Trump’s executive order will cut more forest trees; CU Boulder professor says “we can’t log our way out of the fire problem”

Here’s the full article from the Washington Post, reprinted in the Denver Post. Some interesting snips from the article are below. Note: Emphasis added.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Jennifer Balch said in an email that while treating federal forests makes sense near homes, that policy prescription won’t make a serious dent in the size and intensity of wildfires out West. These fires have increased fivefold since the 1970s as temperatures have risen and snowpack has shrunk. Just 2 percent of lands treated by the Forest Service between 2004 and 2013 experienced a wildfire.

We can’t log our way out of the fire problem — thinning all the forests is not possible,” the fire ecologist said. “And even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently, and will in the future.

The Camp fire’s massive impact came into sharp focus Sunday, as the utility PG&E filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission suggesting it would file for bankruptcy because it faces more than $30 billion in liability in connection with the state’s wildfires. The company’s CEO, Geisha Williams, also stepped down Sunday.

Many California residents fault PG&E’s power lines for the wildfires that ravaged the state last year, and the matter is under investigation.

A piece published Nov. 30 in Geophysical Research Letters found that human-induced climate change now influences a fifth of the world’s fires.

Balch noted that the executive order did not address some kinds of the vegetation that makes communities vulnerable to fire, such as the chaparral that spread a fire in November that destroyed hundreds of Malibu-area homes. “You can’t log shrubs,” she said.

Despite the fact that the Forest Service is shuttered, officials there have given loggers permission to keep operating on existing sales — which was prohibited during both the 1995 and 2013 shutdowns — and are now exploring holding new auctions even if the government remains closed.

Agency officials informed staffers Thursday to figure out what it would take to bring back some furloughed employees for new timber sales, according to a federal official who was not authorized to speak on the record. Meanwhile, the important work of removing small vegetation and dry brush that serves as kindling for fires is not being done because of the shutdown, the longest in history as it enters its fourth week.

Employees working without pay and those funded by unspent appropriations from last fiscal year are managing the current harvests, the official said. Timber technicians who go through the forests to mark which trees should be cut are receiving their regular salary. But holding new sales would involve substantially more staff, the official noted.

Trump has repeatedly blamed devastating wildfires out West on poor forest management, rejecting the idea that climate change could be leading to a longer and more intense fire season in the United States.

Standing in the devastated town of Paradise, which the president mistakenly called “Pleasure,” Trump said the United States should follow the example of Finland, which spends “a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”…

The president has regularly asked advisers how he could punish California for what he deems as poor forestry. Trump has been told repeatedly that he cannot take away money that has already been appropriated for the disaster, according to individuals familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. Advisers have argued that taking such money from California would only hurt the citizens — not the elected officials he wants to punish….

“Our public lands are supposed to be managed in a way that benefits the people,” said Sam Evans, national forests and parks program leader for the Southern Environmental Law Center’s office in North Carolina. “Trump’s executive order does the exact opposite, by putting policies in place that cater to industry interests.

“It’s not telling the agencies to increase the number of communities protected from fire risks,” Evans said. “It’s telling them to put more logs on trucks, while cutting out environmental review, transparency and accountability to the public.”

19 thoughts on “Trump’s executive order will cut more forest trees; CU Boulder professor says “we can’t log our way out of the fire problem””

  1. While Logging isn’t the only part of the solution, it is a large part of it when combined with good management. The idea that the fires are the result of increased temperatures and lower snow pack is not invalid, but why is it effecting the size of fires on federal forest exponentially compared to private and State owned forests?

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  2. There is no proof that logging ( in the WUI) impacted the Camp Fire negatively. Same for salvage logging and tree planting, within the WUI.

    And, yes, salvage logging did continue in 1995, on the Rabbit Creek burn in the Boise National Forest.

    Most people who know about Forestry can see that Trump doesn’t know what he is talking about. He should not be considered a viable spokesman for the active management ‘community’.

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    • Thanks for sharing these before/after images of Paradise. They are certainly eye-opening and heart-breaking.

      I continue to have a very hard time believing that any type of logging, thinning or fuel reduction work on federal public lands would have made any difference for these neighbors in Paradise.

