[MCN] Did Missoulian just purge their own great article about wildfires and logging?

[Matthew Koehler]

Hello:

Many of you in Missoula may have woken up today and read this very in-depth
article from reporter David Erickson featuring a number of University of
Montana experts.

About an hour ago, the weblink to this story stopped working. Also, the
article was featured prominently on the Missoulian's website, both their
homepage and news page, but now all that has been removed too. It was a
"trending story" on the Missoulian's website, but that too was removed.
Also, the Missoulian made a Facebook post featuring the article, but that
FB post has also been taken down.

Perhaps this is just a case of a Missoulian staff member making an error,
which the paper will quickly correct. Or perhaps – given all the political
rhetoric about wildfire, public lands logging and 'environmental
extremists' – there's some type of censorship or purge going on here.

In any case, here's the article in case it remains purged from the
Missoulian's website.

Experts: More logging and thinning to battle wildfires might just burn
taxpayer dollars

- DAVID ERICKSON david.erickson at missoulian.com
<https://missoulian.com/users/profile/ericksonmedia>

http://missoulian.com/news/local/experts-more-logging-and-
thinning-to-battle-wildfires-might-just/article_4950dbb8-
e3be-59c9-ab9c-ecde60e0593c.html

In the wake of one of the worst fire seasons in Montana history, Montana
lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and many others have called for more logging
and thinning in forests as a way to “fireproof” the state and create more
jobs at timber mills.

But several wildfire experts say the simplistic notion that fuel reduction
will somehow stop wildfires or reduce their severity is deeply flawed. And
at worst, it could waste taxpayer dollars.

That’s because, according to years of research, fire managers would need a
crystal ball that tells them when and where to thin forests, and even then
drought and heat are still going to drive fires. One fire expert likens it
to playing the lottery, because the odds of a fire starting in an area
that’s been managed are so low.

Logging and thinning every one of the hundreds of millions of acres of the
vast Western forests every 10 years or so would be the only way to rig that
lottery, and that would be nearly impossible, expensive for taxpayers and
quite likely a natural disaster.

“We can’t let politicians make promises for us that we can’t deliver on,”
said Andrew Larson, an associate professor of forest ecology at the
University of Montana.

***

*Despite significant increases* in areas burned since 1970 due to rising
temperatures, wildfires only burn about 1 percent of Western U.S. forests
even in the worst years. As the climate gets warmer and drier they will
continue to burn not only near communities, but also in remote,
high-elevation, inaccessible terrain.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Montana
<https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_journals/2016/rmrs_2016_barnett_k001.pdf> found
that only about 7 percent of fuel-reduction treatment areas in the entire
United States were subsequently hit by wildfires since 1999. This past
summer, fires burned more than 1 million acres of Montana’s 94 million
acres of land, but they were scattered around the state in both
low-elevation wildland-urban interfaces and deep in the high-elevation
backcountry.

That means there are very few opportunities for fires to actually burn in
places that have been thinned or even could have been thinned in the last
10 years before they regrow.

So why not just thin more and increase the chances of hitting that lottery?
It could work if it’s done strategically in the wildland-urban interface,
according to many experts. But the fires like the 160,000-acre Rice Ridge
fire near Seeley Lake that choked western Montana with smoke this summer
burned large amounts of areas in wilderness areas.

If someone had the magical ability to predict, within the past decade, that
a major fire was going to strike that particular portion of the
240,000-acre Scapegoat Wilderness, then thinning and logging theoretically
could have helped. But it doesn’t work that way, and fires are sparked in
random places by lightning and humans, and they are pushed by erratic winds
and weather.

***

*According to Tania Schoennagel,* a forest landscape ecologist and fire
researcher at the University of Colorado, a warming climate in the western
United States means that fires are here to stay and fire managers would be
better served using taxpayer dollars if they focused their efforts on fuel
treatments around homes and infrastructure.

“Thinning can help protect the things we value where people live in the
wildland-urban interface, but it will not make wildfires and large-acreage
burns go away,” she said. “Thinning, no matter how much we increase the
rate of it, will not be able to outpace the influence of warming on
wildfire area burned.”

