and were always trying to find a way to shut it down. Sadly, they gained power. They managed to convince politicians that logging old growth Doug Fir was decimating the Spotted Owl population. While that turned out be to be untrue, it did cause logging on public land to be dramatically curtailed. Add to that how private timber companies had become very efficient in managing their tree farms (40 years to harvestable tree on private land vs 80 years in the wild) and very little logging was happening in public forests. They also quit maintaining the roads that allowed quick fire suppression.
Since there was no logging, there was no requirement for anyone to keep the understory cleaned out. So fuel began building up in the public forests. In 1998 I was home on leave hunting, and I remember seeing this build up of dead trees, brush, etc. I also didn't see much wildlife. That was not the case when I hunted in Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember thinking that conditions were ripe for a very hot fire, and in 2002, close to where I had seen the build up of fuel a couple years earlier, 500,000 acres burned.
Private timberland does not see as devastating of fires because it is maintained. There are roads and the understory is kept clear. Private companies make sure their forest dept personnel carry firefighting equipment with them when they are in the woods. That doesn't mean a bad fire can't start on private land, but it is much less common than on public land. There are many stories of how a fire burning hot and killing trees on public land drops dramatically in intensity as it moves through private land. Also, private companies work quickly to put out fires unlike public agencies which have been known to let a blaze build to the next level so the next level agency can pay for suppression.
So what should be done?
I have always thought there should be three tiers of public forest land that are managed differently. The first level of forest land is land that is closer to population areas. I don't know what that distance should be, whether it is 10 miles, 20 miles, or more and it may vary based on the area. Regardless, that land should be very well maintained. Understory should be cleared out and roads should be maintained. Trees should be thinned out as well. Fires should be put out immediately.
Also in this close zone there should be a minimum distance from tree stands to structures in populated areas. This buffer zone could be 300 or 500 feet or whatever. One issue right now is in many of these cities/areas it is a crime to cut down a tree even if the landowner wants to.
The next zone is the wilderness zone. We already have Wilderness Areas and National Parks, and these should be kept as natural as practical. They still need to make provision for fire suppression, though not as aggressive of suppression as on closer lands. Generally, they don't put roads in wilderness areas and that is fine, but we better have readily available air tanker support and smoke jumpers. There should also be a buffer between the Wilderness Areas and close zone lands.
The final type of land would be remote wilderness where we don't do anything. Maybe keep it closed to everyone except biologists. If that land burns, then it burns. They only fire suppression would be to keep it out of the other types of lands.
I think that with what we spend on fire suppression each year we could easily fund more active forest management and dramatically reduce the number of big fires.
