Last year, 2,568,948 acres burned in forest fires in California according to the estimations of Cal Fire, the state department of forestry and fire protection. San Jose State environmental studies professors discussed the controversial idea of forest thinning, its potential and its risks.
A study set to be published in Forest Ecology and Management on March 1 suggests cutting western trees by up to 80% could rescue the U.S. western forests from severe wildfires, drought, infestations and climate change, according to a Feb.3 Bloomberg article.
“We realized there were too many straws in the ground,” U.S. Forest Service research ecologist and professor at UC Davis Malcolm North said in the Bloomberg article. “And that density needed to be way reduced if you’re going to make trees resistant to both wildfire and drought.”
Researchers found the lack of water competition in sparser forests would allow individual trees to survive and grow and would therefore produce bigger and healthier trees resistant to recurring fires, dry spells, insects and disease.
Chad Hanson is a forest and fire research ecologist who’s critical of forest thinning. He explained the danger of it in his book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.”
According to his book, the U.S. Forest Service started using terms like “thinning” over “logging” in the mid-1990s, when the public became aware of the widespread clearcutting of mature and old forests on public lands in the Pacific Northwest.
He said the U.S. Forest Service would see an economic benefit from selling public trees to private industrial logging companies.
According to an Aug. 24 article written by Hanson on the non-profit website Grist, which is dedicated to environmental news, logging would bring in more than $1 billion in annual congressional dedicated funds, generating additional revenue that is going back into the U.S. Forest Service’s budget.
“The U.S. Forest service has always been intentionally linked to the logging industry,” SJSU environmental studies professor William Russell said in a Zoom call.
Russell said the agency was created to manage the nation’s forests as a sustainable resource, not to preserve an ecosystem. Like Hanson, Russell sees forest thinning from a critical perspective.
“I think all of this is based on this misconception that, if you remove enough fuels . . . then you’re reducing the fire hazard, right, that’s the idea of thinning,” Russell said.
He said if some trees are removed, more forest superficy will be exposed to sunlight, which will dry potential fire fuels and expose the region to strong wind. All these conditions gathered would increase wildfire and drought risks.
“Forest thinning in remote areas does little or nothing to help prevent fires,” Russell said. “It can actually make them worse.”
Russell focused most of his research on redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He said the forests are adapted to fire and are disease resistant but they also represent extremely valuable timber.
“There’s been a big push to do forest thinning in the Redwood forest,” Russell said. “It makes no sense ecologically, whatsoever.”
Russell said forest thinning could be justified in particular areas under precise conditions.
The Lake Tahoe Basin National Forest was entirely logged around 100 years ago, Russell said. In this area, trees are growing very closely together and are the same age.
He said it became a very dense forest not adapted to recurrent fire and prone to disease propagation that killed trees and produced a dry landscape.
“In a situation like that . . . there might be an argument for doing forest thinning,” Russell said.
Russell said if forest thinning should be done, it would have to be next to houses and other structures.
“If you're talking about forest service lands 20 miles away from a town, or 50 miles away, there's really no point in doing that,” Russell said.
Beyond the controversy about forest thinning, fire needs to be reconceptualized, said SJSU environmental studies lecturer Rachel Lazzeri-Aerts.
“For a long time, there was this big ‘Oh, setting fires is bad, it's counterproductive,’ ” Lazzeri-Aerts said. “And this idea that fires are bad originates with the timber industry . . . and commercial logging.”
When forests are burned in wildfires, they can’t be cut down and exploited as an economic resource, Lazzeri-Aerts said.
Lazzeri-Aerts and Russell believe in prescribed burning benefits, a forest management concept used by Indigenous groups in Western U.S. forests. In targeted locations, groups used controlled fire to efficiently reduce fuel load and increase the health of a particular landscape.
“They've been doing it for centuries,” Lazzeri-Aerts said. “We should be listening to them as practitioners and knowledge holders.”
Even if some people could be worried by prescribed burning impact on air quality and the risks of a fire escaping, Russell said that it would be preferred over forest thinning.
Katherina Forrest, an SJSU meteorology and climate science graduate research assistant, is part of the SJSU Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center.
Forrest’s position on forest thinning and prescribed burning echoes Russell’s statements.
“I think that I personally wouldn't advocate for forest thinning … it just really seems like deforestation,” Forrest said. “[But] doing these prescribed fires can help mitigate future intense … fires in these areas.”
Forrest said fires in targeted locations help fertilize the soil by bringing extra nutrients from disintegrated fuels.
The important aspect about prescribed burning is that trees stay in the forest and continue to participate in the ecosystem, even if they burn, Hanson said.
The 2022 Congressional Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act planned to give $500 million to thinning projects conducted in an “ecologically appropriate manner.”
Russell said he was not surprised about this decision and believes it is economically motivated.
“If you're building a bill, like the infrastructure bill, and you have part of that bill that is going to produce revenue and not discuss money, well, that looks good on the ledgers,” Russell said. “It's problematic because … they're applying it in a blanket treatment for all forest types, which would be counterproductive.”