Schoennagel, who specializes in the implications of forest management
policy, said the argument that more logging and thinning would reduce or
prevent catastrophic wildfires is “hard to break apart” because it seems so
sound without looking deep into the scientific research that’s been done on
the subject.

“Did they know last year that those areas were going to burn this year?”
she asked of the fires that burned in Montana this year. “It’s always easy,
especially ex post facto, looking back to say, ‘Darn it, if only we had
thinned or logged, we would be psyched.’ But it’s little bit of a crapshoot
probability game whether the treatment you put in is going to encounter
wildfire in the 10 to 15 years it remains effective in reducing fire
severity. Simply because forests in the West are so vast, the chance of
burning in a place we’ve pre-treated is so low. It’s not a very effective
lever. We don’t know where fires are going to happen.”

On May 17, Schoennagel testified in front of the U.S. House of
Representatives' Subcommittee on Federal Lands hearing that was titled
“Seeking Better Management of America’s Overgrown, Fire-Prone National
Forests.”

She said that most forests in the West are not overgrown due to past
suppression, and forest management tools like thinning and prescribed burns
can’t outpace the rise in wildfires.

“However, if strategically placed, such management can reduce fire
severity, help firefighters protect communities and hopefully reduce the
cost and risk of suppression,” she said.

Schoennagel and a team of other fire and forest experts recently published
a research paper called “Adapt to more wildfire in western North American
forests as climate changes.”
<https://headwaterseconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/Adapt_To_More_Wildfire.pdf>

In it, they argue that the current approaches to fighting and attempting to
prevent wildfires through suppression and fuels management are inadequate.

The team contends that fuels reduction “cannot alter regional wildfire
trends” and that new approaches are needed. Those include targeting fuels
reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential
communities to more frequent fire, actively managing more wild and
prescribed fires with a range of severity, and giving incentives and
planning for residential development to withstand inevitable fire.

Schoennagel told the subcommittee that a wide range of scientific studies
has found that since the 1970s, temperatures have risen by an average of 2
degrees Fahrenheit, snowpack is melting one to four weeks earlier than
historically normal, and fire seasons are almost three months longer. In
the 1970s, there were 20 large fires per year and now there are more than
100 large fires every year.

“Further warming is expected, 2-4 degrees Fahrenheit in the next few
decades, which will spark ever more wildfires, perhaps beyond the ability
of many Western communities to cope,” she testified.

“The area burned is tightly correlated with warming in the West, no matter
how much thinning we do," she told the Missoulian. "Thinning can reduce
fire severity if that thinned area burns, and help us fight some fires, but
it’s not going to stop the increase in area burned in the West. Fires
simply burn when it’s hot and dry, and it’s getting hotter and drier on
average.”

***

*Back in September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke* directed all land
managers at all levels under the Department’s supervision to “adopt more
aggressive practices, using the full authority of the Department, to
prevent and combat the spread of catastrophic wildfires through robust
fuels reduction and pre-suppression techniques.”

Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte, both Montana Republicans, have
called for more forest management in recent months. Both have also assailed
what they call “environmental extremists” that they say stall logging
projects with lawsuits.

“Here’s one of the problems we have in Montana,” Daines said during a
recent teleconference in which he took calls while on a video screen
broadcast on a Facebook live feed. “We have radical environmentalists who
are blocking projects to remove dead trees even in some cases, lodgepoles
that died from insect infestation. We have radical environmentalists that
do not represent the vast majority of Montanans who believe in a common
sense balanced, approach. They stop these projects.”

Larson, the fire ecologist at UM, doesn’t want to take sides, but he is
pushing back on the notion that “environmental extremists” are the bogeymen
causing wildfires.

“I don’t think there is a scientific basis to blame environmentalists who
have litigated and held up individual projects,” he said. “We can’t prevent
fires. It’s not an attainable goal. Environmentalists are acting entirely
within the law. They’re not doing anything illegal or unethical, and
they’re using the same mechanisms available to all the rest of us to
participate in public land management.

"So where does responsibility lie there? If we take away the ability for
those environmental groups to participate, we also would be removing our
own ability as private citizens, as engaged participants in public land
management. It cuts both ways.”

Larson said he realizes that smoky air is a terrible burden for people in
the summer, but he also agrees that aggressive thinning and logging
wouldn’t help.

