In March, President Trump declared a national emergency by Executive Order to speed up the logging of our national forests. The order affects more than 112 million acres, larger than the entire state of California. It would remove or nullify most environmental safeguards on our national forests.
Trump’s order exempts objections to timber sales by outside groups, tribes, and local governments. The order also narrows the number of alternatives federal officials can consider when weighing logging projects.
Formal public comment is not required for Environmental Assessment, and the FS is told to expand the use of Categorical Exclusions, which usually minimize environmental review and public involvement.
The administration puts timber production above other public values like watershed protection, wildlife habitat preservation, recreation, and economics.
Making it all worse for American citizens is that nearly all timber sales are subsidized by taxpayers, and this does not include the environmental costs associated with logging.
The rationale for expanded logging is ostensibly the misguided assumption that our forests are susceptible to wildfire due to fuel accumulations. It is climate and weather, not fuels, that drive large blazes. It is delusional to think otherwise.
The problem with this rationale is that numerous studies have documented that logging often exacerbates fire spread and severity.
For instance, one study of more than 1500 wildfires found that forests with “active management” (logging and prescribed burns) had higher-severity blazes than protected landscapes like national parks and wilderness areas, where presumably there is more “fuel.”
David Lindenmayer, one of the most published fire ecologists in the world, has written: “Our research following the 2009 Black Saturday fires showed that approximately 10 years after logging, there was a seven times increase in the risk of high-severity fire. This sharply elevated risk lasts for around 30 years (that is until the forest is about 40 years old). It then declines. The lowest risk is for forests 100 years old or more. That is, old forests burn at significantly lower severity than young forests.”
There is an apparent reason for this observation. Logged or thinned forests open the canopy, exposing the soil and surface fuels to drying. Thinning also increases wind penetration, the primary factor in all large blazes.
Prescribed burns are also ineffective because vegetation grows back frequently. And the plants that dominate such burn sites tend to be “fine fuels” like grasses and shrubs.
A further problem with logging and prescribed burns is the likelihood that any fire will encounter treated areas is exceedingly low, usually 1-2%. So most logging projects have no impact on wildfire, even assuming that they worked to reduce fire spread and severity, which, as I suggest, is unlikely.
Prescribed burns, and burning of slash piles, are often part of a thinning strategy, but produce massive amounts of deadly air pollution.
Finally, all large, high-severity blazes occur under extreme wind conditions like those that recently contributed to the destruction of Altadena and Pacific Palisades in California. Those winds blow embers over, through or around fuel treatments.
So, even if logging and prescribed burns were effective under less than extreme fire weather conditions, they fail when you have “red flag” conditions. Proponents of massive logging projects almost never acknowledge this.
The problem with “active management” (i.e. logging and prescribed burns) is that one gets the negative costs like air pollution, loss of carbon storage, disturbance of wildlife, damage to watersheds and soils, and other environmental costs associated with these prescriptions, and the likelihood that these treated areas will experience a wildfire is unlikely.
Trump’s order is nothing more than a giveaway of public wood for private profit at the expense of the taxpayer, the landscape, and its wildlife based on delusions about fire ecology and behavior.
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