The survival of our precious western US forests is in peril.
Some people, betrayed again and again by the false claims of the timber industry, feel we should just let it burn: let nature reset the balance.
But these forests established as the ice sheet retreated...followed by Native Americans. These people managed the new forests from their very beginnings, lighting low-intensity, healthy fires for 13,000 years, fires that established patchiness and productivity. The forests (and the things that live in forests) evolved to need this low-intensity fire to keep the woods thinned, patchy and healthy.
Now, climate conditions have warmed and dried, so where forests are removed by catastrophic fire, they will not always be able to return. If we want to even have forests 100 years from now, we need to actively intervene to get natural, low intensity fire back into the system. To do that, we first need to remove accumulated fuels, and restructure our forests for ecological function. We now understand how to do that.
It turns out that when you bring everyone to the table and consider their needs--whether loggers, environmentalist, wildlife biologists, recreationists or local communities--you get a forest treatment prescription that yields more wood, more habitat, and no less fuel reduction than traditional, unhealthy timber management. The difference is that which trees stay and which go is decided based on what is best for the long-term health of the forest, not on what the timber industry cherry-picks to maximize their profits today.
The problem is that the US timber industry is clinging to the past. They still want to harvest big trees, when there really aren't many left, and that policy is what created this disaster. Most of the developed world has already transitioned to small tree forestry, but public policy in the US is delaying that transition here. In a sad case of unforeseen consequences, we decided to give away for free all the dead trees from beetle kill and forest fire in the west. That means that there is no mill capacity left to process the small live trees that need to come off the forest to restore ecological function and prevent future destructive wildfire.
We have chosen to sacrifice the living to scavenge the dead.
To save our forests, we need a new kind of timber industry: if the existing industry won't step up, then they will be forced out of business.
- 100 years of management for maximum timber yields leaves us with unhealthy forest structure where fire-resistant large trees have been replaced by torchy small trees and brush, and resilient patchiness and diversity is replaced by tree farm-like homogeneity and monocultural forest stands.
- 100 years of taking the fire-resistant logs out of the forest and leaving the waste branches, needles, brush, and other small wood has piled fuel deeply on the ground, here in dry climates where rot is too slow to keep up.
- 100 years of suppression of regular, natural, small fires has left us with a massive build up of fuels, so that when things do finally catch fire, the entire forest is destroyed. Fire suppression efforts in California alone cost us $1.5B a year, and yet we are doubling the amount of burned up acreage every year now, with over a million-acres lost in California alone in 2017.
Some people, betrayed again and again by the false claims of the timber industry, feel we should just let it burn: let nature reset the balance.
But these forests established as the ice sheet retreated...followed by Native Americans. These people managed the new forests from their very beginnings, lighting low-intensity, healthy fires for 13,000 years, fires that established patchiness and productivity. The forests (and the things that live in forests) evolved to need this low-intensity fire to keep the woods thinned, patchy and healthy.
Now, climate conditions have warmed and dried, so where forests are removed by catastrophic fire, they will not always be able to return. If we want to even have forests 100 years from now, we need to actively intervene to get natural, low intensity fire back into the system. To do that, we first need to remove accumulated fuels, and restructure our forests for ecological function. We now understand how to do that.
It turns out that when you bring everyone to the table and consider their needs--whether loggers, environmentalist, wildlife biologists, recreationists or local communities--you get a forest treatment prescription that yields more wood, more habitat, and no less fuel reduction than traditional, unhealthy timber management. The difference is that which trees stay and which go is decided based on what is best for the long-term health of the forest, not on what the timber industry cherry-picks to maximize their profits today.
The problem is that the US timber industry is clinging to the past. They still want to harvest big trees, when there really aren't many left, and that policy is what created this disaster. Most of the developed world has already transitioned to small tree forestry, but public policy in the US is delaying that transition here. In a sad case of unforeseen consequences, we decided to give away for free all the dead trees from beetle kill and forest fire in the west. That means that there is no mill capacity left to process the small live trees that need to come off the forest to restore ecological function and prevent future destructive wildfire.
We have chosen to sacrifice the living to scavenge the dead.
To save our forests, we need a new kind of timber industry: if the existing industry won't step up, then they will be forced out of business.
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