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      • Well, here’s an example of the Federal lands (USFS) closest to Paradise. Federal logging is, clearly, a non-issue, in this wildfire, as shown in the photo, near Concow. Maybe you should be pushing for changing how private lumber companies manage their lands within the WUI?

        https://www.google.com/maps/@39.8042637,-121.5160448,888m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

        Be sure to zoom in all the way to see the fuels buildup in that view. It sure appears that this kind of vegetation probably burned rather intensely.

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      • I think Matt is right about this one. While some fire impacts can be attributed to what we did or didn’t do, the Camp fire was a pure natural disaster. The combination of wind speeds and dry fuels was unstoppable. Most of the structures in Paradise were destroyed by ember cast from miles away that no WUI buffer could have mitigated.

        For what its worth, most of the green trees in the aerial images are actually scorched from the bottom and will probably not survive, but it is correct that there was not a crown fire that burned right up to most of the town.

        Source: friend who worked at Incident Command.

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  3. I looked up the quoted scientist and it’s not rocket science to ascertain that she is not as familiar with the current research/practitioner knowledge as many of us are. Here’s her background:
    https://www.colorado.edu/geography/jennifer-balch-0

    Why did the WaPo pick her to interview? Maybe all the other folks who know stuff were furloughed…except I’m sure that there are some other researchers and state fire experts still around..

    As to the study mentioned A piece published Nov. 30 in Geophysical Research Letters found that human-induced climate change now influences a fifth of the world’s fires.

    I can’t even find an edition of Geophysical Research Letters published on that date https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/loi/19448007/year/2018

    Can someone help who knows about this paper (not that I doubt that 25% of fires are influenced, I actually think most fires are influenced to some extent by climate change) I was just curious about how they could arrive at that figure.

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    • “it’s not rocket science to ascertain that she [Dr. Jennifer Balch] is not as familiar with the current research/practitioner knowledge as many of us are.”

      Sharon: That’s an interesting attempt to try and discredit Dr. Jennifer Balch. For whatever it’s worth, here’s Dr. Jennifer Balch’s Curriculum Vitae.

      Now, I’m not a rock scientist, but graduating with honors from Princeton followed by earning a Master’s and PhD from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies…and earning an “Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellow”…and contributing to 28 peer-reviewed scientific publications…seems to me that Dr. Jennifer Balch has some valuable insights to offer.

      Also, (again) for whatever it’s worth, here’s the entire part of the article in which Dr. Jennifer Balch is either quoted or referenced. Sharon, from what was actually said by Dr. Balch in the article, where did you get the idea that Dr. Balch “is not as familiar with the current research/practitioner knowledge as many of us are?” Was anything said, or attributed to Dr. Balch, totally wrong? Again, I have to say I’m miffed at your attempt to take down Dr. Jennifer Balch for making these comments in a newspaper article when contacted by a reporter.

      University of Colorado Boulder Professor Jennifer Balch said in an email that while treating federal forests makes sense near homes, that policy prescription won’t make a serious dent in the size and intensity of wildfires out West. These fires have increased fivefold since the 1970s as temperatures have risen and snowpack has shrunk. Just 2 percent of lands treated by the Forest Service between 2004 and 2013 experienced a wildfire.

      “We can’t log our way out of the fire problem — thinning all the forests is not possible,” the fire ecologist said. “And even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently, and will in the future.”

      The Camp fire’s massive impact came into sharp focus Sunday, as the utility PG&E filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission suggesting it would file for bankruptcy because it faces more than $30 billion in liability in connection with the state’s wildfires. The company’s CEO, Geisha Williams, also stepped down Sunday.

      Many California residents fault PG&E’s power lines for the wildfires that ravaged the state last year, and the matter is under investigation.

      A piece published Nov. 30 in Geophysical Research Letters found that human-induced climate change now influences a fifth of the world’s fires.

      Balch noted that the executive order did not address some kinds of the vegetation that makes communities vulnerable to fire, such as the chaparral that spread a fire in November that destroyed hundreds of Malibu-area homes. “You can’t log shrubs,” she said.

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      • I’m also going with Matt here. Sharon, what are you talking about? She’s a fire science researcher in Colorado. I’m pretty sure she knows as much about the causes and consequences of fire policy as we do….

