| Lewis and Clark experienced an American landscape that we can only imagine today — from vast prairies teeming with wildlife to primeval forests cut only by game trails. As they pursued their epic journey, one of the spectacles the explorers surely encountered was smoke from thousands of fires that regularly burned tens of millions of acres every year.
While forest fires are still inevitable, wildfire season is now a shadow of its former self. Throughout the West, forests are populated with cities and towns, dramatically increasing the values at risk. Many of these same forested stands are now crowded with many more trees than they historically supported. Some of these forests are tinder dry from a poorly understood combination of episodic drought and global climate change. Unhealthy forest conditions have contributed to a recent bark beetle epidemic. As trees are killed from insects, fire risk increases.
Today, fire can be catastrophic, rather than simply restorative.
Where and under what circumstances are fires appropriate? Where they are not? Can we restore fire’s essential ecological role? How can we create fire-adapted communities amid fire-dependent landscapes? How can we improve communities’ protection from fire, while at the same time planning for more fire-friendly development in the future?
For decades, opinions have been divided on these questions between federal and state land managers, academics, environmentalists, local governments, state regulatory agencies, watershed protection groups, industry and emergency responders. The debate has been contentious with finger pointing all around. And fire has continued to burn.
The Roundtable
The Roundtable was formed as something of an advisory group to the newly created Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership in 2003. Following the devastating Hayman fire south of Denver in the summer of 2002, Regional Forester Rick Cables acknowledged the risk to lives and property along the heavily populated Front Range of Colorado. With the support of Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., Cables diverted some of his appropriated fuels reduction funds from other forests in the region and asked the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, the Pike-San Isabel National Forest, and the Colorado State Forest Service to work together to prioritize projects in the area. This newly formed Partnership also needed larger stakeholder engagement, and the Roundtable was created.
Our first meeting in the winter of 2003 was something to behold. Around the table sat federal agency leaders, industry organizers, environmentalists, academics, locally elected officials and emergency response personnel. We shook hands, introduced ourselves and our organizations, sipped coffee, and had a long, rambling conversation about the fire challenge in our backyards. We continued to meet for all day meetings every 6-8 weeks, hired an outside facilitator to structure and lead our meetings, and divided ourselves into working groups.
Members of the Front Range Fuels Treatment Roundtable.
Courtesy Lisa Dale.
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We agreed that the problem was so complex and so controversial that we had to do something different. We decided to study the problem systematically, beginning with an ecological assessment of forest conditions and a summary of scientific consensus on forest health. Next, we passed those ecological views through an economic filter, estimating the costs of recommended treatments and weighing those costs against existing sources of revenue.
We took our ideas to a series of community meetings across the Front Range and listened as homeowners, foresters, and the curious public voiced their concerns. We consulted experts at every step along the way, held a regional scientists’ workshop, and conducted scores of interviews across the area. At the core of our approach was a stubborn insistence that fire is everyone’s business and that working together is the key to saving homes, lives, and even the forests themselves.
In April, 2006, with television cameras and media photographers looking on, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens publicly endorsed the Roundtable’s report Living with Fire: Protecting Communities, Restoring Forests (PDF). The product of a two-year collaborative effort, the Front Range Roundtable’s report defines a collective vision and roadmap for long-term, comprehensive fire and forest management over the entire 200-mile Front Range.
Recommendations
The ecology of Front Range forests suggests that to achieve large-scale gains in safeguarding communities and forests, dry, lower elevation landscapes need to be a top priority. The Roundtable’s report concludes that along the Front Range of Colorado, 1.5 million acres fit this profile and deserve a hard look for opportunities to protect communities and/or restore forest health. That’s an area nearly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Perhaps most importantly, more than half of this prioritized landscape is not in federal ownership. Solutions will have to target private landowners and cross-boundary partnerships.
At a projected annual cost of $15 million, it will take 40 years and $225 million to stay even with the problem, let alone get ahead of the curve. The Roundtable approached the funding shortfall from two sides: how to reduce treatment costs, and how to increase revenue.
Costs can be reduced if the use of fire — both wildland and prescribed — is expanded. Costs can be reduced by finding uses — such as heating for schools and other public facilities — for non-traditional woody materials. Costs can also be reduced by increasing the size of contracts, which brings down administrative overhead. The Roundtable also identified a number of ways to gin up new sources of money: identify new state and local funding sources to contribute to treatment costs on non-federal lands, develop incentives for landowners, and, of course, advocate for additional federal funding for Front Range fuels treatment work.
Local leadership is essential for the Roundtable’s substantive recommendations to be implemented. Limiting the growth of risk in the wildland-urban interface will require attention by local planning and zoning boards. Reducing the risk from wildfire to existing interface communities can be accomplished through the development of local Community Wildfire Protection Plans.
Finally, the path toward implementation of these recommendations is almost as important as the end point. Setting priorities that are acceptable by all factions within a community will help stretch existing funds. This process requires a collaborative approach, and the Roundtable is committed to following through over the long term.
A Collaborative Model?
In Colorado and West-wide, the Front Range Roundtable is one of precious few initiatives to bring together such diverse interests to collectively examine fire’s role across whole landscapes, not just neighborhood backyards. It is a model approach that can inform other efforts. But ultimately it requires that similar interests elsewhere decide for themselves that there is value in advancing consensus over belaboring contention.
This exercise in big-picture planning, in trust-building, isn’t going to save us from inevitable, high-intensity blazes like those occurring this summer. Nor is it going to herald the return of the number of fires burning in Lewis and Clark’s day. But it does mark a critical step in ensuring the right people are at the table, moving toward a future that’s sustainable for the forests and the communities that depend on them. |
