A Conversation with Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth

'You've got me wrong': A Conversation with Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth 8.7.06


excerpts from an interview by High Country News on August 7, 2006 by Paul Larmer and Greg Hanscom. Here is what USFS Chief Bosworth has to say about forest health and fire. He is advocating thinning and prescribed burning in spring and fall. You may find the full article at American Lands.


HCN: Yet the issues facing the agency have changed, haven’t they?


Bosworth: Yes. The 1990s were a decade of transition from the Timber Era to the Restoration and Recreation Era. I believe that restoring fire-dependent ecosystems and accommodating increasing numbers of recreationists will be the defining challenges for a couple of decades to come.


HCN: Has fire replace
d timber as the agency’s raison d’etre?


Bosworth: Firefighting has always been a big part of the Forest Service, ever since the Big Blowup in Montana in 1910 (HCN, 4/23/01). But our view of fire has changed. Now we view it as an important tool in restoring our forests. A lot of our forests are too dense because we have suppressed fires for so long. So we have to do some thinning, and we have to reintroduce prescribed fire wherever we can.


HCN: Yet the agency still spends incredible amounts of money in putting out fires — at the picnic, you said that fighting fire now takes up more than 40 percent of the agency’s budget, up from 20 percent a decade ago. And I noticed that Smokey Bear is still on all of the baseball caps. Why isn’t the agency being more aggressive?


Bosworth: We need to do more, and we are moving in that direction. But to allow fires to burn in August, when they can get out of hand and burn intensely hot, would yield results we don’t want and people living near the fires don’t want. We need to use the spring and fall times to burn. And sometimes we need to do restoration work through mechanical thinning first.