The Forest Service’s fuel reduction strategy is adding fuel to the fire

Most of the West’s perennial wildfire plague is due to human stupidity. But it’s not just the careless people who start the fires. Given the primary risk factor for massive forest fires is hotter, drier forests from the climate crisis, there is a long list of guilty parties.

First, there’s all the people that voted for politicians who ignored the climate crisis or called it a hoax. Then there’s the Supremely Corrupt Court, that has enshrined contempt for environmental and climate protection beginning with an “inconvenient” awarding of the 2000 election to fossil fuel handmaidens Bush and Cheney instead of climate champion Al Gore.

As long as we have all paid dearly for front row seats to an apocalyptic future, let’s look at another actor in this theater of the absurd, the U.S. Forest Service.

The agency has peddled a fairy tale that Western forests are morbidly dense and unhealthy because of aggressive fire suppression over the last 90 years. Solution? “Fuels reduction treatments” and “prescribed burns.” The euphemisms are deliberately crafted to make you think our forests are sick, and the Forest Service “doctors” will make house calls to do forest plastic surgery. And for good measure, this medicine will also protect your home in the forest.

This is wildfire management malpractice.

The agency cites “in-house” research to support its claim. But the agency lives, eats, and breathes conflict of interest. The agency operates under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which treats trees as a commodity. It’s joined at the hip to the logging industry. It promotes lumber and wood products with videos that encourage burning wood for heat, the most polluting way to heat a home, and more carbon intensive than using coal. The agency receives funding selling trees to the timber industry. This obvious conflict of interest is institutionalized.

In contrast to agency research, over 40 studies from different countries and independent researchers tell almost the opposite story. In the largest study ever done, the authors concluded forest “thinning” accelerates and intensifies wildfires, that, “Dense, mature forests tend to burn less … because they have higher canopy cover and more shade, which creates a cooler, moister microclimate.” The higher density of trees of all sizes act as a windbreak, buffering gust-driven flames and limiting flying embers:  “Thinning and other activities that remove trees, especially mature trees, reverse those effects, creating hotter, drier, and windier conditions.”

Consistent with that research, photographs of the current Cottonwood Fire, the most destructive in Utah history and largest in the nation, suggest the fire is burning right through areas that had been thinned.

Continuing the medical theme, thinning our forests to prevent wildfires makes no more sense than thinning your brain to prevent Alzheimer’s. It’s just making things worse.

We know of Forest Service employees that have been fired for challenging the agency’s forest thinning orthodoxy. Communication with researchers (including with Ph.D.s in ecology) in federal agencies and other institutions characterize the differences in conclusions drawn by independent research compared to Forest Service-connected research this way:

1. The burning and thinning mindset has been institutionalized, making it difficult to change. It takes a long time to convince people that the strategy is not working. Employees are reluctant to consider what they have been doing is failing or making it worse.
2. There is a long-term budget commitment to “active forest management” so land managers want to take advantage of those available funds. Follow the money.
3. Land management agencies (primarily Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) want to be perceived as being proactive because the public expects them to do something to put out or prevent fire, to keep their homes safe. Land managers don’t want to be blamed if there is a poor outcome (especially when houses, cabins or other structures burn) which feeds the public’s expectation that something can and should be done.

This is also climate malpractice.

Preemptive deforestation is also an obvious climate disaster. Every tree cut down loses its carbon absorption, and every tree burned releases all that carbon into the atmosphere immediately when we can least afford it. We are contemptuous at deforestation of the Amazon knowing the “lungs of the earth” are being mutilated and their climate buffering is being lost. But when we do the same to American forests, many cheer it on because it’s branded “fuels reduction.”

This is public health malpractice.

Smoke from wood burning, whether from a fireplace, wildfire, pizza oven, or prescribed burn, is the most toxic type of pollution the average person ever inhales. New research gives another black eye to the presumptive therapeutics of “prescribed burns.” On a national scale, 10,000 people die annually from wildfire smoke, but slightly more die from prescribed burn smoke. Contradicting claims that human health is being protected by prescribed burns, per hectare burned, the health burden and daily health care costs are nearly five times higher for prescribed burns compared to wildfires.

The megadrought strangling the life out of the American West, making bonfires of our forests and smothering us in toxic smoke is not random bad luck, it is the direct and predicted result of decades of human caused greenhouses gases, climate policy failures, and pervasive political propaganda. And the Forest Service is only making it worse, blasting us with a firehose of stupidity with their “fuel reduction” solution, and ironically adding fuel to the fire.