profits in determining strategies and tactics for managing wilderness fires.

Post-fire “salvage” logging and industrial tree planting are big concerns for FUSEE members because this practice has significant ecological consequences, and can adversely affect present and future fire management activities. As a recent study published in the prestigious journal, Science, recently demonstrated, commercial “salvage” logging tends to set back post-fire forest recovery by killing naturally-regenerated conifer seedlings and covering the ground with highly-flammable logging slash. When logged units are then densely planted with artificial “reprod” to become timber plantations, these slash and sapling stands become explosive tinderboxes that can pose extreme hazards to firefighters.

Millions of tax dollars are spent to subsidize commercial “salvage” logging and tree planting, and federal land managers then seek to protect these investments in timber production by making logged/planted areas become fire exclusion zones—even if they are located within fire-dependent ecosystems. Thus, post-fire logging and timber plantations cause land managers to eliminate future potential fire use opportunities and instead mandate total fire suppression in areas where firefighting may be extremely hazardous, very costly, or highly damaging to the ecosystem.

As in nature where every element of the living landscape is interconnected, federal fire, timber, and rangeland policies are also connected. While FUSEE seeks to focus specifically on fire management issues, this also requires us to examine a broad range of issues, such as timber and livestock economics, not to mention wider political and cultural factors, that heavily influence fire management. FUSEE will continue to provide constructive criticism of forestry practices such as post-fire “salvage” logging, and fire policies like fire exclusion in wilderness and roadless areas, that thwart the needed progress toward restoring fire processes in wildland ecosystems.

Despite these positive developments in fire reintroduction, aggressive suppression continues to be the major response that the multiple-use agencies take on wildland fires. Suppression intended to protect natural resources can at the same time be very harmful to ecosystems, with soil damage caused by heavy equipment use, water pollution caused by retardant chemicals dumped into lakes and streams, and firelines built in ways that cause long-term damage to watersheds, fish and wildlife habitat. Fire suppression is also the most expensive management action on a per-acre basis, now routinely costing over one billion tax dollars per year. It is also far more difficult and dangerous for firefighters to put out wildfires burning under severe weather conditions than to put in prescribed fires burning under ideal pre-planned conditions.

Many times, fire suppression activities are not driven by landscape conditions or fire behavior concerns, but rather, by economic considerations such as protecting high timber values or nearby private timber lands. Thus, agencies often feel compelled to spend millions of tax dollars on firefighting wilderness fires, putting firefighter lives at risk and causing suppression damage to public lands for the sake of private economic interests. For example, in 2005 firefighters were sent to the rugged Rogue River Wilderness Area in southern Oregon to aggressively suppress the Blossom Fire, primarily because the wildfire threatened to spread onto adjacent private timber lands. Also in southern Oregon, firefighters were ordered to ignite backburns in protected old-growth reserves, which increased the size and severity of the burn and later resulted in extensive proposed salvage logging inside the forest reserves.

These kind of incidents raise legitimate ethical concerns among firefighters who care that safety and ecological benefits take precedence over private