Talking fire

THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Arizona is burning - again.

This bone-dry spring has brought near-weekly blazes on federal land while closing large swaths of federal forest for Memorial Day.

At the same time, the sparks are igniting big fights over who is to blame and what should be done.

It is appropriate that Arizona's two Republican senators, Jon Kyl and John McCain, have called for Senate field hearings in Arizona on forest issues.

The sessions may well aid reform of a forest management regime badly in need of improvement - providing the exercise unfolds as a serious inquiry into a crisis 70 years in the making.

What is hopeful is that McCain and Kyl's hearings have a chance to communicate to Congress an emerging consensus about the forest problem.

One after another, the foresters and researchers who best know the West's timber blame today's conditions on 70 years of over-zealous fire suppression by the U.S. Forest Service. They mostly agree this suppression - combined with improper grazing and a failure to pursue preventative ``prescribed'' burning - has impeded nature's fiery rhythms and turned the forests into thickety explosion-zones.

The experts widely agree, too, on what forest managers need to do now. They should thin the forests, using prescribed burns when possible. They need to reduce the grazing that has brought a more flammable undergrowth with its hotter, more destructive fires. Sometimes they will want to prune the forests with selective logging of small-diameter trees.

Which suggests Kyl and McCain's planned hearings have a chance to perform a key service. At a moment of consternation with fires, the sessions have the potential to disseminate a clear critique of past management practices. They may push the country to begin the potentially controversial thinning and prescribed burning needed to improve its forests.

A worry lingers, though - one that will only be allayed by the quality of the coming discussions. This concern stems both from past anti-environmental votes of the sponsors and recent pronouncements that suggest a degree of ideological front-loading.

It erodes trust, for instance, that both Kyl and McCain voted for the disastrous ``logging without laws'' rider to an appropriations bill last year. Nor does it help when Kyl - in a recent newspaper column - names environmental lawsuits as a major component of the fuel-accumulation mess. In reality, such lawsuits - which date only to the 1970s - have played only a tiny and recent role in this malaise.

All the same, such concerns should not preclude environmentalists from participating in the hearings. Both Kyl and McCain are talking responsibly this spring. Environmentalists, too, need to realize that doing nothing is not an option now. Without major reform, many more fires will burn everything - the too-crowded trees, entire forests, even the habitats of the endangered owls and squirrels within them.

Here, then, is hoping the senators' hearings will constructively lay out a road to healthier - and less explosive - forests.

"http://www.rain.org/~cse/index.html" The Center for the Study of the Environment makes available on its home page a relevant article on "http://www.rain.org/~cse/FIRE.HTML" fire ecology treating California's coastal chaparral.