Doc Smith Interview
| Hear interview excerpts: | Biographical data |
Today is August 3, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I am happy to be here in the Cline Library with H. B. "Doc" Smith who has had an impressive career in fire management, and currently serves as program liaison of the NAU Ecological Restoration Institute.
Kern: Thank you for coming in.
Smith: It was my pleasure to be here, really.
Kern: Thank you. Could you start off just by giving us a little bit of your background, where you grew up?
Smith: I was born in Mississippi, and I grew up in southern New Mexico, and then west Texas. Graduated from high school in El Paso, Texas. Went in the Navy soon after high school, and served during the Korean War, the tag end of the Korean War.
Then, after my service in the military, I went to Colorado. I worked in the mines in Colorado for a year, and then went to school at Colorado State University to get a bachelor of science degree in forestry, which I got in 1961. During my time in school, why, I worked first on the Coeur d'Alene National Forest in northern Idaho in 1958. And then in 1959, I got a job as a smoke jumper out of Missoula, where I made twelve jumps. I think six of those were fire jumps onto forest fires, that we put out. Usually two or four of us jumped on a fire to put out a fire as smoke jumpers.
And then I had some other jobs with the Forest Service and BLM [Bureau of Land Management] while I was in college. After graduation, I started on the San Juan National Forest at Dolores, Colorado. I worked there as a timber forester and also as a firefighter.
In the early days when I was working, all of us were firefighters. That was just part of your job, you had a job, you had a real job, and then you had a firefighting job. And so I began both careers at Dolores, and began working up in the fire career side as a sector boss and division boss and at that time line boss, and those kinds of things; and also in my other career, moving from Dolores, Colorado, to Minturn, Colorado, near Vail, Colorado, on the White River Forest. And then to the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. I was district ranger in Lander, Wyoming, for seven years and worked, again, in fire: district ranger for almost all my duties, but then when a fire was going on somewhere, I would go and work on that fire.
And during that time, from '68 to '75, I worked my way up through the fire ranks to become a fire boss. In fact, I brought a fire team down here to Arizona, I think in '72, to fight several fires down along the border with Mexico.
Then [I] went on to become a district ranger in Utah on the Wasatch National Forest; and then later on the Toiyabe National Forest in the Sierras. That ranger district was in both California and Nevada. I lived in Carson City, Nevada, and was there six years, and again stayed in fire and became a Class I fire boss, and worked on national teams all over the West.
Then my career job took me to Arizona to the Kaibab National Forest, where I became the fire staff officer in charge of the fire program on the Kaibab, and continued with my firefighting "career," if you will, and became an area commander. And I have served as an area commander on six major incidents in the West, including Alaska and Northern California. Northern California was pretty interesting. I had some 8,700 people working for me on those fires, including, I think, six or eight Type I teams, and two or three Type II teams.
Later, I was area commander on the Boise for the Foothills Fire. It was 257,000 acres of timbered country that burned up in that fire. We had a new start that went to 10,000 acres, and it felt like just a little bitty fire, because we had this other enormous fire.
I retired from the Forest Service then in 1994 in the spring, and the Forest Service called me in the summer and asked if I could come back and be area commander one more time on the Boise National Forest. So I came out of retirement, went to work for the Arizona State Land Department as a temporary, and went up there to take command of that very large situation up there in 1994.
Then when I came back to Arizona, I was enrolled in school to get a master's degree here at NAU in forestry, and I completed that a couple of years ago. During my time as a student here working on a master's, I became part of what is now the Ecological Restoration Institute, but I was working with Dr. Wally Covington and Dr. Pete Fule` and others to get this Institute established and credible with the agencies and the like. So that's what I have been engaged in to now.
Since about four years ago, I've been working full-time for the Institute.
Kern: For those who aren't very familiar with either the firefighting side of your career, or working on districts, how 'bout we start with fire? Could you talk about maybe some of the responsibilities of some of the positions you've held? For fire boss, what did that job entail?
Smith: Yeah. Of course most people start out as a firefighter, learning to fight fire. [I] did that in northern Idaho in 1958. I learned how to put out fire, dig a fire line, mop up fire, all those kinds of things. Continued through that as a smoke jumper. And then I was a sector boss. And so a sector boss was responsible for a portion of the fire line that encircled the fire. So as we would be trying to encircle the fire, the fire team would establish these sectors, and then there would be two or three sectors, sometimes four or five, that made up a division. And a division boss oversaw those three or four or five sector bosses.
And so I had become a sector boss even while I was still a college student, on a large fire in the Black Hills. So by the time I started my career in the Forest Service as a permanent person, I had become a division boss, or one of those people that oversees this larger segment of the fire line that we're constructing to try and keep the fire within that.
