This record-breaking low snow year is a painful reminder that our changing climate affects lives and livelihoods. It should be an urgent call to action — but what action? How can we rapidly cool the planet and preserve our snowpack? One answer is simple and costs no money: protect our remaining forests.
According to consensus science, temperatures across the planet are rising due to a few primary drivers: burning fossil fuels, deforestation and forest degradation from logging. What you may not realize is that our very own Utah leaders are engaged in large-scale forest degradation across public and private lands including the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forests and open-space recreation areas, stoking our fears to sell it. I was evacuated during the Parleys Canyon fire, and it was indeed scary, but what I see happening in our forests and open space is making me far more afraid.
It’s common sense to support proven measures to protect homes from wildfire including home-hardening, maintaining safe evacuation routes and efforts to prevent human ignitions, like the one that caused the Parleys Canyon fire. But instead of sourcing money for these crucial actions, local leaders have focused almost entirely on one very costly, ineffective and often counterproductive action: cutting down more forests.
So-called “fuel reduction” logging is part of a Frankenstein experiment that has been run since 1997 with over 3,000 projects across nearly 1.2 million acres of public Utah land. And the results are in: less forest shade, higher temperatures, more wind, and a worsening water and climate crisis. Despite this, Utah leaders have embraced more logging than we’ve seen in decades — and with gusto.
But that mazelike deforestation of oak trees in Parleys Canyon will not slow down the next roadside ignition or increase our snowpack. The herbicides sprayed across the masticated slopes have not made our watershed healthier or more resistant to wildfire.
What of the thousands of wood piles from leftover logging slash? Now they house ecosystem heroes like tiger salamanders and boreal toads, ermines, red squirrels, grouse and a host of overwintering pollinating insects. These critter condos will eventually be doused with gasoline and ignited to form a toxic plume of fine particulate matter and carcinogenic compounds. Until they are, which can be years, they represent an increase in fire risk. These piles pose a grave hazard for our homes and the wildlife — not a “buffer of safety” as purported.
We are told such burning is a “necessary evil” and only conducted on days that will blow the smoke away from us — only to settle someplace else. We are told it is safe to ignite these piles close to communities because it’s conducted by professionals who will not make the mistakes made by other professionals who lost control and burned hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of acres. But forest logging and pile burning don’t make us safer, and it will not protect our homes.
Maybe you have seen for yourself, while hiking and biking in these cleared areas; more sunlight, more wind, drier soils and even an increased avalanche hazard because trees on slopes act as snow anchors. This is problematic because fires burn hotter and faster (often toward communities) through open forests. The dense forests we are told are so bad and “overgrown” tend to slow down fires. And most of the home destruction comes from flying, wind-driven embers. Embers ignore “fuel breaks” and can travel many miles to land on a house. This won’t cause too many problems for “hardened” homes, but the ones without ember-proof vents, fire-resistant materials and other defensible measures will likely ignite.
So the question remains: Why are we being led down this costly, destructive and endless path in the opposite direction of a true solution? We did not arrive at historic snowpack lows despite decades of forest management, we arrived here because of it. The forest is the snowpack. Remove the canopy and you lose the shade, the cooling and the moisture retention that keeps snow on the ground long enough to feed our streams.
We simply cannot continue to believe, and fund with taxpayer dollars, scientifically debunked propaganda that supports extractive industry and lines personal-interest pockets. If you trust science — or even common sense — the choice is obvious and simple: Forests cool and logging heats. Cutting trees is the problem, and saving them is the answer.