America's most-cherished legacy tree, the giant Sequoia, is known as a "fire-dependent" species because it requires the heat effects of fire in order to prepare the soil and release the seeds of the next generation of sequoias. A wide variety of other plants have developed various adaptations to fire, such as thick bark, deep roots, fast-growing shoots, or sun-loving seeds that give them the ability to resist, evade, and endure mortality from most fires. Although specific fire events may cause the death or damage of individual specimens of these fire-dependent plants, collectively the population, community, or species as a whole depends on fire processes for the plants' long-term vitality and sustainability.

Over 30 years ago the fire ecologist, Dr. Robert Mutch, hypothesized that through an evolutionary process of natural selection, some fire-dependent communities had developed certain biological characteristics that actually increased their flammability, as if to intentionally encourage fires. These plants generate sufficient fuel to affect the frequency, intensity, or seasonality of burning in ways that tend to increase the biological benefits they derive from fires. These plants, which I refer to as "incendiary opportunists," expand their numbers and range across the landscape, or maintain their position of dominance within stands, thanks to habitat-enhancing and life-sustaining fire processes.

Examining the outcome of a century of well-meaning but misguided forest and fire management policies of the U.S. Forest Service, the case could be argued that the agency has evolved into a "fire-dependent" bureaucracy. Indeed, the public's forests have become ever more flammable from past logging and firefighting, and yet each wildfire disaster seems to gain the Forest Service increased power, resources, and opportunities to continue logging and firefighting. In the face of growing public scrutiny and criticism of the agency's logging policies and practices, the Forest Service and their enablers in Congress have learned to mask timber sales as so-called "fuels reduction" and "forest restoration" projects. Yet, the net effect of these logging projects is to actually increase fire risks and fuel hazards. Although individual employees may sincerely believe they are doing their utmost to prevent large-scale, severe wildfires, collectively the agency is manipulating vegetation just like an incendiary opportunist, increasing the forest's flammability, thereby maintaining the dominance and expanding the range of its logging and firefighting programs.

Decades of encouraging private logging companies to take the biggest, oldest, most fire-resistant trees from public lands, while leaving behind a volatile fuel load of small trees, brush, weeds, stumps and slash has vastly increased the flammability of forestlands. When clearcut timber plantations burn, their young trees are usually incinerated with no survivors, no biological legacy from large snags or logs, no seed sources to naturally regenerate the tree stand. Unlike native mature and old-growth stands which usually contain all the above elements necessary for natural post-fire recovery, plantations burn catastrophically, leaving the infamous "moonscape" in their wake. Millions of acres of flammable timber plantations are linked by hundreds of thousands of miles of logging roads which, although billed as sites for firefighters to stop fires, they are more commonly places for people to start fires through careless, criminal, or even official acts. Wildfires starting or spreading through logged landscapes often encounter hazardous fuel loads that cause "blow ups" of erratic, extreme, uncontrollable fire behavior. In essence, tree farms function like fire bombs, and logging roads are their fuses.

Much of the so-called forest health debate has focused attention on all the "overstocked" stands of "dead and dying" trees. These excess trees are presented as the unforeseen products and unintended consequences of so-called "past" fire suppression policies. It must not be forgotten, though, that throughout most of its history, the agency fully intended and attempted to grow as many trees per acre as possible. In fact, here in the Northwest the agency and timber industry used to brag that they "planted six new trees for every one cut." The agency engaged in systematic fire suppression with the hope that they could successfully exclude fires from the landscape and thereby protect their vulnerable densely-stocked even-aged timber plantations until it was time to harvest the crop. The Forest Service was thus historically fighting fires with the clear intent to stock up and save from wildfire as many trees as possible for the sawmills.

Nowadays, however, wildfires provide the Forest Service with new and greater opportunities for commercially logging the remnants of native forests. One means is through post-fire salvage logging. The agency routinely offers up fire-scorched trees for "salvage" timber sales, often claiming the need for streamlined environmental analyses, or special exemptions from official standards and guidelines, or abandonment of conservation strategies in order to get the salvage timber cut out as quickly as possible before the trees decay and the timber is "wasted." In some cases, salvage timber sales have been proposed in areas that for environmental reasons were supposed to be prohibited from any commercial logging.

One especially notorious case, the 1991 Warner Creek fire on the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, was started by arsonists in a northern spotted owl habitat reserve, but simply because the reserve had burned, it suddenly became one of the Northwest's largest timber sales of its time. Similarly, last year’s arson-caused Hayman and Rodeo-Chedeski fires have blazed trails for commercial logging on an immense scale that would not otherwise have been considered possible without the occurrence of the fires. Evidence is now coming to light that the Forest Service is routinely igniting huge backfires and burnouts during severe fire weather conditions which adds significant amounts of acreage burned with high severity. Ethical questions emerge when the agency subsequently plans salvage timber sale units in the same areas that it deliberately backburns. As well, offering salvage timber sales in otherwise protected forest areas that were torched by criminal arsonists could be construed as opportunistically exploiting incendiarism.

In addition to post-fire salvage logging, the Forest Service and timber industry advocates in Congress have been pushing pre-fire timber sales, often falsely billed as hazardous fuels reduction or "thinning" projects, to lower the risk or hazard of future wildfires. In too many cases, these so-called thinning projects are logging thick-diameter fire-resistant overstory trees instead of or in addition to cutting thin-sized fire-susceptible understory trees. The resulting logging slash and the increased solar and wind exposure can paradoxically increase the fuel hazards and fire risks. The Forest Service claims to have shifted its management focus from timber production to tinder reduction, yet the results of the agency’s policies on the ground sadly indicates that the words have changed but the saws remain the same.

A form of pre-fire logging that is gaining popularity among politicians is called "shaded fuelbreaks." For example, Congress passed a rider mandating up to 1,500 linear miles of shaded fuelbreaks to be cut in the national forests of the northern Sierra Nevada. Shaded fuelbreaks are intended to be places where enough trees and other vegetation have been removed such that, it is alleged, these sites will enable firefighters to safely and efficiently contain and control raging wildfires. With the specter of "catastrophic wildfire" trumping all other forest values or resources, fuelbreak timber sales are now being charted through some of the most precious stands left, including old-growth and endangered species habitats. With the advent of pre-suppression fuelbreak logging projects, the agency's fire-dependent timber sale program has now come full circle: whereas the agency formerly fought fires in order to log, nowadays it is logging in order to fight fires.

The agency and timber industry’s fervent hope is that after 50 years of Smokey Bear-style social conditioning, the public fears big fires more than they hate big stumps. What the American people have yet to realize is that they’re going to get both: commercial logging and its aftermath will spark future big fires, and big fires will fuel pre-fire and post-fire timber sales. Yet, for each wildfire disaster that exposes the social and ecological folly of its logging and firefighting policies and practices, Congress is sure to reward the agency with even more tax dollars and less environmental regulations in order to "solve" the wildfire crisis. In this way, the Forest Service has arguably evolved into a fire-dependent agency, creating the conditions that encourage large-scale severe fires, and reaping numerous institutional, fiscal, and political benefits from burns.