And then later I became what was at that time called a line boss. So I was in charge of all of the crews and all of the divisions, and all of the sector bosses and bulldozers and everything, trying to put the fire line and encircle the fire. That position was called the line boss at that time, although today it's referred to as the operations chief. So I did that job for a number of times and became a fire boss on a fire on the Shoshone National Forest that was on my own ranger district, and later that summer went up to take command of a fire as the fire boss on another ranger district on the Shoshone Forest. A year or two later I brought this fire team down to Arizona, to the border, as, again, the fire boss.
In about 1983 or so, the national agencies made a shift from what was called Large Fire Organization, or LFO, from terminology used in that—like fire boss, line boss, division boss—those things, to a different terminology that was called ICS or incident command system. And that changed those—not so much the job, as the terms for those people—so that it was more consistent with the states and rural fire departments and the like. So we had, instead of a fire boss, we established the incident commander; instead of the line boss, we established the position of operations chief. A part of the large fire organization is not just the putting out the fire, but it's also the planning for it. So there's a planning section chief. There's a logistics chief who's in charge of getting all the equipment there, the hoses and the shovels and the meals and the toilets and everything else to fight a fire. And then there's a finance chief that is in charge of making sure that contractors are paid, and that firefighters are paid, and the records are kept of expenditures on the fire, and that aircraft are being properly paid for, and those kinds of things. So that is the structure, then, that we developed in the early eighties, called incident command system.
So I had already worked up through the fire organization to become a fire boss, so then I was qualified to become an incident commander. Part of my duties as a fire manager in the Forest Service was to also help teach others about fire. And I taught a course called fire generalship, which is a national course; it happens to be taught here in Arizona, down near Tucson at Marana. We have a little academy down there that we teach a number of national courses. And I taught fire generalship there.
Kern: What did that class entail?
Smith: That was teaching the fire generals' group—the incident commanders, the finance chiefs, the logistics chief, plans chief, operations chief—about large fire management and things to be aware of—bringing their skill level up from what's typically called Type II to Type I level. So they get more information, more experience from the "old-timers" if you will, such at the time that I was one of those old-timers. Then they have an opportunity for an exercise. So they spend about two days in a fire exercise, a tabletop fire, that you just say these things are happening on a map, and so "the fire is spotted over here, and it's growing in this direction, and this bridge got burned out," and those kinds of things. And so then the fire team has to deal with those kinds of situations—perhaps an airplane crash on the fire, so they have to deal with an incident within an incident, and things like that. As an instructor at that fire generalship course, I brought the knowledge of how to do those kinds of things to those guys, and supervised their tabletop exercise, and evaluated it and critiqued it for them, and those kinds of things.
Kern: And how is the critiquing? Is it pass/fail?
Smith: Uh-huh. I guess sometimes we'll pass someone with some conditions: "Okay, we're passing you from this course, but you have to go on one more assignment as a trainee," or something like that. So there is a conditional pass—pass with these kinds of conditions.
Kern: And then the next step after that for you was area commander, is that right?
Smith: Area commander, uh-huh.
Kern: And then what is area commander?
Smith: An area command is usually established when there are a large number of Type I incidents around. So there might be a 12,000-acre fire over here, and a 13,000-acre fire here, and a 22,000-acre fire here, and a 14,000-acre fire there. And these are all being managed by Type I incident commanders. So they will bring in an area commander then that takes command of all of these incidents. The most I had was eight, I think. And so I then provide the direction and the coordination, typically, and the allocation of resources to all of those units—and some supervision. They're pretty well-supervised anyway, so that's not a big thing, but sometimes it can be. I would have the authority to move resources between fires so I could ask this fellow to give up some helicopters to this guy because he didn't have any; or this guy to give some Type I crews over to this guy; and those kinds of coordinative responsibilities. Also then to make sure that their strategies are compatible with one another. Those kinds of things.
And I would have a much smaller staff than any of those guys, but I might have a staff of twenty or twenty-five or something like that. I might have a planning commander, a logistics commander—typically would not have a finance commander, because they're expected to do that. I would have an aviation coordinator, to make sure that these guys don't get airplanes mixed up with one another.
Kern: What are some of the major challenges of a position like that?
Smith: The major challenges are all political. It's dealing with the state forestry issues about these fires, or the governor, or two of our supervisors that have different interests in fires, or with the regional headquarters, or with the national logistics folks about getting the right materials and whatnot. So it's all very.... An area commander doesn't deal much with strategy or tactics or any of those things, or getting the fires put out—it's all of the trying to keep the politics and the conflict and whatnot away from those guys, and keep it back here at the area command and deal with that, and resolve the governor's concerns, and resolve the state forester's concerns, and resolve the regional forester's concerns about what's going on out here, without these guys having to deal with that separately.
Kern: So you would deal directly with all of those people (Smith: Uh-huh.) [and the] governor's phone calls, and things like that?
Smith: Right.
Kern: So all the positions that you held in fire, which positions did you enjoy the most?
