Krystina Skurk wrote recently at the Federalist that environmentalists are the true culprits in the California forest fires (See The Federalist). Their supposed opposition to the use of prescribed burning and forest thinning, and their support for too many regulations has allegedly allowed the forests to become too prone to catastrophic fires. However, in accordance with her extensive history of association with conservative institutions, she reflects the tendencies of conservatives to oversimplify, misrepresent statistics, and ignore the valid points of the other side. Though she claims that blaming the fires on dry conditions or human causes “misses the big picture,” it is she who misses the big picture and lacks a comprehensive understanding of forest fires today.
In the light of Secretary of the Interior Zinke’s ignorant August opinion piece on forest fires and Trump’s more recent, and even more ignorant words about the California forest fires, it’s important to shed some honest light on this issue.
First off, are environmentalists opposed to the prescribed burning and forestry thinning practices she champions? She provides utterly no evidence that they are opposed. It is simply something she assumes and expects readers to accept uncritically. But if you do her homework for her, you will find that environmentalists take different positions on these practices. In general, environmentalists follow the scientific recommendations, which sometimes favor prescribed burning and thinning, and sometimes don’t. Scientific studies, for example, have shown that thinning a forest can actually increase its susceptibility to fire because the reduced density will allow more drying from the wind, and thus worse fires. Also, environmentalists are skeptical of many forest thinning proposals because often the thinning gets done, but not the necessary cleanup and management of the area afterwards, thus leading to greater fire danger and erosion. In recent years, the federal Canadian forests in British Columbia were logged at an increasing rate (perhaps as a response to reduced harvesting in the United States, by the way). However, the fire acreage there increased instead of decreasing. Note finally that the forests of the western United States cover vast amounts of often rugged land. There is literally no way we can perform enough prescribed burns or thin all the forests.
Skurk also tries to blame overregulation as the reason more forests in California are not logged (with the unproven assumption here that the environmentalists put all these regulations into place). But the statistic she cites does nothing to prove her point. She says that in one year in California private forest owners got permits for only 3 million of the 8 million privately owned timber acres. Does she actually think that every year there should be cutting permits for a high percentage of the timberland? What if that timberland is not economically feasible to log because it is in remote and rugged areas? What if it has been previously logged and needs to regrow?
She tries to shock the reader into thinking that the number of acres is rising exponentially by giving the statistic that “In 1993, 1,797,574 acres of wildlands burned, but in 2017 this number jumped to 10,026,086 acres.” While it is true that in the last thirty years there has been an overall upward trend in the acres burn, a look at the year to year numbers shows a great degree of variation, not a sudden jump from 1.7 to 10.0 million acres. Skurk cherry-picked the lowest value she could find as her comparison point, but there have been numbers almost as high as 2017 at several points in the last 25 years. Note also that in earlier years, the number of acres was possibly much higher. The data for the early twentieth century is not as reliable or systematic, but the National Interagency Fire Center reports that 1930 may have seen as many as 52 million acres burned.
Environmentalists are not to blame for the increase in intense forest fires. For that, you can blame many decades of excessive fire suppression, starting well before the environmental movement took off, and now in more recent decades the effects of climate change. While it is true that we could increase the amount of prescribed burning and do more thinning of the forests, the gains will be limited. We simply can’t do enough prescribed burns nor can we thin the forests sufficiently, especially the vast, remote forests in the rugged areas of the West. Efforts will need to be focused on areas where more people live, and at the same time people must understand the risks of building homes in the midst of fire-prone areas. We also must recognize that a real reason for less timber cutting is a changing market. Wood products have been replaced by products made of other materials, or have been replaced by cheaper wood from overseas. Trump can open up more federal forest to logging, but it won’t make much difference if there is not enough demand for the product.
In the end, Skurk’s essay is just an evidence-free smear of enviromentalists. It puts her in good company with the many science-denying conservatives, but it does nothing to help us understand the true nature of the challenges the world will face from a changing climate.
