Overgrazing fuels wildfires, environmentalists charge

Excessive cattle grazing, not fire suppression, is the main cause of wildfires that have ravaged Western forests in recent years, a coalition of environmental groups charged yesterday.

Federal officials said last month that decades of ill-conceived fire suppression efforts led to an unnatural buildup of vegetation capable of fueling huge fires.

But coalition members, in a letter to the U.S. Forest Service this week, maintain the real culprits are cattle, which they say destroy the grass cover and create ideal conditions for dense thickets of fire-vulnerable trees.

A spokeswoman for the Forest Service, which permits grazing on some national forest lands, said agency officials would have no response until they've studied the group's charges in detail.

A representative of the Arizona Cattlemen's Association called the coalition's claims ``paradoxical,'' and added, ``Next, they'll be saying we contributed to the war in Bosnia.''

Coalition members cited several scientific studies intended to support their assertion that grazing has turned forests into ``a catastrophe waiting to happen.''

``While the Forest Service conveniently blames fire suppression for poor forest conditions, the scientific evidence is clear: Overgrazing is the number one cause of poor forest health and increased fire potential in the Southwest,'' said Dennis Morgan, research associate for the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity in Silver City, N.M.

The group, which often criticizes federal livestock grazing policies, is one of 15 organizations in the coalition. Others include the Sierra Club, the Southwest Forest Alliance and the Forest Guardians.

``The biggest problem is that grazing breaks up the grass cover,'' Morgan said. ``This exposes the mineral soils and allows large numbers of pine seedlings to get established.

``Before heavy grazing started in the late 1880s, grass would carry fire along the ground,'' he said. ``But now, when the grass disappears, you get a high number of trees in a small area. When a fire gets into a thicket like that, it's very likely the whole thing will go up.''

Bas Aja, spokesman for the Arizona Cattlemen's Association, denied cattle are a major cause of wildfires.

``It's a paradoxical statement they're making,'' Aja said of the coalition's claims. ``In other documents, they say we're destroying the land by letting cattle eat young trees. Now they're saying we're contributing to the proliferation of trees.

``Livestock forage on grasses, and grasses are a natural fuel for fires,'' he said. ``The livestock are eliminating a portion of the fuel that would carry fire. They are eliminating some of that fire risk.''

StarNet: Find out more about wildfires by consulting "http://life.anu.edu.au:80/landscape_ecology/firenet/firenet.html" Firenet, an international network for fire information based at the Australian National University.