Smith: Well, I really did like being a smoke jumper. That was really a lot of fun. You didn't have a lot of those political kinds of problems. Those are not fun to deal with. They're almost always ugly. And while being an area commander was a very big challenge, and there was in fact a lot of satisfaction with making everything go pretty well, it was still one of those lose-lose jobs. I mean, you cannot do that job right. It can't be done. If you do it right for the governor, you ain't doin' it right for these guys, or somethin'. So it's always one of those deals where people will say, "Yeah, ol' Doc Smith, he wasn't too bad." But you never have a chance to be great, because everything is just too political and too emotionally-charged, and too conflict-oriented. It's all about conflict and resolution of conflict there. So I liked that job where you just go jump out of an airplane, go fight a fire.
Kern: Can you tell us a little bit about the training you went through to be a smoke jumper?
Smith: Yes. You have to fall out of an airplane, and you have to land on the ground, your parachute has to open. Actually, we had about—do you know, I don't remember! That's been 1959, this is 2001—forty-two years ago. Whew! But I think we had six weeks of training, but it may have been four—four or six. A lot of it was physical, a lot of it had to do with fighting fire. They made you dig fire line and all those things that you'd already learned how to do, but you had to do a lot of that to be a smoke jumper. Had to do a lot of physical training, a lot of running, a lot of exercises, pushups, situps, back bends, all those kinds of things. And then we practiced a lot, doing things from the air, like we would practice exiting the aircraft, even though you only had to jump out about three feet. Just stand in the door and jump out. You practiced jumping out with all of your gear on and everything.
We would practice landings where not your parachute, but all of your harness and everything would slide down a wire, as if you were coming in on a landing, and you would have to learn to make a parachute roll and land safely. And then you would have to jump out of a tower where you would jump and it would simulate your parachute opening. You'd fall about twenty feet or something, and then you could certainly get that jerked-up motion from when the parachute opens, which was actually very different than that parachute actually opening, because it was much worse than that.
So we did that, and then we had five or six practice jumps where there weren't fires involved. They would just take you up in the airplane, and you would jump out of the airplane and your parachute would open and you would come to the ground and do all the rolls, and people would be critiquing you both from the air and from the ground, about how to do parachute rolls and how to land safely, and what to do if you land in a tree, and those kinds of things.
Kern: So what do you do if you land in a tree?
Smith: If you land in a tree, your jumpsuit—I don't know if you can picture this big canvas jumpsuit. You've seen pictures of big shoulders and a big high collar that comes way up to here, and a helmet with a screen on it. And in the pocket of one of the legs is what's called a let-down rope, and it's a hundred feet. And so that's in your pocket. So if you hang up in a tree, you take the let-down rope out, tie it to your parachute, and release your parachute from your harness, and then let down—you rappel down that rope to the ground. Then later you have to go get your parachute. So you have to climb back up the tree, top the tree or do something to get the parachute back on the ground, because you have to pack it out.
The gear that you take with you has to be packed out. It weighs about a hundred pounds—if it's dry. If it gets a little wet, it could weigh 130 pounds. I weighed 150 pounds.
Kern: What is some of the other equipment (unclear)?
Smith: You have your parachute and your reserve chute and this canvas jumpsuit and the harness. That's the stuff you would jump with. And then they would drop to you in a different parachute called a cargo chute, then you would have food, tools, Pulaski shovel, a hand saw—not a chain saw. You may have climbers that you strap on your feet just so you can climb back up to get parachutes out of the trees. If any parachutes are hung up in the trees, they drop you climbers. You might have—let's see, I mentioned a sleeping bag. Hm. Those kinds of things. A lot of that was in the parachute, jumpsuit, and all that, was a lot of the weight. The food, if we had food left over, we took it. We weren't going to pack it out. But water, and those things, by the time you get everything loaded up, you had about a hundred pounds on your back.
Kern: Can you tell us about the first jump that you made?
Smith: The first jump I made was kind of interesting to me, and I remember it very vividly. It was not very scary. The second jump, I was terrified, because I found out how scary it is to jump the first time. So the second time out, then I was really scared. But it's the kind of thing, I was more scared, I guess, of saying, "I'm not going to jump out of this airplane," than I was of jumping out of the airplane.
We jump from about 1,200 feet, 900 feet, 1,500 feet, somewhere in there. So I was up there quite a ways, but it's not way, way up there like a lot of those skydivers jump from. So it didn't take too long to get down, and the ride was a pretty quick descent. That is, you get down to the ground pretty quickly. So it's not like you have a lot of time to relish this floating down through the air. You've got to be preparing for your landing, you've gotta be guiding your parachute to see where you're going. You've gotta stay away from the trees and the power lines and the lakes and all of those things. And so there's a lot to be done in this jump, getting to the ground.
First of all, you have to make sure that your chute is open and fully open and doesn't have a line over or something that's going to increase your rate of descent. So you have to check on that. So you're pretty busy once you go out the door, before you get to the ground.
Kern: How many seconds, more or less?
Smith: I don't know. I suppose it takes a couple of minutes maybe, or three, perhaps, to get to the ground.
