The American timber industry is using the Los Alamos prescribed burn that got out of control as an excuse to push for more commercial logging in National Forests, ostensibly to reduce fire risk. This is ecological heresy. The truth is that timber sales are causing catastrophic wildfires on national forests, not alleviating them. In many cases, overly intensive industrial forest management opens up the understory, changing microclimate, and making conditions more conducive for large fires.
Prescribed burns are an important tool in forest management.
But some of these exhortations, coming from the timber industry's supporters in Congress, look more like opportunism than considered criticism of what went wrong in this fire. It is an argument that doesn't hold up. In April 1999, the General Accounting Office issued a report that raised serious questions about the use of timber sales as a tool of fire management. The Forest Service typically keeps about 90 percent of the revenue from these timber sales. The money has helped finance both the agency's budget and its preparations for more commercial logging.