Measure 37 exacerbates fire hazards.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By George Wuerthner For The Register-Guard

A few days ago, five former chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service sent a joint letter to Congress warning about `an untenable financial situation" created by the way that fire-suppression funding is handled in the federal budget.

Increasingly, the agency is being asked to pay for fire suppression at the expense of other priorities and needs. Last year, firefighting consumed 45 percent of the agency's budget, leaving less to spend on campground maintenance, trail work, wildlife and fish habitat restoration and more.

There are, of course, several reasons for this situation.

The first is drought. It's axiom of fire ecology that you get big fires with extreme drought. There is little one can do to control drought. Under drought conditions, fires blaze through all kinds of woodlands - and proposed solutions to reduce fire hazard, such as thinning forests, ultimately have little effect upon fire spread under severe drought conditions.

Under severe drought, especially if coupled with winds, throw normal fire behavior out the window. There is evidence that thinning actually can increase fire mortality because it opens up forests to greater wind and drying, exacerbating the effects of drought.

Not surprisingly, we are experiencing some of the largest fires in recent memory, in part because we are experiencing some of the most severe drought conditions in history. This past year, for instance, Southern California has gotten the least amount of precipitation ever recorded. Fires already are being whipped across that landscape, and it's not even the late summer, when Santa Ana winds historically blast out of the desert to propel blazes across the landscape.

In the Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico are seeing the worst drought in 500 years. Not since the Anazasi Indians abandoned their pueblos in the canyon country and moved to more permanent water sources along the Rio Grande has the Southwest experienced such dry conditions.

But the West always has experienced periodic drought, and large fires are not just a recent phenomenon. During the 1930s Dust Bowl era, more than 39 million acres burned on average annually across the United States; in 1910, one large conflagration blazed across 3.5 million acres of Idaho and Montana in a single month.

Drought, however, does not fully explain rising firefighting costs. What is different today is the preponderance of homes that are being built outside of established towns and cities throughout the West. Everyone, it seems, wants to have a house in the woods. But then they also expect the government to protect that house from fires.

In recent years, the majority of the firefighting effort has focused on `structure protection.' In other words, firefighters are no longer fighting the fires themselves, but spending the majority of time and effort defending the randomly located homes created by rural sprawl. Not only is structure protection costly, but it also endangers firefighters. Many recent firefighter deaths are a consequence of trying to save some isolated house or cabin in the woods.

One of the best ways to avoid this cost and risk is to make it illegal to build homes in the hinterlands. Although Oregon's historic statewide planning and land uses were not established to reduce firefighting costs or save lives, one unintended consequence of urban growth boundaries is that it reduced rural sprawl.

Now, this historic law is threatened by Measure 37 claims, which would permit an unprecedented construction boom in many areas. That would surely exacerbate firefighting costs.

No one should be permitted to construct homes in the `fire plain' any more than we permit home construction in a flood plain. The flood plain is as much as a part of a river as its normal flow channel. A similar situation exists for fires.

There are many ecosystems in which the likelihood of a fire in a 100-year period is extremely high. Building homes in such `100-year fire plains' is as foolish as building a house in a 100-year river floodway.

Certainly, one important reason for Oregon voters to maintain the state's historic land use laws is that they not only protect against sprawl and its associated costs, but they also prevent a lot of unwise home construction in fire plains.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist, writer and photographer with 34 published books. His most recent is "Wildfire - A Century of Failed Forest Policy." The Native Forest Council will host Wuerthner's slide show `Wildfire' at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Room 180 of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, 1415 Kincaid St. Call 688-2600 or e-mail info@ forestcouncil.org for more information.