Kern: Did you ever have a bad land?
Smith: I never did have a really bad landing. A lot of my friends did—they wound up with sprains and broken legs and broken arms, and certainly a lot of bruises. I wound up with a lot of bruises and sore places and those things, but never anything terribly serious from jumping. I had jumped one fire and been on it for quite a few days and cut my foot pretty seriously with a Pulaski tool and had to be evacuated—but not from jumping.
One of my roommates when I was going through jump training in 1959—we annually sent a small contingent of jumpers from Missoula to a spike base—that is, a distant base—and there were four people selected to go down there, and I wanted to go really badly and didn't. It was at a place called Grangeville, Idaho. And this guy was selected and was later that year killed in a plane crash. The plane that was carrying two smoke jumpers, the pilot, and a co-pilot were all killed. The pilot may not have been killed, but the two smoke jumpers were killed in that plane crash. Upon reflection, I think that could have easily been me, had I been selected for that.
Interestingly, I was dating my wife at the time that I became a smoke jumper, but we were just dating—we weren't engaged or pinned or any of those kinds of things. She had read about that in the newspaper, but had no way of knowing who it was—only that two smoke jumpers had been killed. And we weren't that tight, so I didn't immediately call her and say, "Hey, everything's okay." But a few weeks later, apparently she got a letter from me and it made her feel better.
Kern: So being that not only smoke jumping—I mean, the whole career of firefighting is dangerous (Smith: It is.), why did you do it? Especially the smoke jumping.
Smith: Uh-huh. It's a guy thing. It's an adrenaline thing. It is. "I can do this!" And I want to do it. It's a challenge. "Can I jump out of an [airplane]? Yeah, I can do that. Can I be an area commander? Yeah, I can be that." You know, it's just that. It's there, and it's kind of like climbing the mountain—because it's there. But not everybody, because I don't think everybody wants to be a smoke jumper; and I don't think everybody wants to be an area commander. For one reason, as I mentioned, being an area commander, particularly, is just prone to criticism. And you just can't be that very well. I do feel like that in my six times as an area commander I gained a lot of respect from my fellow firefighters because they also know that it is a difficult job and I did it as well as anybody—better than some. Same with smoke jumping.
Kern: And how many years did you spend as a smoke jumper?
Smith: One.
Kern: And what happened, why didn't you keep up with that?
Smith: I was graduating from college, and so by the next year, I had gotten married, and we were having a baby, so I didn't jump again. Although since then—as I say, that was forty-two years ago, in 1959 that was pretty typical, most smoke jumpers were a smoke jumper for a year, maybe two, sometimes three. Guys that had been a smoke jumper a long time had jumped five years. Today, many of the smoke jumpers have jumped twenty-five years, eighteen years, and the like. But that was not the culture at that time. You jumped a couple of years while you were in college, and you went on to your main job, your "career."
Kern: Let's go into that other side now, your main job. Can you tell us a little bit about what the responsibilities of a district ranger are?
Smith: Uh-huh. The district ranger is one of the administrators of a national forest. So like the Coconino National Forest has, I believe, four district rangers now—used to have eight. Years ago, they had even more than that. Each forest is divided into geographical units that are called districts. And those are headed up by a district ranger who then is responsible for all the activities on that district, including visitors, such as campers, and he's responsible for the logging, he's responsible for the fires, he's responsible for the grazing that occurs on the district, the wildlife habitat. And so he or she will pull together all of the activities on that district, and ask for a budget to run it, and do that under the supervision of the forest supervisor and his staff. The staff of the forest supervisor gives technical direction and guidance and oversight. The district ranger then supervises the timber program, the fire program, makes sure that his fire management officer, his timber management officer, are doing the right things—coordinates those activities between these various functions, between grazing, the range staff officer, the timber staff officer, the recreation officer, the fire officer. And so he or she will be an on-the-ground, day-to-day supervisor of the activities, on that ranger district, that piece of land.
Typically, a ranger district would be from perhaps 100,000 acres up to perhaps 300,000. I think the largest district I had was 340,000 acres in Wyoming. The district ranger's responsible for a lot of the political things that are going on with the county commissioners and the city fathers, and in some instances, the U.S. congressmen. The forest supervisors and regional foresters often deal with the U.S. Senators. But often a district ranger may deal with a congressman when his district is within that congressional district. It requires a lot of management skill, supervisory still. It requires the ability to stay within budget and bring projects in on time, and the ability then to have a sense of what's going on, so these activities don't step on each other's toes, or don't step on the toes of the larger picture—the forest or the community or the area. Like I was district ranger in the Wind River Range. That was an important feature to a lot of people in Wyoming, and so I had to take all of those state and national interests into account in the management of that ranger district.
Kern: What were some of the best parts of that job for you?
