Why are prescribed fires so important to prevent wildfires?
Adam Mendonca, deputy fire director with the U.S. Forest Service, explains why prescribed fires, also known as controlled burns, are critical to prevent wildfires.
The Trump administration last Saturday touted logging as the next frontier in job creation and wildfire prevention, but those goals will face confounding challenges.
Trump issued two executive orders on March 1: the first to boost timber production on federal land and the second to address wood product imports. The moves were quickly cheered by the timber industry.
“These are common sense directives,” said Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry trade group. “Our federal forests have been mismanaged for decades and Americans have paid the price in almost every way – lost jobs, lost manufacturing, and infrastructure.”
Timber groups and rural lawmakers also said the orders could help manage overstocked forests and reduce the threat of wildfire.
But conservation groups and forestry experts say cutting down more trees doesn’t inherently reduce wildfire risk and can actually increase it. And the Trump administration’s plan also faces pushback about environmental concerns and economics.
Meanwhile, the logging surge is expected to face legal pushback. Groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice say they are pursuing all of their options, including litigation, to potentially prevent Trump’s directives from taking effect.
Will more logging help prevent wildfires?
The Trump administration says increased logging and wildfire prevention go hand-in-hand.
A March 1 executive order links logging regulations with a list problems: “Our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply has impeded the creation of jobs and prosperity, contributed to wildfire disasters, degraded fish and wildlife habitats, increased the cost of construction and energy, and threatened our economic security.”
But logging more timber and dealing with increased fire risk “are really two separate problems,” according to Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he oversees the forestry program.
A multitude of factors fuel wildfires, including:
- Too few natural fires: U.S. Forest Service fire suppression efforts that began in the early part of the 1900s mean that many U.S. forests – which evolved to burn every five to 30 years – are now unnaturally overgrown and at risk for catastrophic fires.
- Climate change: A warming planet has led to increased drought and temperatures, leaving landscapes more fire-prone.
- Disease: A rise in bark beetle infestations has killed large swaths of trees, adding potential fuel to forests.
- Lack of forest management: This process is labor intensive and expensive, but it can keep small fires from becoming conflagrations. It involves controlled burns and mechanical thinning, which can make forests more resistant to catastrophic fires.
Environmental groups say logging doesn’t address these issues, in part because natural, mature forests are more resilient to wildfire than timber plantations would be.
“Logging doesn’t curb fires, it intensifies fires. Trump falsely claims that more logging will curb wildfires and protect communities, but there’s an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence showing the exact opposite,” said Chad Hanson, a co-founder of the John Muir Project. “The more trees you remove, the faster wildfire flames sweep through the forest. It gives less time for people to evacuate and less time for first responders to react.”
Wildfires move faster because removing trees reduces wind resistance, allowing winds to sweep through faster, Hanson added.
“Also, removing trees reduces the ‘cooling shade of the forest canopy,’ creating those hotter and drier conditions,” Hanson said. “When the forest canopy is reduced, it stimulates the growth of combustible invasive grasses, which like a lot of sunlight. Grasses spread flames faster.”
More logging would not have affected the Los Angeles fires. The land that surrounds the areas that burned is largely chaparral, a type of scrubland, said Ernesto Alvarado, a professor of forestry and forest fires at the University of Washington.
“There are no commercially useful trees there,” he said. “You cannot harvest trees where there are no trees.”
Many of the most destructive fires in recent years have been driven by conditions it’s unclear any amount of forest management could have stopped, said Mindy Crandall, a professor and forest economist at Oregon State University.
“Those fires in Los Angeles were in 90 mile per hour winds and extremely dry conditions,” she said.
Economic boost from logging? There are logistical challenges.
Currently, about 70% of U.S. timber needs are supplied by domestic production and 30% by Canada and small amounts from other countries. About 50% of U.S. forest land is privately owned, according to the National Association of State Foresters, which the executive order doesn’t impact.
The U.S. Lumber Coalition has cheered Trump’s actions, especially possible additional tariffs on timber imports. The trade group says Canada’s lumber industry is unfairly subsidized by the country’s government, making it tough for U.S. producers to compete.
Tariffs making imported wood and timber more expensive could drive up demand for U.S. sources. However, some of the infrastructure that once supported the U.S. timber industry no longer exists, said Alvarado. Smaller sawmills were uneconomical and closed.
“In the short term, we have fixed capacity,” Crandall said. The uncertainty will make it difficult for new mills to be built. “Businesses aren’t going to build out increased capacity for an increase that might only last three or four years.”
U.S. timber production has decreased since the 1990s, according to the Congressional Research Service. It’s partly due to falling demand and cheaper imports from other countries.
Some of the trained workforce left the field, in part due to low wages.
“You can’t just take people off the streets and have them start cutting trees,” said the University of Washington’s Alvarado. “It’s a risky job.”
Complicating the issue further: In many areas of national forests, current trees are “the wrong size and the wrong species for the forest industry to process,” he said.
Other environmental impacts
Expanding logging operations also comes with environmental concerns, including how felled trees could release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Logging, including thinning, emits at least three to five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per acre than wildfire alone, according to Hanson. Most of the wood removed from forests through logging is burned for energy, he noted.
Randi Spivak, a public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity, argued the orders would cause major destruction. Spivak agreed that “stripping these beautiful spaces” increases the danger for more wildfires but added they could put about 400 threatened and endangered species ‒ including grizzly bears, wild salmon, salamanders and spotted owls ‒ at risk.
“The gloves are off, Trump is purely looking at our federal forests not as valued land but merely as pieces of property,” Spivak said Tuesday. “Trump views our public lands merely as commodities, whether it’s oil and gas, whether it’s mining or creating timber, he views these as places he can loot and exploit.”
The Trump executive order is being extensively discussed in forestry circles, but not enough is known about what it means and how it will be implemented, said Crandall.
“There’s a lot being proposed for changes right now,” she said. “We have all these interactions: different types of land owners, the demand question, the tariff piece. There’s just a lot we don’t know.”