Essay On The Wildfire Season

Introduction:

As the 2014 “Wildfire Season” kicks off across the American West, it is crucial that the Administration examines the glaring failures of current federal wildfire policy. Drier and hotter summers are contributing to longer and more intense wildfire seasons, while in the meantime, the dangers and costs of fighting those fires have increased substantially. The budget and appropriations that are in place for the two main agencies that practice forest management, the United States Forest Service (USFS) and the Department of the Interior (DOI), are less than sufficient, and these agencies are being forced to rely on “fire borrowing” to fund excess fire suppression activities. This “borrowing” undermines other important functions, and starts a damaging cycle in which funds are diverted from elsewhere within agency budgets to fund suppression. Within the past two years alone, the DOI and USFS have “borrowed” almost $1.1 billion from forest management programs meant to reduce fire danger.

The DOI and USFS cannot continue to suppress these new super-sized wildfires with their meager budgets. Congress needs to grant these agencies access to the same emergency funds used for other natural disasters such as tornados and floods. We need to reform federal wildfire policy by treating mega-wildfires as the natural disasters that they are by targeting emergency funding for fire prevention.

Recommendation:

The USDA and DOI are stuck in a negative feedback cycle, where their lack of ability to fund and improve forest health means forests are prone to larger wildfires, which then means they are forced to divert more money away from forest health programs. The proposal of new funding approaches for wildfire policy enjoys wide biparti...

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...mes. The Rim Fire, near iconic Yosemite National Park, left Sierra Nevadan skies hazy with smoke for weeks and burnt an area one-third the size of Rhode Island.

In addition to wildfires skyrocketing in number, American firefighters are also now burdened with the responsibility of protecting 47 million inhabited homes in high fire risk areas because the construction of homes within the “wildland urban interface” continues to expand . Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, inaction towards better wildfire policy and budget allocation will leave Congress fiddling while the DOI and USFS are helpless to save millions of acres of both forest and homes from ashes. Reforming federal wildlife policy with a disaster relief cap will be a step in the right direction towards protecting forest health, communities and public safety in a future of escalating natural disasters.