Smith: I was ranger at Lander, Wyoming, and I was there seven years. I probably spent fifty-five or sixty days a year horseback, up in the mountains, in the wilderness, dragging pack horses around, looking at things, inspecting things, looking at the range, checking on the trails, checking on the recreation users, seeing how the sign program was going, checking on grazing use in the wilderness, and those things. So that was a wonderful time of my career, to spend on top of a horse. Had my horse—Governor was his name. A big old golden retriever, Rielly—had him along. Spent days and days, maybe eight or ten days at a time, in the backcountry.
Kern: (unclear)
Smith: Maybe five or six pack horses and a couple of saddle horses, and a couple of us. We'd be back in there, camp out every night, put up a new camp, a new tent, cook supper, cook breakfast, throw together a lunch, get in the saddle, pack up all the horses, get in the saddle and ride off another eight, ten, twelve, fifteen miles. Can't beat that.
Kern: Do they still do that?
Smith: I think so, but probably not as much.
Kern: Would you tell us about your most memorable fire, or one of the fires, of all of the fires you fought that sticks out in your mind?
Smith: Yeah, probably one of the most memorable fires was in Idaho in 1986. It was the Anderson Creek Fire. Very large fire. I was the incident commander. We had an army deuce-and-a-half truck turn over with a crew in it, and six firefighters were killed. And that was a terrible, terrible fire—one that has stayed with me for a long time, probably for the rest of my life; one that I had thought, until the time of the accident, that boy, we were just doin' such a great job on this fire.
I remember once a day going over to the medical tent and seeing what kind of injuries we were havin'. We were havin' just the most minor kind—blisters and slivers in fingers and coughs and things like that. And then early that morning, about six o'clock, we'd gotten a call into the camp communications and they came to get me, and this truck had turned over and there were fatalities.
That was a tough thing to deal with. For one thing, the fatalities, certainly that was a terrible thing to deal with, just in that, retrieving the bodies and getting them transported and prepared to be shipped home and all that. But then all of the repercussions of that, about what had we done wrong, "Why hadn't you done it this way?" and "Why hadn't you done it that way?" and on and on and on. That was no fun, but very memorable.
But other fires all kind of run together because they typically are fun. They're hard, hard work, many, many hours—eighteen, twenty hours a day, day-in and day-out, and day-in and day-out. Hard work. Fighting fire is hard, even if you're a commander. But it's a lot of fun, because the folks that are there, they're the same guys that you've been doing this with for a long time. I mean, not all the same, but this community of firefighters is a group that you've been working with for a long time. And you have to make it fun, or I don't think people would do it. And so there's a lot of, "Oh, you remember on the old 'Umpti-ump' Fire? Remember when old Dan Johnson, and we tipped the toilet over?" That kind of stuff. And so most of the fires then all kind of run together as being just a lot of hard work and a lot of fun.
Kern: And what happened (unclear)?
Smith: Well, what happened was the Forest Service just does not have enough resources to supply these huge fires, so we leaned heavily on the National Guard units for things like vehicles and water trucks and drivers. And so I am now convinced in my mind that the driver of that National Guard truck went to sleep. He didn't just completely go to sleep, but he'd drivin', he'd put in some very long days also, and was driving along, probably dozed slightly, and probably for just a few seconds, but was driving along and was so tired, and just kind of dozed off, and that truck kind of got over to the edge of the road and a couple of wheels went over, and it's very, very steep right there—and pulled the truck over, and down it went. I'm sure he probably was not asleep for more than two or three seconds, or maybe—I don't know how long, but that's what happened. As he was driving and dozed off, he got too close to the edge. Very narrow road. Got too close to the edge and the truck turned over, I think two-and-a-half times.
Kern: So when there is a fatality or fatalities on a fire, what happens next? An outside team of investigators comes in?
Smith: Uh-huh. First of all, we have to do things that we have to do for the accident. We had to take care of the injured people, and we had to take care of the truck driver. And we had to get the truck out. Well, maybe we left the truck down there, in this case, until the other investigators came. We had to notify a lot of people. We had to continue with the firefighting effort. But then right away, the Forest sent out a team to kind of start gathering some information—a group of safety people and managers. And then soon after that, within a day or so, a national team from the Washington office had been assembled and had flown into Boise and driven out to the fire, and started trying to find out the root causes of that kind of an accident. And so they interviewed a lot of people. Then for months after that, I had to come back to Boise to be interviewed. Then I had to come back for a very tough board of investigators, two regional foresters, a person from the Washington office, and a supervisor, and some other fire bosses—and sat at a big table something like this, and just had people ask questions and fire questions and "Why this?" and "Why did you do this?" and all those things.
Kern: After that fire, did you contemplate retiring? No?
Smith: Unt-uh. No, I was too young. That was in '86. I retired in '94, so I was only fifty.
Kern: The National Fire Plan was just created last year by the former secretary of the Interior, and that has brought a lot more money to different fire agencies. What is your opinion on how the money is being used?
