Burninq Issues.

In the wake of a disastrous fire season, AMERICAN FORESTS pushes for more trees and a community-based approach to healthy ecosystems.

When the top news stories of 2000 are compiled, it's a safe bet wildfire will be among them. This summer's devastating wildfires burned almost 7 million acres from California to New Jersey, with the heaviest damage in Idaho and Montana. At our 125th anniversary celebration in September we announced a new facet of our Global ReLeaf tree-planting campaign: Wildfire ReLeaf. Tbe program will provide grants to replant areas burned in the 2000 fires (see The Day After, page 7).

With the announcement came a generous check from our premier tree-planting partner, retailer Eddie Bauer. The $500,000 check was a down payment on Eddie Bauer's pledge of $1 million from its Add-a-dollar, Plant-a-tree promotion.

Restoration is a long process, and we're beginning our tree-planting commitments on seven sites, including Los Alamos, New Mexico, scene of the infamous fire that resulted from a poorly executed prescribed burn. Wildfire ReLeaf fills an important need because the government's wildland fire emergency funds will go for fuels reduction and suppression work and to pay costs incurred in the 2000 fire season. Rehabilitation of sites to stabilize soils and prevent erosion will be included to prepare them for tree planting.

Prescribed burns have gotten a bad rap as a way to manage woodlands. In fact, we now know that fire is a necessary element in forest ecology. Without it some tree species--longleaf pine, for one -- could not germinate, grow, or reproduce. Fire replenishes nutrients in soil and recycles carbon, benefiting forests and wildlife. Historically fires have burned regularly, keeping flammable fuels reduced, favoring large fire-resistant species, and limiting less fire-resistant ones.

Long before Smokey Bear, AMERICAN FORESTS developed educational outreach materials to change public attitudes about burning the woods. Our Dixie Crusaders traveled the Southeast with fire prevention movies, electrical generators, and public address systems that reached 3 million people from 1927 to 1933. As recently as the 1990s AMERICAN FORESTS led the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters and explored the increased risk of fire as a result of global climate change.

If anything good comes out of this disastrous fire season, perhaps it is the national focus on the threat wildfires pose to western communities and forest ecosystems, the need to restore affected areas, and concerns about future risk.

AMERICAN FORESTS believes federal poilcymakers must address concerns about the wildfires' effects and the threat future wildfires pose to communities and ecological values. This response must integrate wildfire issues with broader goals to restore and maintain healthy ecosystems and communities through a community-based approach that promotes public and private collaboration.

The priorities should be to: rebuild communities and rehabilitate ecosystems, build federal and local firefighting capacity, reduce fuel loads through adaptive management, develop research and public information programs through which scientists and citizens can learn wildfire's role in forests, and promote a restoration-based economy that includes locally based "ecosystem workforces." By providing training and job opportunities for local workers, the federal government can empower local nonprofit groups and businesses to perform the array of needed activities, provide jobs, and help create sustainable local enterprises.

Simultaneous with that, we intend that our Wildfire ReLeaf trees will help restore the integrity and viability of the forests hit by fire this year, and help us better appreciate the blessings of what was once termed "the curse of the forest."