Throwing Shade on Forest Management Theories

Weather and climate are the leading indexes of the number and intensity of wildfires. Some are sparked by careless smokers and campers, a few arsonists have their way, arcing power cables deserve some significant blame, industrial sparks (vehicles and machinery) take their toll, and nature with lightening strikes has been taking down forests and grasslands since time began. We know that we are so far down the line with climate change that there is no possible short-term reversal. Unfortunately, that’s really what it takes to make a significant difference. The hotter the average temperatures have been, the drier the land, the more frequent and intense the wildfires. Oh, and those warmer temperatures are idea for pine-eating bark beetles, killing trees by the millions. Those dead trees make fine kindling too!

Logging, especially clear-cutting, may well – you’ll pardon the expression – backfire. Chad Hanson, research ecologist with the John Muir Project, and his colleagues looked at the problem, gathered data and came to some startling conclusions. Writing for the September 29th Los Angeles Times, Hanson explains: “Meanwhile, as wildfires continue in parts of the West that don’t often burn, a troubling new form of climate change denial has crept into the public dialogue, and it is only increasing the threats to public safety.

“The logging industry — and the Republican and Democratic politicians whose reelection campaigns it finances — are busy telling the press and the public that they should focus on “forest management” in remote wildlands, rather than on climate change and community wildfire preparedness. Joining this chorus is a group of agency and university scientists funded by the Trump administration.

“Logging bills are now being promoted in Congress, ostensibly as solutions. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) introduced a bill last month that would severely erode environmental laws to increase commercial logging in our national forests. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has introduced a bill that would triple funding to subsidize logging on federal forestlands.

“My colleagues and I conducted an ambitious scientific study on wildfire behavior and trends — one of the largest ever to analyze the factors that drive such fires. The study involved three decades of data and tens of millions of acres of forest fires across the American West… What we found will not surprise most people who have an understanding of climate change. Weather and climate influence fire behavior much more than other factors. Alarmingly, in forests where trees had been removed by logging, fires burned hotter and faster. That’s because removing trees reduces shade; creates hotter, drier and windier conditions; and causes highly combustible invasive grasses to spread.

“Numerous other scientists — those who are not funded by logging corporations or the Trump administration — have found the same thing. Weather and climate factors are what mainly drive wildfire behavior. Fires do not tend to burn more intensely in dense forests, or in forests with high numbers of dead trees.

“Our large wildfires are driven in significant part by the climate crisis. We should respond by protecting vulnerable communities, not by allowing more logging in backcountry public forests, which does not stop fires and often makes them burn faster toward towns, as we saw tragically with the Camp fire in Northern California.

“This year’s wildfire season has brought the biggest and fastest runs we have seen. The Creek fire and the Bear fire, in the Sierra Nevada, traveled most rapidly through areas where extensive commercial logging had already occurred, often under the deceptive guise of “fuel reduction.”

“More than 200 of the top climate, forest and fire scientists in the country recently warned Congress that logging not only increases wildfire intensity and spread, but also emits more carbon into our atmosphere annually than our economy’s residential and commercial sectors combined. The scientists, myself included, urged policymakers to increase protection of forests from logging.

“The only effective way to protect homes and lives from wildfires is to direct more resources toward creating fire-safe communities, improving warning systems and providing adequate evacuation assistance. Passing the Wildfire Defense Act, introduced last year by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), would be a step in the right direction.” And getting to work on reversing climate change. 

Nothing appeals to a politician with an outstretched campaign fund-seeking hand that a well-heeled special interest with a need to generate a benefit, even to the detriment of almost everybody else, that can easily be spun as a solution to a horrible problem. People are so conditioned to listen to words, buying into “logic” that at first blush rings true, that they have little or no interest in the vetted facts and the genuine “truth” that just might produce the opposite conclusion. Simply, logging in these great natural reserves just might the next wildfire even worse than what we are already experiencing today. Thousands of homes, millions of acres, a veritable slaughter of wildlife, and dozen of humans have perished in the Western United States  in wildfires in the immediate past.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when huge scientific problems need to be addressed, you’d think that understanding scientific facts, not creating comforting mythology, would be the obvious approach.