Smith: Well, I don't know too much about it. I mean, I'm not in the agencies anymore, so I'm not able to see exactly how it's being used. Starting about the time I retired, we started having a tremendous drain of experienced firefighters. I think I told you that my son is a firefighter. He's a hotshot superintendent for the Mormon Lake Hotshots. There aren't very many experienced firefighters to carry on, from here on. And so part of the money is being used to hire permanent people to start developing into these experienced firefighters. And we need that desperately. I don't think that's a very bad thing at all.
We also are using a lot of the money for additional resources: engines and airplanes and helicopters and lookouts and things like that. And there's certainly a need to beef that up. We're adding something like twenty hotshot crews. We need to do that. There's no doubt that some of the money is gonna be wastefully spent, because there's just too much money coming too soon, too quickly, to do too many things, and just not enough people to do it wisely. And so some of it's just gonna be pooped off, I'm sure, on wasteful kinds of things.
Part of the money is being spent for things like research. I support that because that's what I do now. So I think that we need to find out more about what we can do to make the forest more acceptable of fire. Fire used to burn in the western forests very, very frequently, and a lot of fire. And so we need to do some things now like thinning and restoration of the understory to make the forest more compatible with fire once again—more sustainable in the face of fire. I think that some of the money will be used for that. Probably more of it should be used for research, than is going to be used for that. But there is a big backlog right now of just getting some of these other things—the crews hired, and the helicopters on, and some of the underburning done. So hopefully in a year or two we'll shift and begin to do more of the ecosystem restoration with some of that money, and I think that would be very appropriate.
Kern: Could you give us a summary of the status of the forest in this area right now?
Smith: Uh-huh. Yeah, the forests in Arizona and New Mexico, of the Southwest, are grossly overstocked with trees. In the presettlement times, there were like 20 or 30 or 50 trees per acre, and now we have 500, 600, 800, 1,000 trees per acre. It's terribly understocked with grasses, flowering plants, herbaceous plants, shrubs, and the like. In presettlement times, those understory plants—grasses and forbs and shrubs—made up about 70 percent of the forested area. Today, almost a hundred percent of the forest is in trees.
This has changed the character of fire for the Southwest in a very dramatic way, because prior to Euro-American settlement, fires would burn through the ecosystem frequently—every two or three or five or eight years there would be fire burning on every forest in the Southwest. As it did that, it would burn up the fuel available for fire, leaving only enough fuel in three years to burn again. Today, because of management practices, we have now converted the forest into almost all trees, and we have managed to suppress or exclude fire from almost all of these acres, so now when fire burns, it rapidly gets into the crowns of the trees, it burns much more intensively, much hotter, much longer, and much more destructively to the ecosystem. So our forests are way out of whack. We have too many trees, not enough fire, not enough of the understory vegetation.
But before we can get fire back into the ecosystem, we need to prepare the forest. We need to thin it, we need to get it so that the fires don't rapidly escalate into the tops of the trees and become crown fires, and we need to regenerate the understory of grasses and forbs and shrubs. Then we can begin to bring fire back into the ecosystem. That is, the fire would be burning in a more natural condition, be burning with flame lengths of one or two or three feet, instead of flame lengths of two or three hundred feet. Then fire will not be as destructive as the fires that we've had more recently. We need to make those adjustments to the fuels and to the character and structure of the forest.
Kern: Could you define what then ecological restoration means?
Smith: Well, it's not well-defined anywhere, but I can tell you the way I see it. I would see us trying to emulate the structure of the forest for the last eight or ten or twelve thousand years. And that's one of very, very open grown forest. Early settlers, of course, talk about riding at full gallop through the forest. You could drive a wagon through the forest. So we need to have this more open forest. We need to have this lush understory returning, and we need to have fire back in on a more frequent basis.
Now, you don't have to do that everywhere. It does not have to be done on every acre, and it does not have to be done exactly like it was in presettlement times. But it needs to emulate that. So we need to have 15 to 25 percent of our forest, perhaps, in a presettlement sort of condition—a condition that emulates that early forest—not very many trees, lots of lush understory; clumpy, groupy pattern where the trees grow; and we need to have fire going through more frequently, maybe every seven or eight or twelve years, rather than every two or three or five or eight years. But certainly more frequent fire, and a forest that's capable of allowing that sort of fire.
Kern: Can you explain how you and the Ecological Restoration Institute come to decide what an area should look like after thinning?
Smith: Yeah, I can. Actually, a lot of what we are looking at is to create the forest, or to restore the forest so that it looks more like the presettlement forest. But we recognize that today it's different than it was 125 years ago. And so we have to consider things like other people's concerns about it, about the production of forest recreation, or of forest growth for timber. And so we provide this background of information to agencies and to the public to help make those decisions. So we're saying, "Hey, the forest should be much more open, it should be a much stronger component of understory, and this is why: It provides for more butterflies and more birds and more carab beetles and other components of the ecosystem. Now, the public and the managers have to take that kind of information and fit it into this particular situation for this hundred acres or thousand acres or ten acres." We can help them make those judgments about what it should be. In very few instances will it be fully restored to presettlement condition, even though it should be, because of other political concerns. So there will be some sort of mitigation for those concerns when we finally decide to thin the forest. So we're typically leaving more trees at the cost of the understory development. But that's what's happened.
