Months into his Forest Service career, Danny Lee stood amid a vast, charred forest in Idaho where a wildfire had consumed a quarter of a million acres, its temperatures hot to enough melt glass bottles.
“I thought I was joining the Forest Service to swim around in the creeks and look at fish,” said Lee, who came to the agency as an aquatic biologist. “Given that fire is such a dominant disturbance agent on our landscape, if you want to understand what’s happening to the trees and the forest and the fish and wildlife that inhabit it, you have to understand fire.”
That blaze, known as the Foothills Fire, occurred in 1992, at a time when the agency’s budget largely was dedicated to managing critical resources like watersheds and vegetation, as well as maintenance on facilities, roads and trails on Forest Service lands.
Now though, more than half of the Forest Service’s $6.5 billion budget is given over to wildland fire management. Two decades ago, less than 20 percent of funding was directed to firefighting activities.
Many of those resources are directed out West, where a recent spate of so-called megafires has sopped up funds, and in doing so, has shifted the agency’s priorities from forest management to firefighting. And because the budget has not kept pace with expanding fire needs, funding has been diverted across the system, including in North Carolina, where national forests have lost personnel, maintenance and amenities.
From the Asheville Citizen-Times: https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2015/03/07/west-burns-local-forests-get-scorched-resources/24558327/