[MCN] Scientists: More Logging Won’t Stop Wildfires

[Matthew Koehler]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/more-logging-wont-stop-wildfires.html

More Logging Won’t Stop Wildfires

*By CHAD T. HANSON and DOMINICK A. DELLASALA*

JULY 23, 2015

IN the fall of 2013, shortly after fire swept across 257,000 acres of
forest and shrub lands near Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra
Nevada, Republicans in the House of Representatives approved a bill that
would have suspended environmental laws to increase logging in our national
forests in the name of fire prevention and “restoration.”

Fortunately, the legislation never made it out of Congress. But it is fire
season again in the West and, predictably, House Republicans have struck
again, passing a similar measure, almost entirely along party lines, that
all but gives away public forests to logging companies. A similar bill
promoted by three Western Republicans is now before the Senate.

Just as they did in 2013, supporters of this legislation are using the
public’s fear of forest fires to advance their agenda. They argue that
overgrown and “unhealthy” forests raise the risk of wildfires, and that the
government has been hampered by litigation and environmental reviews from
allowing timber companies to thin forests to reduce the risk of fire.

Accordingly, this legislation would allow more logging on federal lands,
including clear cutting, by exempting some logging from environmental
reviews entirely, limiting oversight in other cases and making it much more
difficult to challenge harmful logging projects in court.

The legislation is rooted in falsehoods and misconceptions.

Some of the bill’s supporters claim that environmental laws regulating
commercial logging have led to more intense fires. But, as we saw in the
2013 fire near Yosemite, known as the Rim Fire and one of the largest in
California history, commercial logging and the clear-cutting of forests do
not reduce fire intensity.

In the case of the Rim Fire, our research found that protected forest areas
with no history of logging burned least intensely. There was a similar
pattern in other large fires in recent years. Logging removes the mature,
thick-barked, fire-resistant trees. The small trees planted in their place
and the debris left behind by loggers act as kindling; in effect, the
logged areas become combustible tree plantations that are poor wildlife
habitat.

The bill’s supporters also argue that increasing logging and clear-cutting
will benefit wildlife. But decades of forest ecology research strongly link
the logging of both unburned and burned forests to the declines of numerous
wildlife species, most notably the imperiled spotted owl.

Recognizing these findings, some 250 scientists sent a letter to Congress
in 2013 opposing a similar version of the current legislation. They
predicted, correctly, that the Rim Fire would actually benefit many
wildlife species and rejuvenate the forest ecosystem, provided that the
burned expanses were not then cleared by loggers.

As it turned out, a team of scientists investigating wildlife use of those
forest patches that burned at high intensity found a “rich habitat” for
birds because of increases in native insects that serve as food.

And a recent study
<http://www.eenews.net/assets/2015/04/30/document_pm_02.pdf> by biologists
at the Wild Nature Institute <http://www.wildnatureinstitute.org/> found
that California spotted owls stuck around after the Rim Fire, and that
their use of burned areas, where they nest and forage, was actually higher
than that of the unburned, old forests that are generally associated with
these owls.

Since the Rim Fire, we have observed hundreds of naturally regenerating
pine and fir seedlings per acre — many already knee-high — and rapidly
growing oak saplings in the unlogged high-intensity burn patches. We
observed far fewer seedlings in heavily logged sites, where logging
tractors and the dragging of logs across fragile soils crushed regenerating
trees.

In fact, there is an emerging consensus among ecologists that patches of
high-intensity fire, where flames kill most or all of the trees, create one
of the rarest, most threatened and most ecologically important wildlife
habitats in Western conifer forests — a snag forest. Large dead trees,
called snags, which proponents of the logging legislation want to remove,
are especially important to forest renewal in anchoring soils, shading
young conifers from intense sunlight and providing habitat for scores of
insect-eating bats, birds and small mammals.

Contrary to widespread misconceptions, large fires burn mostly at low and
moderate intensities. For example, only about 20 percent of the Rim Fire
was high-intensity, and only a portion of the land involved was densely
forested enough to create snag forest habitat. Moreover, current science
indicates that we have less, not more, mixed-intensity wildland fire in our
forests now than we did historically. Allowing more fires to burn in
backcountry areas will help restore our forest ecosystems.

Of course, the combination of drought and hotter temperatures in the West
presents real concerns for rural communities in and around these forests.
But the only effective way to protect rural homes from fire is to reduce
the flammability of the homes by building with fire-resistant materials and
reducing vegetation within 200 feet or so. Continuing to spend over $1
billion of taxpayer funds each year fighting mostly backcountry fires does
not protect homes or drinking water reservoirs, and it unnecessarily puts
firefighters at risk.

The great conifer forest ecosystems of the Western United States were born
to burn. They are renewed by fire. Logging after a fire destroys a forest’s
ability to rejuvenate.

The Senate should reject this legislation, and President Obama
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
should
veto it if it reaches his desk.

Chad T. Hanson is an ecologist with the John Muir Project,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/www.johnmuirproject.org> and
Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist at the Geos Institute.
<http://www.geosinstitute.org/> They are the editors of “The Ecological
Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20150723/17ef6bef/attachment-0002.html>