“The smoke issue in a year like this is intractable, but we’re not going to
stop it,” he said. “Imagine a scenario where we had aggressively restored
forests all over western Montana so that those forests were resilient to
fire. In a year like this, once a fire is ignited, the spread is so rapid
it’s going to burn into mountain forests where there is no ecological or
economic rationale to have ever done logging in those forests. Even if you
had treated those, we would still be breathing smoke. The scale of area so
greatly exceeds what we could ever treat, so we’re still going to have
those smoke problems.”

Larson said he understands that people are looking for a scapegoat.

“It’s a difficult thing to hear,” he said of the scientific conclusion that
preventing wildfires is impossible. “The natural tendency is to blame
somebody. But fire is overwhelmingly driven by summer drought. About 80
percent of the year-to-year variation of fire frequency and size is
explained just by summer climate. There is also an overwhelming amount of
evidence that humans are causing these global climate impacts.”

Daines, on a tour of the Lolo Peak fire earlier this summer, said the
“climate has always been changing.”

“Go back to 1910,” he said. “We had the Big Burn, 3 million acres. In 1930s
we had the Dust Bowl. My ancestors living up on the Hi-Line had to leave
our state to go to Canada. The climate has always been changing. We go
through warmer cycles, cooler cycles, droughts, etc., extra precipitation.
We are in a warm cycle right now. We are in drought conditions here in
Montana and consequently we’re having a severe fire season.”

Larson agreed that 1910 was an “epic” drought year.

“It’s absolutely true that there is variability in the climate and drought
is worse in certain years,” he said. “That doesn’t somehow negate the fact
that humans are causing the climate to warm.”

Larson also said that fires are an essential part of the ecosystem. For
example, although most people associate wildfires with a short-term loss in
the water quality of nearby streams because loose soil erodes into the
waterway, it provides long-term benefits.

“Over the long term you can only have healthy stream habitat with periodic
delivery of large wood and sediment into aquatic network,” he said. “There
are short-term negative consequences to waterways after a fire, with
turbidity and fine sediments, but it’s better over the bigger, longer-term
picture.”

Larson also said that many species, such as the black-backed woodpecker,
have evolved to live in burned areas. He also said fires play an important
role in cycling organic matter into forests.

***

*Schoennagel **is trying* to convince more people that dry, low-elevation
forests are where thinning is both most ecologically appropriate and where
fires tend to burn more frequently. She said that’s where fire managers
should focus their efforts, especially around the wildland-urban interface
near communities. Research has shown that humans start the majority of
wildfires <http://www.pnas.org/content/114/11/2946.full>, so thinning there
is also probably more likely to encounter fire than in the backcountry.

High-elevation forests tend to burn very infrequently because they are
cooler and wetter on average, she added, so the chance of a thinned area to
burn there is much lower and these forests burn at high severity naturally,
so there is no ecological need to reduce severity there.

“Combined, strategically thinning dry low-elevation forests and near the
wildland-urban interface is a win-win,” she said. “It reduces fire severity
where it’s needed ecologically, and helps protect people and homes. But
importantly, such treatments would have a better chance of encountering a
fire."

***

*Kevin Barnett, a research associate* in the Department of Economics at the
University of Montana, collaborated with a team of researchers to quantify
the frequency and extent of fire and fuel treatment interactions on federal
lands across the U.S.

“The Hazardous Fuels Reduction Program received a lot of financial
investment and resources over the past 15 years,” he explained. “We treat
quite a lot of landscapes each year. And less than 10 percent of that had
even burned by a subsequent fire. So that raises more broad general
questions over the efficacy of fuel treatments to change regional fire
patterns.”

Since 2006 when the Forest Service allocated about $290 million per year
for the hazardous fuels reduction, there has been a steady rise in the
discretionary funding allocated to that program. Barnett said in fiscal
year 2017 the Forest Service spent roughly $375 million on the program
<https://www.fs.fed.us/sites/default/files/usfs-fy18-budget-overview.pdf>.

“It boils down to: Not a whole lot of the treated area we’ve put in has
been impacted by fire,” he said. "It raises questions about the
cost-effectiveness of fuel treatments."
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