Continued

Fighting the Wrong Battle: Why Logging Isn’t the Answer to Mitigating Wildfires or Climate Change

In forests of the eastern U.S., this misleading “overgrown forests” narrative is being used by the Forest Service and other public land managers as an excuse to conduct huge logging and burning operations based on misrepresentations of current science. In other cases in eastern U.S. forests, land managers are mischaracterizing historical fire regimes in an attempt to justify unnaturally hyper-frequent use of prescribed fire that, in some cases, is removing most of the carbon from forests and causing significant harm.

Photo 1: Iverson (1991): Loss of forest since 1820 in Southern IL

Photo 2: Shortleaf pine: considered to be fire-dependent (Stambaugh et al. 2020)

Second, it is an outright myth that trees must be removed from forests before fire can be restored. In fact, half a century of science shows that, even in the very densest forests, and even in those that have not burned in over a century, there is no need to “thin” forests prior to fire. Whether it is managed wildfire, prescribed fire, or Native American cultural burning, fire alone can be applied and maintained in forests without any tree removal. The Forest Service is well aware of this, and recently admitted that “it is known that tree removal is not required before prescribed fire can be used”, and that thinning is six times more expensive per acre than fire alone. This is because fire behavior is driven overwhelmingly by weather conditions like wind speed and direction, ambient temperature and relative humidity, not forest density.

To the extent that forest density is secondarily relevant to fire behavior, most science finds that removing trees from forests to make them less dense actually tends to change the forest microclimate, creating hotter, drier, and windier conditions that exacerbate wildfires, increase overall tree mortality, and put human communities at greater risk.

One final point to keep in mind: “thinning” forests emits at least 3 times more carbon per acre than wildfire alone. It is even worse when trees are removed as part of dirty biomass energy production—burning trees or portions of trees for kilowatts—which emits even more carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal, for equal energy produced. Contrary to popular mythology, even the biggest and most intense wildfires only consume about 1% of total tree carbon in the forest, and forests quickly re-absorb emitted carbon through natural post-fire regrowth.

The real solution for climate change and wildfire mitigation is not more logging, but proforestation. Legislation to fully protect our public forests from logging must be prioritized. This should include an expansion of protected forests through the public acquisition of private forestlands from willing sellers, ending taxpayer subsidies for the logging and biomass industries, and redirecting a portion of these funds to jobs programs to help create fire-safe communities through proven methods like home hardening and defensible space pruning. This is a path forward for the 21st century.

Chad Hanson is a forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project, based in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and is the author of the book, “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”, and the co-author and co-editor of “Mixed Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix”.

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