The starting assumption about wildfire that dominates public policy is that “fire suppression” has created abnormal “fuel build up” in forests, leading to large, uncontrollable blazes.

Recently, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told a House hearing that the nation’s forests are in a state of crisis, driven by a precipitous decline in logging that’s increased the risk of bigger and more dangerous wildfires. The solution Schultz proposed is to do more logging and prescribed burns on public lands to reduce “fuel.”

During the same hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) suggested: “An untended forest is no different than an untended garden.” It’s going to grow and grow until it chokes itself to death, and then it’s going to fall victim to disease, pestilence, drought, and ultimately catastrophic fire.

The solution promoted by logging advocates to cure what they perceive as sick forests is “chainsaw medicine.” Photo by George Wuerthner

Logging proponents support the euphemistically named Fix Our Forest Act. Of course, one must wonder how forests survived for millions of years before humans were around to “save” our forests from these alleged blights, including Indians who colonized North America only in the last 15,000 or 16,000 years.

Proponents of active forest management frequently misinterpret ecology so they can justify the goal of more logging.

Schultz blames fire suppression for the reason for large, uncontrollable blazes. He and most logging supporters repeat a common myth that, historically, wildfires were frequent (occurring every 1–20 years) and kept fuels low.

While this may have been true for some dry conifer forests, it is false for the vast majority of forest types and plant communities across the West. Everything from sagebrush to spruce-fire forests naturally experiences much longer intervals between blazes, often hundreds of years ago. Fire suppression has not altered these fire regimes. The 1910 Big Burn that scorched over 3 million acres of Montana and Idaho occurred long before there was effective “fire suppression.” Historically, there were millions of acres charred by fire, largely controlled by climatic conditions, not fuels.

Furthermore, climate largely influences wildfire. In the early 1900s, when there were major droughts, we had massive wildfires like the 1910 Big Burn that burnt over 3–3.5 million acres of Idaho and Montana. In the late 1920s (remember the Dust Bowl?), as much as 50 million acres were charred by wildfire annually. Then, between the 1940s and 1980s, it was cool and moist, and there were far fewer ignitions and fewer acres burned. This is the same time when many suggest fire suppression was successful, but Nature was successful at suppressing wildfire.

Second, logging forests does not protect them from wildfire. Forests under “active management” (read logging) frequently burn more severely than protected landscapes such as parks and wilderness areas. Some studies show that logging can increase fire risk and burn severity.

Logging tends to increase solar penetration (reduce shade), which leads to drying and high winds—both factors that contribute to wildfire ignition and spread.

A third problem seldom discussed is that such “fuel treatments,” whether logging or prescribed burns, have a short effective window of 5–20 years, to the degree they are effective at all. And the probability that a wildfire will encounter treated (read logged) areas during this time period is minuscule.

A fourth problem with the present policy of logging forests is that the most significant home loss is the result of grass and shrub fires, not forest fires. The Eaton Fire that blackened Altadena, CA, the Marshall Fire that destroyed more than a thousand homes in Colorado, the inferno that consumed more than 2000 homes in Maui, and the Almeda Drive Fire in the communities of Talent and Phoenix, Oregon, that destroyed 2,600 homes were all non-forest blazes.

These fast-moving fires easily overwhelmed firefighting responses.

Rather than logging forests in the backcountry, a better public policy would be to focus on home hardening and reducing the flammability of structures. Photo by George Wuerthner.

Rather than wasting money on logging (thinning) and random prescribed burns, communities should invest in home hardening, strategizing evacuation routes, and reducing the flammability of structures.

Beyond the fact that thinning (logging) and prescribed burns are often ineffective, there are economic and ecological costs to these “solutions.” The cumulative tree mortality resulting from logging and thinning, when combined with the trees that may subsequently die due to wildfire, is often greater than the loss from wildfire alone.

Old-growth forests store an enormous amount of carbon. Even burnt forests have residual carbon in snags, soil, and logs on the ground. Photo by George Wuerthner.

Logging contributes to carbon emissions more than wildfires. Since forests store a tremendous amount of carbon, the removal of trees by logging reduces this carbon storage, releasing it into the atmosphere. This exacerbates the ongoing climate warming that is ultimately contributing to wildfires.

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