In twenty years, I'm hoping that people will look back and say, "Oh, gosh, we need to go in and do more thinning than we had done, and make it look more like those old guys thought it should look."
Kern: Can you tell us a little bit about the Fort Valley Research Forest and what goes on there, what is going on now?
Smith: Uh-huh. The Fort Valley Experimental Forest was created in 1908 to do experiments on forest management practices: What about planting? What about thinning? What about harvesting? What about grazing? What about wildlife use? It was established to answer those kinds of questions through experimentation.
What about thinning? Let's thin some acres and see what thinning does to promote growth, develop the understory, and reduce fire hazard.
What about mistletoe? Let's do this with these acres and see how mistletoe responds.
And so it's an area of about, I think, close to 2,000 acres that then has provided an opportunity for researchers to do treatment and see what kind of response develops. It's to design the treatment, have the treatment carried out, and then see what the result is, so that you can control the external factors as much as you can.
And that's what's up with that forest, and it's been very successful, I think. It's one of about twenty across the nation that have been established for that purpose.
Kern: So will you get requests from other national forests for your prescriptions? (Smith: Uh-huh.) How does it work if someone wants to implement a similar treatment?
Smith: We do get requests, and we've visited other national forests. We've visited the Kaibab and the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Gila and the Boise and the Lolo Forest. We've been to the Santa Fe Forest where the Los Alamos Fire occurred a year or so ago, and have talked with them, shown 'em our prescriptions, given 'em the findings that we have developed from our research, and we continue to do that. Charlie and I share those duties and get around and visit with the folks out on the ground.
Kern: But that's part of your duty as program liaison?
Smith: Yes. In fact, that's really one of my principal duties. I'd like to visit with more forests, too, but it's fun working here, and working with these forests. The more people know, the easier it is to work with them. When you visit a brand new area and start talking about cutting 90 percent of the trees, they kind of go ballistic a little bit, and it takes a lot of showing and telling and demonstration to get people to say, "Ah! By golly, that's right! Yeah! Okay!" Because originally they're thinkin', "This guy's nuts!"
Kern: Say in an area where you are promoting the thinning of 90 percent of the trees....
Smith: It's not always 90 percent, but it's always a lot of trees that need to be thinned.
Kern: So what opportunities, or what will happen to those trees? What are the avenues of promoting the use of those trees commercially?
Smith: Well, that's something that the nation is struggling with right now, because a lot of our tree-using industry has left the United States and gone elsewhere. So they go to Indonesia or South America or Africa or Asia somewhere, where the environmental controls aren't so strict. So we've lost a lot of the ability to utilize this material.
Smith: We're trying to use everything we can think of to make it into boards or chips or some other product that can be used. But right now there's not a lot of industry out there. We're trying to make the material available and hope that if we can make it available, then they will come with some sort of utilization industry.
Kern: Right now does the federal or the state government offer incentives to companies who make use of that product?
Smith: There are some incentives, and I'm not acquainted with all of 'em, but there's a few tax incentives, but they're not making the kind of incentives that we think would be large enough. I mean, it's a pretty big investment sometimes—you know, from five to twenty million dollars to get a plant sited and in place and be able to use some of this material. And so with the controversy sometimes surrounding the use of the national forests, people are disinclined to put down twenty million when it's just going to be a lot of controversy and they're never gonna get much material into their plant.
So it would be nice if the governments could somehow support that better with incentives and tax breaks and start-up waivers and things like that. But I don't know that that'll happen. There's a lot of reasons to not do that kind of thing also.
Kern: What are some of the reasons?
Smith: Well, it's just where do you stop with something? If you did that for the woods industry, do you do that for the coal industry? Do you do that for the grazing industry? Do you do that for who-all? So there's some political tradeoffs when you start those kinds of incentives.
Kern: Have you noticed just in the past year with the change of public administration, with the past election, have you noticed a change on the horizon in terms of monies allocated for the National Fire Plan?
Smith: I'm not sure, I think that Secretary Babbitt really had that going in the Clinton administration; and Secretary Norton seems to be continuing in this administration. It's the sort of thing that is nonpartisan. It affects everybody. And so it's not too much of a partisan issue, although in today's climate, everything is a partisan issue. So I see some of that still at work. But it's interesting that when the Democrats were doing it, the Republicans were yammerin' at 'em. And now that the Republicans are doing the same thing the Democrats were doin', the Democrats now are yammerin' at the Republicans. But I do think it's a bipartisan sort of a thing, and should go forward regardless of the present politics of it.
Kern: Could you tell us a little bit about the history of the Ecological Restoration Institute?
