State of the Rockies 2007

Day 2: A Federal Land Manager Comes Home to Report on the Region’s Forests

By Daniel Berger
assistant editor
Headwaters News
April 12,2007

James Hubbard is quick to acknowledge how a warming climate has affected our national forests. That, along with too many trees in the forest and the growing wildland-urban interface, is one of the primary factors affecting the health of our national forests.

At the fourth annual Colorado College State of the Rockies Conference, this career forest manager gave his own report on the state of the West’s national forests. And it was a bit different than the report offered by the researchers (pdf) at Colorado College, as well the report we’re accustomed to hearing from his bosses in the Bush administration.

Hubbard comes by his knowledge and perspective honestly. He has had a long and varied career in management of public lands in the West, including a 20-year stint as Colorado State Forester followed by a position as the Director of the Office of Wildland Fire Coordination with the Department of the Interior. Today, he is the Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry with the U.S. Forest Service.

In his keynote, Hubbard outlined how these three issues — climate change, too many trees in the forests and the growing wildland-urban interface — are affecting national forest management, and he offered a few ideas about how we might work through these issues.

We need to solve them through innovative partnerships with local communities, he said, we need good leadership, and we need to prioritize projects.

“That last thing takes a lot of people working together to decide that that’s what they want to do,” he added. He also said that collaboration and partnerships are important because state and private lands are mixed in with federal lands, and that there is no single landowner or manager.

Hubbard also outlined why he thinks the Healthy Forests Initiative is good, though not perfect legislation, (read about another conference presenter’s critique of the legislation). He touched on the shared responsibility landowners in the wildland-urban interface should shoulder in managing for fire. And he noted that his agency is getting ready to implement reforms to increase efficiency in fighting wildfires this summer.

Before his keynote, Hubbard sat down with Headwaters News to answer a few questions. What follows is the conversation.

Headwaters News: The Healthy Forests Initiative has been around for five years. How has it been successful and what could change?

James Hubbard: Let me start with a little context. In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton was impressed by a major wildfire season, and so he called on the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior to produce a National Fire Plan within 60 days. Immediately the Western governors got involved with the two secretaries and talked about how we would implement that national plan to reduce fire risk and provide for adequate firefighting preparedness in the West.

Because of the wildland-urban interface, because of weather, because of fuels accumulations we continued to have tough fire seasons in the West.

When President Bush came in, he experienced the same type of season, and said,  “We’ve got to do more. How can we accelerate our progress that the National Forest Plan started in reducing the risk to communities?”

So the Healthy Forests Initiative concept was to do that. Yes, it did accelerate some existing environmental legislation. It tried to do that in, I believe, a judicious way, not across the board on a large scale, but in small projects wanted for protection close to communities.

The kind of volume and acres we’re talking about aren’t a major economic factor, so those communities wouldn’t choose categorical exclusions to support them based on what economy it would generate for the community. The initiative doesn’t go that far; it is a matter of trying to be expeditious where you think the threat is most critical, and to cut down the time it takes to get treatment on federal land.

We don’t use it a lot. Since the National Fire Plan, we’ve treated 24 million acres, and of that, only one million has been under the authorities of the Healthy Forest Initiative and Restoration Act.

HW: So you don’t think anything needs to be fixed?

JH: Well, the caution we hear today, that the public wants to have a voice in these decisions, is legitimate, and the Forest Service should always pay attention to that. And if the press says that we’re not sure that tool is the right thing for our communities, I would expect those Forest Service line officers to listen, because they’re using it mostly to protect that community. If the community says “no, we’d rather go a more deliberate way and use all of the process,” my guess is, that’s what’s going to happen.

HW: Fire is more than 40 percent of the agency’s budget. Why it is so high today and what kind of effect is that having on the rest of the budget?

JH: That’s driven by the cost of suppression — what we spend each year fighting fire. The agreement between the administration and Congress, when they’re concerned about balancing budgets, is to say the Forest Service’s total constrained budget for suppression is the 10-year average.

Well, what’s been happening between weather [climate change and drying forests] and wood [too much of it left in forests] and the growing wildland-urban interface is that those costs have been going up. The cost last year for suppression was $1.5 billion. Ten years ago, it was $300,000 million. So that 10-year average increases by $100 million -200 million per year, but the Forest Service budget does not. And the money is now coming out of other programs to help finance fire suppression.

HW: Is there any initiative to cut those costs, or is it a situation where, if you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it?

JH: It doesn’t function that way. The last four out of seven years, costs have been over a billion dollars and the Forest Service has never had a billion dollars in its budget for fire suppression. Even though we spent a billion and a half last year, for the ’08 president’s proposal, the ten-year average is up to over $900 million. And in this current year, ’07, it’s probably around $750 million.

We’re spending more than we have in the budget. Congress deals with that by providing an emergency supplemental to pay for the additional costs of fighting fire. If you need it, then you ask for it. If you don’t need it, then you don’t ask. FEMA, with hurricanes and other natural disasters, works the same way.

So, we’re right now in that cycle where Congress is providing the dollars to continue to fight fire, but it’s causing a budget formulation problem. As you build your budget with a total amount you can’t exceed, and that fire piece for suppression goes up, then other programs suffer, causing a disruption to the multi-program mission of the Forest Service. Range and recreation and forest management are having problems adjusting to that.

HW: What role does the Forest Service play now, want to play, or have any interest in playing in working with communities on managing the wildland-urban interface or new development in the interface to help mitigate wildfire conflicts?

JH: The federal land management agencies, knowing the complications that development in the wildland-urban interface cause, are stepping forward and offering their advice, their services, their information, to local decision makers. And that’s starting to occur more often, and local decision makers are becoming increasingly receptive to that kind of information. But it still is their decision process — local governments. States don’t interfere with that. Federal government doesn’t interfere with that, with few exceptions.

This is an issue that really affects federal land management, certainly affects the complexity of fighting fire, and the cost of fighting fire.  So, how can the federal government, in a proactive way without interfering with that decision process, be helpful? A lot of effort is going into making sure that local land management agencies have access to our geospatial products that can help with assessment and risk, and models that show what you can expect to happen with fire and landscape, which Forest Service research develops and which are getting more sophisticated. The federal government really wants to help apply those to the local decision process, but on a willing basis.

HW: Let’s finish talking about water. What if anything is the agency doing to get involved in the contentious issue of providing or managing for water, especially in our arid region.

JH: That would be a good question for one of the other panelists, Merrill Kaufman [retired research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station], and mostly because the Rocky Mountain Station, and particularly the Fraser Experimental Forest in Colorado, has a long history of water research and different types of treatments on the forest in terms of capture and release of snowpack to increase and extend the water season and the yield.

More recently, we’ve been conducting a lot of work on water quality, and how management of the forest affects water quality — both good and bad — so you can learn what practices not only increase the quantity capture of water but the quality release of water. There is good information available for how to treat the land with water as an objective.

The Forest Service knows that because of its land holdings, especially higher elevation land holdings in the West that capture that snowpack, it’s pretty important how those forests are managed.

Water as an ecosystem service is really important for this agency to pay attention to. I think you already see that showing up in forest plans and in land management activities and treatments— that water is one of the primary goals of those treatments.

You may be setting an objective within a landscape to reduce fire risk to a community but you’re not going to set that objective and develop that treatment method without considering other values, wildlife and water being principal.