This proposal will inquire into the reasons for the recent increase in catastrophic wildfires on public lands in the American west. Due to a significant increase in forest density and fuel accumulation in many western ecosystems, fuel reduction has become the guiding principle for fire management within public land agencies. However, efforts to implement fuel reduction continue to encounter a multitude of obstacles. This is an especially puzzling policy problem for two reasons: 1) the importance of fuel reduction has been understood by agency officials for several decades now, and 2) few, if any, policy actors with a stake in forest resources benefit from catastrophically destructive fires. Thus there exists knowledge and the incentive to cooperate, both, which one might expect, would drive the effort to reduce fuels in high risk areas.
By doing extensive archival research and by interviewing stakeholders and public officials at the national and state level, this project will examine the methods of decision-making used within the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and two state land agencies (in Arizona and Colorado). The research will develop measures of the relative costs of wildfire management, the time and number of procedural steps required to treat high risk areas, the impact of federal regulations and compliance requirements, the impact of lawsuits and legal complications, and the relationship of agencies with communities and interest groups. A comparative examination of decision-making within these agencies will help this project identify key factors which are disabling to a nation-wide effort to reduce the magnitude and costs of wildland fires.
