Our vast public forests are among our greatest national assets. But politicians and commodity interests continually insist that these woodlands are somehow broken. The Fix Our Forests Act, sponsored by Sens. Curtis (R-UT) and Hickenlooper (D-CO), is a bipartisan swing at “restoring” wildlands by invoking claims of overstocking, crowding and impending megafires. The cure, they suggest, is once again calling on increased forest “treatments” to save the day.
My own 40 years of experience and research tell me otherwise. We are told that if forests burn, then they are unhealthy. This is untrue, undercutting the basis of FOFA.
The idea of “overly dense” forests, proffered by industry dogmatists, has been around since the 1990s “forest health” crisis. But evidence of these maligned woods is selective. Our most fire-prone forests are often the result of overengineering in the form of single-species management, road building and development that facilitate such conditions. FOFA bypasses abundant ecological evidence of climate-driven conflagration and reads from the same old menu of felling fixes.
While pointing fingers is easy, it is more challenging to apply science, humility and restraint to buffer fire’s impacts. According to recent work by Philip Higuera and others, most fires where structures are lost are human-caused and near established municipalities. Make no mistake, human sprawl is at the heart of the matter. More people in flammable landscapes are the real fuel.
Short-term profit over sustainability (aka, the agricultural model) has been a scourge on our land, water and wildlife for more than a century. Following FOFA, increasing grazing on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands will augment fire recovery. Such practices may limit some invasive species, but will likewise increase shrubs while degrading herbaceous diversity. FOFA also prescribes new roads and expands the forest harvests to reduce “uncharacteristic wildfire.” This should be done, sponsors suggest, by removing unhealthy and healthy trees to reach “appropriate basal area.”
Didn’t these very management techniques bring us to this point?
FOFA excels at speaking power to truth. Simply steamroll reliable ecological findings with maxims from the past like “sustained yield forestry.” But the proposed legislation does offer that commonly bandied phrase “best available science” ... while the administration simultaneously guts federal research, including the Forest Service and Geological Survey. When answers are predetermined, real science is an obstacle, and FOFA is a cover for more chain saw remedies.
The original sin of the U.S. Forest Service — namely, forest farming in the Department of Agriculture — plagues us to this day. To protect the nation’s arboreal crop, war was declared on intentional burning and wildfire. A perfect storm of an exceptionally wet century followed, which propped up the illusion that we can control fire. An inevitable turn to drier times appears unusual in the context of moisture-ridden decades. However, such climatic ebbs and flows track wildfire occurrence much more closely than the mixed effectiveness of fire suppression. In sum, American fire management remains a practice of commodity (and now home) protection irrespective of climate-driven fire and vegetation susceptibility.
Climate warming is serious and must be addressed. Further droughts portend increasing wildfire. But forests have burned like this before. What is really new is the amount of development and road building and the mounting effects of a century of forest manipulations. More people, machines and homes in the woods will guarantee more human-set fires and property destruction. These changes significantly augment a warming climate. Don’t blame “overgrown forests” — understand the environment and adapt to it.
Yes, protections are needed near buildings. This doesn’t mean added tree cutting will get us out of the woods. Reductions in roads, restrictions on development in fire-prone areas and sound safety plans to address inevitable wildfire are solutions compatible with modern fire sciences. If policymakers wish to extract more timber, they should just say that and not make claims about restoring resilience and “reducing wildfire risks.” Learning to live with wildfire (and nature more broadly) through community education and lifestyle changes is a better way to quell looming disaster than cultivating our treasured forests.