By Duncan Kennedy
Senior-level environmental science student at UNR
It is fire season season again in the American West, and just like in previous years, homes are threatened, lives are endangered, and the skies are choked with ash and soot – to say nothing of the thousands of trees burned to death in these fires. It seems like every passing year is another abnormal, historically bad fire season, and that’s because this is by and large the case. With the exception of 2019, every successive season in recent memory has been worse than the last, and with fires like the Beckwourth Complex, which burned just over 100,000 acres as of this writing, 2021 promises to be another historically bad year.
But why is this the case? Why does every successive fire season get worse, and what do we have to do in order to solve this issue that chokes our children, destroys our homes and blackens our beloved forests?
To understand how we got here, we must look to the arrival of the first European colonists in the American West. When Spanish missionaries sailed up the California coast, a thin haze of smoke seemed to hang over the state every summer – the result of 4.5 million estimated acres of low-intensity fires burning annually across the state, removing decadent vegetation and promoting healthy regeneration of the landscape. Some fires were set intentionally by Native Americans to create healthier environments for themselves; a form of traditional knowledge still practiced in some places today.
Fast-forward to 1910, when abnormal conditions created the firestorm of the century in the Idaho Panhandle region. Three million acres burned, 87 people died, and incalculable resources were lost. In a knee-jerk response to this once in a century or possibly once in a millennium event, the fledgling U.S Forest Service implemented a “10 AM policy” of extreme fire suppression in the American West, to prevent another “Big Burn”; this was, in hindsight, a mistake.
Despite removing fire from western landscapes, requisite disturbance to prevent decay in the wild was provided in a pale imitation by human action. Demand for building materials after World War II brought a lumber boom to the American West from the early 1950s until the late 1980s, helping stave off the threat of wildfires to a degree until decreased housing production and Canadian lumber trade agreements (currently hampered due to high tariffs) slowly tapered that economy.
Yet a lack of coherent management policy hindered these market-based measures in consistently preventing wildfires from reaching damaging proportions, and concerns about endangered species led to litigation by preservationist-dominated environmental groups and ultimately resulted in a federal injunction in 1991 on large-scale logging on National Forest land until a management plan existed for these species. Thirty years later, that management plan still does not exist.
As a side note, some blame for these modern fires can be placed on the preservationists for their actions since the 1980s in California forests and elsewhere, attempting to enforce a vision of nature that is incompatible with reality. All landscapes in this world are dynamic systems requiring disturbance to avoid decadence; these rules of nature invalidate the preservationist ethos of preserving nature in one state forever, as ecosystems do not exist in a vacuum and cannot be forced to without nature herself assuming control and resetting ecosystems through destructive means. The West is more in need of the vision and ideals of Gifford Pinchot than those of John Muir.
This brings us back to today, with fires now a part of life forcing millions of people to live in fear every summer of losing everything in a puff of ash and smoke; worse, the effects of today’s fires are more wide-reaching and nuanced than they appear. In 2020, California fires alone released 112 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, strengthening climate change and in turn amplifying drought conditions, creating worse fires in a positive feedback loop. It is worth noting that even without climate change, these fires would be terribly destructive – claiming that megafires would not exist without climate change would be a laughably false statement if it wasn’t so serious an issue.
Little is known about the long-term effects of small particulates in wildfire smoke on human health, and millions were forced to cope with PM 2.5 concentrations of 500 parts per million or more in 2020 – a level considered hazardous to human health. It is possible that we may see increased risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular issues in time among residents of western states and provinces due to a haze of wildfire smoke every summer. As a young man in the west, I admit I am concerned about the health issues I may face in the future because of these fires. Will I have lung cancer in 30 years? I don’t know, but I am not too keen on finding out.
The economy suffers every fire season too; sometimes, this is from obvious effects, such as the destruction of homes, businesses and crops; for instance, over a dozen historic vineyards in Napa County have burned in the past few years, putting a dent in the California wine industry. Other effects are more subtle – disruption of water supplies and quality to urban areas such as the Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin, and blackouts and brownouts of electrical supplies due to either caution over wildfire risks or damage to infrastructure by wildfires.
Millions of dollars are lost every time a wildfire inhibits the transportation of goods, services and people. In 2018, it was estimated that $148.5 billion was lost due to wildfires; a stark and shocking blowup compared to the 2008 fire season’s price tag of $1 billion, considered unprecedented at the time. Wildfires are a burden on the economy that even those not directly affected by them can no longer ignore.
What is to be done then? My answer, which may seem surprising or outrageous, is that the logging industry must be revived as a tool to curb the risk of wildfire in the West. The Sierra Nevada is stocked with anywhere between three and seven times more trees per acre than pre-colonial levels; many of them small and deformed trees only good for burning – and many would find it preferable that they burn in a controlled setting, such as in a slash pile for a prescribed burn or in a biomass generator to create renewable electricity, than to burn in a manner that threatens homes, lives and ecosystems.
If a management plan was crafted to implement large-scale selective logging and fuel reduction operations on public and private lands alike across the American West, the benefits would be tremendous. Rural economies would be revitalized, ecosystem health would rebound to its best in over a century, grid-scale renewable biomass energy would be possible in Western states, and above all else, nobody would have to fear losing everything in a puff of smoke again.
For an example of what is possible, in the early 1990s, Plumas County supervisor Bill Coates, environmental lawyer Michael Jackson and Sierra-Pacific Industries forester Tom Nelson made an attempt to solve that problem on the Plumas and Lassen National Forests, forming a group of concerned citizens, environmentalists and logging professionals known now as the Quincy Library Group. This group drafted a management plan, successfully lobbied Congress and achieved their first big milestone with the nigh-unanimous passage of the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Act in 1998.
According to a 2017 Plumas News update, 300,000 acres of timberland were treated, and 10,000 acres of riparian meadows were restored under the QLG’s plan. However, thanks to litigative delays, no economic boost came as a result, and the treatment area was not significant enough to stymie wildfires such as the Camp, North Complex and Beckwourth Complex fires that have ravaged the region since 2018. The QLG was neither aggressive enough in treatment nor large enough in scale, but it is a good framework to move forward from.
Some may still argue that logging must be kept away from forests due to a loss of intrinsic value, but the fact of the matter is that these forests will be logged one way or the other; it’s just a matter of if selectively logging live trees is better than salvage logging destroyed ecosystems; without the former happening, the latter is inevitable. Actions like the QLG’s plan, and management strategies like what the Collins Pine Company enacts on their Almanor Forest can go a long way in removing this risk.
In conclusion, environmentalists and concerned citizens must stop seeing logging as something to be fought against for the sake of our forests and start seeing it as a tool to be used to prevent the next great wildfire tragedy. Overstocked forests from a lack of natural disturbance have combined with climate change to create incalculably hazardous fire conditions that threaten millions of lives annually, and the solution to save a tree in the age of the megafire is to cut two others. As paradoxical as it sounds, the way to save the trees is to start the sawmills once more.
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Where I Stand: Save the trees; start the sawmills - Plumas County Newspapers
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