To most of us, it is unseemly, at the very least, to take advantage of other people’s tragedy, hard times, and fear. Yet some folks, driven by the pursuit of profits or political ambition or both, simply cannot resist. That is the case with those seeking advantage from the terror most of us in the Northern Rockies are experiencing as fires or at least the smoke from the fires threaten to engulf us and render our homes and home towns uninhabitable.

Except for suffocating the ash fallout from Mount Saint Helens, we in the Northern Rockies have had the luxury of observing natural catastrophes at a distance on our television sets. When floods swept the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries in the upper Midwest, simultaneously drowning and burning major cities, when hurricanes repeatedly threaten to drive the sea across Florida and well into the Carolina coastlands, when earthquakes threatened to drop large swaths of southern California into the sea, we in Montana could shudder with a distant fear and easy sympathy, for we faced no such immediate threats of natural disaster. This summer’s wildfires in Northern Rockies have changed that.

While most of us have suffered with the unavoidable fire-related anxieties, we have also been impressed by the hard work and heroism of both neighbors and anonymous firefighters. But others have tried to profit from the fires and the primordial fears they evoke. The forest products industry has been in the lead in this exploitation of other people’s hard times.

The forest products industry wants access as cheaply as it can get it to as much wood fiber as possible. It once had privileged access to forested public lands. As the frontier economy has faded and government give-aways have fallen out of political favor, the forest products industry’s privileged grip on public resources has begun to slip. The current forest fires offer them an opportunity to try to regain some of their lost clout.

The fires, timber industry spokespersons claim, are the result of restrictions on commercial logging on public lands. If all of these lands had been logged, they assert, the fires would not be burning. It is the federal government and the environmentalists they are in cahoots with who have caused the fires that now threaten us. As one timber industry advocate baldly said, "I never saw a clearcut burn."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course clearcuts burn. When long, hot summers dry out the grasses, brush, and logging wastes, they can flare explosively. When they grow thick with closely packed young trees, they present exactly the fire danger we are wrestling with now. The logging roads provide human access that is the source of the vast majority of forest fires.

If roading and logging eliminated the threat of wildfire, most of the fires that threaten us now would not be burning. Look at where these fires are: They are largely burning on the forest- urban interface in areas adjacent to intense human activity. In Western Montana, for instance, the fires are burning in the forests adjacent to some of the rapidly growing residential areas in the nation, the Bitterroot, Helena, and Clark Fork Valleys. These are not roadless areas that have never been logged. Quite the contrary, they are areas that were roaded and logged in the past. Those roads often have then provided access for the human activity that now dominates these areas, including the home building, residential settlement of the last two decades, and recreational activity. The trees now burning are usually second growth that followed past logging.

The bulk of the fires burning are burning outside of roadless and wilderness areas. At last count in Western Montana over 75 percent of the burned acreage lies outside of protected areas like National Parks and Wilderness. Even more telling, 96 percent of the firefighting effort is focused on roaded and developed areas where human lives, homes, and other structures are threatened. It is not primarily battling wilderness fires.

Commercial logging and the roads associated with it do not reduce the threat of wildfire. They do the opposite. The timber industry has been as insistent as anyone else that all wildfires be extinguished immediately, thus, over the decades, allowing the fuel loads in our forests to build. Commercial logging does not remove dangerous fuel loads. Instead it takes the largest, most valuable, and most fire resistant trees, leaving behind a firetrap.

Commercial logging is not a prescription for forest health; it is one of the major causes of unhealthy forest conditions. Until the forest products industry stops trying to insist that clearcutting our public lands is necessary for the health of those lands, we will make no progress in restoring those lands. Equating forest health with timber company profits condemns out forests to either the commercial ravages of the past or the management paralysis of the present. Both are bad for our forests and for those of us who have chosen to live in beautiful, but naturally dangerous, forested landscapes.