Q&A: What Does Washington State’s Forester Do and Why is Western Washington Facing a Growing Risk of Wildfire?
Tell me about your job. What does the State Forester do? What lands are you responsible for?
The
Wildfires in
What do you mean when you talk about inadequate management in the past?
I always describe forestry, people want to trigger to cutting trees or prescribing burns. ... What needs to happen is that all of these tools, whether it is thinning, whether it is harvest, whether it is prescribed burn, (or) whether it is masticating -- where you're clearing out the underbrush mechanically. We need to assess all of our forests and say, 'In this individual location, what needs to happen to make the forest healthy?'
Wildfires have not historically been as much of a problem in
The one thing that I was told when I was moving to
The wildfire seasons of the past few years have been described as 'the new normal.' Can we expect to keep seeing such intense and frequent fires in years to come?
We have no longer described it as a fire season. We are in a fire year. There are always wildfires occurring now. This is kind of the new norm. We've seen repeated years of drought. We know that we have a forest health issue throughout the West. ... The last five to seven years, we've seen significant wildfires occurring. We are now looking at that as what will typically occur.
Last week, the
What is really now down on paper and going to be implemented is actually a greater role through the states to influence land management on the ground -- not just on our own lands, but also on federal lands. It's a reconfirmation of roles. ... This idea (that) all of us are shorthanded, all of us lack funding and if we get together and really start discussing where the priorities need to occur, and then collaborating, we can make these significant impacts to the landscape. It doesn't matter the boundary line. That green line with the national forest, it should not matter. Fire doesn't care. Insects don't care.
One of the terms that's frequently used is 'reducing the fuel load.' What does that actually look like?
You'll hear that described a lot. That's primarily because people look at forests that are overgrown and say, 'This needs to be thinned out.' If you look at it from the standpoint of what fuel really is, whether it's living trees or dead, grass and everything, it reaches a point where the amount of vegetative mass or fuels on the ground are actually above the carrying capacity of the land. There's never enough water for everything that's out there, or there's never enough nutrients. It's all kind of in a poor state of health ... What we do to get some of that off the landscape, whether that's mastication or harvest or prescribed burning, it's bringing it down to a level that is healthy and sustainable. You have this balance of overly cured or overly dense fuels where you have this potential for unrestrained wildfire.
It sounds like a lot of these long-term management plans will require more resources
at all levels.
That's kind of an inevitable thing. The cry of 'We need more resources.' Every solution to this issue does revolve around that. It takes resources to do the management that's necessary, it takes contractors, it takes firefighters, it takes land managers, it takes equipment -- everything that it takes to get those things on the ground. You're talking about more money. ... Resources involve money, but it also revolves around workforce, equipment, capacities that are identified, that we just need to build on. ... If you have a landscape that's well-managed, suppression costs drop tremendously.
How long is it going to take to get to a place where this is not 'the new normal'?
We are at a point where it took decades to get here, and we're not gonna wiggle our nose and get out of it. We as a society have a short attention span. It's going to take years, if not decades, to fix it. ... We're looking at new ways to accomplish things on the ground, collaborations that probably change our description of what resources are needed. It's going to be millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. Not just nationally. In
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