Although smoke has cleared throughout Clark County, wildfires continue to burn in many regions of Washington. Fire seasons are growing longer and more intense, and the impact has been felt in urban areas the past two summers with choking air and hazy views.
The question is whether this represents a new normal for populated areas throughout the state. The corollary to that question is how much attention the Legislature and Congress should pay to the issue. In Clark County, nearly 100,000 acres are publicly owned, including about 58,000 protected by the state Department of Natural Resources.
Since 2015, lawmakers have provided the DNR and the Department of Fish and Wildlife — the state’s primary wildfire-fighting agencies — with operating budgets totaling $18 million. This falls far short of the agencies’ request of $40 million, according to The Seattle Times, but still represents a sharp increase from previous years.
In addition, the agencies were granted $18 million in the supplemental budget for 2017-19 to implement a 20-year plan to thin the state’s forests. “The Legislature is recognizing that it needs to be more proactive and ramp up funding to address forest health,” state Sen. Brad Hawkins, R-East Wenatchee, told the Times. Hawkins also emphasized the need for “harvesting and thinning forests in a responsible way.”
Responsible management received a boost earlier this year, when Congress ended the long-standing practice of “fire borrowing.” That process saw the U.S. Forest Service using money for forest management to fight wildfires. The result was less money for thinning forests and reducing the amount of fuel for fires, which led to larger fires the following year and created a cycle that exacerbated the situation.
As part of a bill approved in March, the Forest Service will receive $2 billion a year for fighting wildfires. That leaves funds designed for fire prevention to be used for their intended purpose.
At the state level, however, questions remain. Peter Goldmark, state commissioner of public lands from 2009-17, said money allotted by the Legislature “doesn’t really scratch the surface. It’s only going to get worse.”
Forest management has been one factor leading to more intense fires. But it would be folly to ignore the impact of climate change. Jonathan Thompson, an ecologist at Harvard University, explained to The Associated Press that the time between wildfires in some locations is growing shorter, and with less moisture in those areas, certain forests will never regenerate. The result will be regions converting to shrub land. “They get stuck in this trap of repeated, high-severity fire,” he said. “Through time, we’ll see the California shrub land shifting north.”
The quality-of-life costs of wildfires are evident to residents who lived through the eye-irritating and throat-scratching smoke of recent weeks — or the residue from the Eagle Creek Fire of 2017. So, too, are the economic costs of fire prevention and suppression. But the long-term collateral costs might be more difficult to enumerate. Pictures of smoke-shrouded cities influence how would-be tourists view the region, and the area’s robust outdoors industry has suffered through back-to-back hazy summers that often keep residents indoors.
Improved forest management and increased funding for fire suppression will not halt the blazes; those are an immutable fact of nature. But the new normal calls for increased action to protect the environment, economy and the health of residents throughout Washington.
