More logging won’t curb wildfire smoke

With wildfires sweeping across 10 million acres of Canada’s forests in recent weeks, residents of New York and other northeastern U.S. cities and towns have struggled with wildfire smoke, and the irritation of eyes and lungs that it can cause. The conversations under the hazy, orange-tinted skies in recent days have turned political. People are concerned. They want answers, and solutions. Unfortunately, in response, some elected officials are offering mainly misinformation, cynical opportunism, and a new form of climate denialism. 

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) used the Canadian fires to promote the view that more logging on our national forests will somehow stop wildfires and the smoke they produce. Daines opined, “Unfortunately, this is what happens when you have more lawyers in your forest crawling around versus loggers and when your forests aren’t managed properly.” Some Democrats have also pushed for new policies that would weaken environmental laws and increase taxpayer funding to facilitate more logging on public and private forestlands under the guise of forest fire management. Lawmakers are now eyeing the upcoming farm bill reauthorization as a legislative vehicle for such policies. 

But this approach ignores the large and rapidly growing body of science telling us that wildfires are driven mainly by weather and climate factors, and climate change, and that denser, more carbon-rich forests have microclimates that moderate wildfire behavior. Many scientific studies are finding that logging, including timber sales euphemistically promoted under terms like “thinning” and “fuel reduction”, cause the opposite effect, making fires burn hotter and faster. Many of the U.S. Forest Service’s own scientists are now acknowledging this. 

As one study recently concluded after a large-scale analysis, “More open forests with lower biomass had higher fire severity, because the type of open, lower-biomass forests resulting from thinning and other logging activities have ‘hotter, drier, and windier microclimates…’” 

In fact, logging is a double-whammy because it not only exacerbates wildfire behavior, it also worsens the climate crisis, according to hundreds of U.S. climate scientists and ecologists. This, in turn, creates conditions for more extreme wildfires, resulting in a vicious cycle. 

Currently, and for many years, Congress, the administration, and federal agencies have focused wildfire policies almost entirely on promoting increased logging in remote U.S. forests. The public has been told, over and over again, that our forests are “overgrown” and that removing millions of trees will curb wildfires and the smoke they produce, and in the process will also protect towns from such fires. These are dangerous falsehoods that are putting the health and safety of Americans at greater risk on multiple levels. 

In addition to increasing carbon emissions into our atmosphere, these logging policies are giving vulnerable towns in fire country a false sense of security, and are often making fires spread more intensely and faster toward communities, robbing residents of precious time they need to evacuate. We saw this in the Camp fire of 2018 in California, which killed 86 people and destroyed over 14,000 homes. Moreover, the continuing misplaced focus on backcountry logging is diverting resources and funding away from the things that will actually help, such as home hardening and defensible space pruning around homes, indoor air filters for at-risk people, and public education campaigns to inform people about how they can minimize their exposure when wildfire smoke is significant. 

Wildfires are inevitable. Like those burning in Canada currently, fires in more remote forests are often ignited by lightning strikes during dry, windy conditions. No amount of taxpayer subsidies for more logging, and no level of fire suppression activities, will stop such fires once they begin moving. They are fundamentally weather events, and you can’t fight the wind with a chainsaw. Nor can you stop the wind with any level of air tankers or other industrial fire suppression machinery.

Big fires burn until temperatures cool, relative humidity increases, and the wind dies down. We are not in control of wildfires. We do, however, have the power to influence whether towns burn down, and the extent of human health impacts from wildfire smoke, but only if Congress and the administration break their ties with the logging industry and change course on wildfire policies for the greater public good. 

Chad Hanson, Ph.D., is a forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project, and is the author of the book, “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.