Now that we have a few months to catch our breaths concerning wildfire, I want to address a slightly more abstract issue than how high to prune trees. The issue is this: does environmentalism conflict with fire safety? If you love nature and want to protect it from degradation, does that put you at odds with those who work to keep our community fire safe?

My answer is no. In fact, I see both environmental and fire safety goals as being inextricably bound to each other for this reason-sustainable, healthy forests are also the most fire safe forests. So we both want the same thing. We both want forests that look like the forests prior to European settlement: more open, spacious, with fewer and larger trees. Forests packed with hundreds of small trees per acre, so dense as to be almost impassable, are not healthy, not sustainable, and not fire safe. The competition for water and nutrients will leave many of these trees weakened and susceptible to insect and disease epidemics, as our bark beetles have demonstrated. Looking at the mountains and seeing huge swaths of brown, dead trees, is to look on an environmental disaster. It is also to look on a fire safety disaster, since those great swaths of dead trees are a conflagration waiting to happen.

Our surrounding forest was such a disaster until very recently. Thanks to the excellent work of NRCS, the Forest Service, Calfire, and their contractors, we can look around and see green, rather than brown slopes.

Overcrowded conditions are everyone's enemy, so to prevent this disaster from returning, the forest must be thinned and kept thinned. In pre-settlement times this was done by frequent, low-intensity fires, started both by lightening and by Native Americans. These fires essentially cleaned up the forest floor, took out most of the seedlings and small trees, and allowed native species like ponderosa to grow in open, sunny clearings with little competition for water and nutrients.

But at this point the forests are too thick to just let fire do the thinning, since most of the fires now will burn with intensities that will kill everything in their path, leaving moonscapes with damaged soil.

Thinning the forest at this point means having people use chain saws and other mechanized tools to take out the thick understory that poses the threat. (Most dangerous are the thick clusters of either chaparral or small cedars.) Re-introducing low-intensity fire through prescribed burns is also an important goal, though of course it has to be done with great care, in exactly the right conditions. Both of these methods, used by federal and state agencies, are necessary, and major environmental organizations support them. The precise details used will probably engender a little more debate, but groups like the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and The Nature Conservancy support thinning and burning. Rich Fairbanks, a fire expert of the Wilderness Society whose area includes Idyllwild, is a strong advocate for both methods, and The Nature Conservancy is a world leader in re-introducing fire into ecosystems where it was part of the natural regime.

So I think there is enormous common ground between environmental groups and organizations concerned with wildfire. We all want healthy forests, and we basically agree on what healthy forests look like.