Don't blame Clinton for the wildfires
By Bozeman Daily Chronicle Editorial Board

Politics is the crassest sport, especially when politicians try to spin a disaster to their political advantage.

In the latest example of the tactic, some high profile Republicans are blaming the Democrats of the Clinton administration for the forest fires raging around Montana and the rest of the West.

The Republicans stepping forward to spin the conflagration toward their political opponents include the party's candidate for president, George W. Bush, as well as here in Montana, Dennis Rehberg, candidate for the state's seat in the House of Representatives, and Gov. Marc Racicot, who angles for a position in the would-be Bush administration.

The Republican spin is that the Clintonites and associated environmentalists have reduced logging in the federal forests too much, allowing a dangerous buildup of standing wood ready to burn.

The Clintonites and enviros also get blamed for protecting virgin roadless forests too much and being too reluctant to use logging as a management tool.

Racicot has gone so far as to air his conflagration spin on national TV, including on CNN and ABC's "Good Morning America." Racicot says he warned repeatedly, beginning last year, that the federal forests in Montana need thinning to reduce the fire danger.

Like most blame games, this one breaks down when subjected to the facts:

• The fires consuming trees, brush and grass this summer are not only burning in never-roaded and never-logged wilderness. They're also burning in many forests that have been historically roaded and logged - as is shown by the toll of more than 50 buildings, including homes and cabins, destroyed so far by the flames. There are no buildings to burn in the environmentally correct wilderness.
  
  
• The fuels that are so ready to burn - small-diameter trees and brush - have built up for far longer than the Clinton administration has been in power, ever since the forests were put under federal management about 100 years ago. For that long, the policy of the federal managers has been to allow logging companies to remove the large-diameter trees - the trees with thicker, fire-resistant bark and limbs out of reach of ground flames - year after year converting the forest to the smaller stuff that is way more flammable.

Logging companies take the large trees because they can be milled into the most profitable lumber products. With such relatively easy pickings, the companies failed to devise enough ways to profit on the thickets of small-diameter trees that grew up as replacements, so the forests steadily converted to tinder boxes.

The loggers have also prodded the federal foresters for decades to suppress natural fires wherever they popped up, even though many forests evolved naturally with frequent fires cleaning out the inventory of small stuff. The loggers and federal foresters together saw fire as an enemy that should not be allowed at all.

Many decades of skewing the forests toward the most flammable condition cannot be undone in a year or a single President's tenure, as Racicot and the other Republican spinners demand. It will take many decades to correct many previous decades of mismanagement, acre by acre over millions of acres.

And there is no evidence that putting the logging companies more in charge will reduce problems. Generations of loggers have pretty much had their way with the public's forests until fairly recently, and if blame is being spun, they have earned a share.

It's especially crass for politicians to make a political gain on the loss of homes and firefighter casualties, evacuations, and the choking smoke that Montanans have to breathe these days.

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