Smith: Yeah. Coincidentally, when I came to get my master's, Dr. Covington was looking to expand his concepts and principles of ecosystem restoration out into the forest, and to do real scale, operational kinds of restoration tasks. And I had just come from the agencies, and I knew how to deal with the agencies, and the BLM at that time was trying to find out what to do with Mount Trumbull, about 15,000 or 18,000 acres of ponderosa pine that they have up there. Secretary Babbitt was interested in promoting ecosystem health nationally. So that all kind of hit together at the same time. Covington had been acquainted with Babbitt when Babbitt was governor, and Babbitt knew of his work. So they kind of hit it off. I had worked with the BLM on fires. So we started doing large-scale treatments at Mt. Trumbull. We planned to treat about 3,500 acres of the ponderosa pine up there. So we were able to get some funding from Babbitt to start the work on the BLM.
And at that time, we were just the Ecology Lab in the School of Forestry. Pete Fule` and myself and Covington and a few other grad students were working on forest restoration. So I was able to influence the BLM, to find ways to get this done on the ground. Pete Fule` was able, with his influence, to do the measurements and the science of it. Covington was able to do the politics of it. So we started doing large-scale, operational-scale treatments— real time, real dollars kinds of treatments.
We were a program about a year or a year and a half, when we got a very large sum of money from the federal government—about a million and a half [dollars]. So we went back to the Board of Regents with a new proposal to make this a much broader thing than a program. It's now an institute that looks at forestry issues, water issues, social issues, fire politics—all of those kinds of things. We became an institute about a year-and-a-half ago.
The Ecosystem Restoration Institute has now grown in stature, and it's certainly a well-respected regional institute, but also has a fair national presence.
Kern: Can a student graduate with a specialization in ecological restoration?
Smith: Yes, as a graduate student. Undergraduates still don't have an emphasis area.
Kern: When you have received the different grant monies, for other major institutes or programs across the nation who may be watching this, where do they go, where are good places to go?
Smith: You have to have an angel. It can't be done without an angel. And our angels—we had a couple of 'em—we had Bruce Babbitt and we had Senator John Kyl. You can't go anywhere if you don't have an angel. And it has to be somebody that has some influence on budgets and dollars and priorities for spending and those kinds of things—and that's what those two guys had. We could have had all the same research, all the same everything, but without the impact of those angels, we would have never gone anywhere.
Kern: So do you have individuals coming up in the ranks who'll kind of get formed as lobbyists within the institution?
Smith: Not so much in the institution, but a lot of the folks that we work with outside the institute now recognize the value of it, and so they are touting what we do with the governor of Arizona, or with the chief of the Forest Service, or with the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, or those kinds of things. So yeah, we're building, we're broadening our base now of people who are the "constituents," if you will, of our institute, that are now helping us with our presence and reputation.
Kern: Can you talk a little bit about some of maybe the negative feedback you've gotten from local environmentalists?
Smith: Uh-huh. It's been pretty disappointing in that regard. Local environmentalists have attacked Dr. Covington, I think unjustly and pretty severely about "being in bed with the timber industry," and "he's only about cutting trees" and a lot of those really ugly remarks. Early on, they thought that Covington had the right approach—that is, his approach had to do with this broad scale of ecosystems, rather than just timber or range or wildlife. But now that this has gained in its popularity and gained in its recognition, and gained in its ability to get things done, a lot of folks now have turned on Wally accusing him of only cutting trees, and cutting too many trees, and going too fast, and looking at too large an area to be restored, and those kinds of things, and have provided this sort of criticism with hardly any basis. I mean, all of our work is extremely well-grounded in science. And most of the criticism is just off the top of someone's head. We just talk about our science and what it shows and what the responses of the ecosystem have been.
Kern: Where would you like to see the Ecological Restoration Institute in the next ten years?
Smith: I would like to see a number of things. One of the things I'd like to see is an ecological restoration center here, where we could bring agency employees and teach them about ecological restoration. We'll probably do a lot of distance teaching from the web and from television, and try to get that out into the agencies more.
Certainly going to continue with our popular education—that is, to the public—letting them know about what's up with the ecosystem and how terribly out of balance it is today, and the imbalance has resulted in terrible fires, and showing them what the response has been of the ecosystem to our treatments and that sort of thing.
We're going to continue with the formal education here on campus of ecosystem restoration.
And then finally, we'll continue with our research of responses of the ecosystem to these kinds of treatments over a long term. It's one thing to look at it over four or five or eight years, but over twenty years is it going to hold up, and over fifty years will it hold up? So I think those are some of the areas that we could look forward to.
I think that the Institute will probably grow a little bit from a regional sort of institute into more of a ponderosa pine or a West-wide institute.
Kern: And what about you personally? Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
Smith: Right here. Just havin' too good a time, and I'll probably stay for about another five years. Then after that I'll probably withdraw some—maybe work part-time, half-time or something. Then someday I'll die.
[END OF INTERVIEW]