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        • Uh.. I’m not so sure. She actually doesn’t have any publications I could see about western US fuel treatment effectiveness. So..she probably gets her information from general reading in the field. But she is perhaps missing the experience of listening to some voices..I have read many “fuel treatment effectiveness reports” and perhaps she has not, based on her statements?
          Here’s a post I wrote a while back about the landscape of fire science disciplines. https://forestpolicypub.com/2017/04/27/introduction-to-the-landscape-of-fire-sciences/ I was hoping that some fire science folks would write in and add to it.

          By the way, how I know about the disciplines and subdisciplines is that I was once asked by Dave Cleaves to do the administrative work behind doing a review of the Forest Service fire research portfolio. So I basically read all the research project proposals that were ongoing at the time under the banner of fire research. It’s way too big an arena for anyone to keep up with or understand all the nooks and crannies. And finally a plug for physical fire models.. we spent billions on climate models but not much on fire models.. whyzzat?

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      • Matthew, I don’t think I’m “discrediting” her. I am saying that based on her publication record, which I had previously viewed, she is not an expert on fuel treatment effectivenss and fire suppression in the western United States. Fire science incorporate many subfields and subdisciplines. There are people building physical models of behavior. There are people studying fuel treatment effectiveness. There are people studying the ecological role of fires. It’s not hard to search on “fuel treatment effectiveness” and find some names. Note: I would be that she said something like “I’m not an expert on this but here’s what I think” because most scientists (in my experience) are careful of treading on scientific disciplinary toes. For example, just because I’m a geneticist, doesn’t mean I know everything about everything in the field.

        So let’s go through her statements and find out how many straw people we can find. It looked like a veritable convention of straw people to me.

        University of Colorado Boulder Professor Jennifer Balch said in an email that while treating federal forests makes sense near homes, that policy prescription won’t make a serious dent in the size and intensity of wildfires out West.

        These fires have increased fivefold since the 1970s as temperatures have risen and snowpack has shrunk. Just 2 percent of lands treated by the Forest Service between 2004 and 2013 experienced a wildfire.


        Personally, I would feel cautious about making a statement about wildfire acres and relating them entirely to snowpack and temperatures. Many other things have changed at the same time, as has been pointed out by many in previous posts (people in forests, fire suppression, changes in suppression policy and so on).
        I honestly don’t know how you can say that “thinning won’t make a difference in the size and intensity of specific wildfires.” That’s what evidence shows. Of course, perhaps a “serious dent” is in the eye of the beholder. If your community is spared, that might be serious enough for you. I think it’s pretty much a value judgment (time for fire economists and social scientists to join the discussion).

        This is the old “fires won’t hit treated acres just by random nature of fires” argument -yet some folks (other fire scientists) actually use fire history to predict the likely places fires will continue to go, and where to put treatments for maximum efficacy. Every year we see evidence that fires are indeed hitting treated acres (in the newspapers), so the 2% is really not a good argument, assuming it’s correct, it probably includes southern, eastern and midwestern forests, National Grasslands and the Tallgrass Prairie (and El Junque) so that could be misleading. Do we believe our own eyes or other folks’ calculations?

        “We can’t log our way out of the fire problem — thinning all the forests is not possible,” the fire ecologist said. “And even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently, and will in the future.”

        What she seems to be saying is that thinning all the forests is not possible (straw person alert!!!!) but as usual in strawperson situations no one wants to do that.
        Then she asserts: “it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather conditions that is happening more frequently and will in the future.”

        Basically that sounds like a statement that 1) even though annually we see fuel treatment effectiveness reports, that 2) sometimes they don’t work (agreed), and 3) that will increase in the future due to changed weather conditions.

        Without being an actual fire researcher or suppression expert (and there is a whole body of literature on “when fuel treatments don’t work”) , we would consider the idea that something is worth doing if it works frequently but not all the time. Right now they are still working.. so we should stop on the basis that they might not work in the future?

        Here’s an analogy, if we listen to climate change projections and their own statements, Colorado ski areas will go out of business due to climate change. We know they generate large amounts of carbon via international airline travel and automobile traffic. Why not just close them now? We’d save all that carbon, and based on models, they’re going out of business anyway? Well, maybe we’re not THAT sure.

        There’s one more thing that I don’t think some researchers understand in the same way that a botanist or fuels specialist or forester or hydrologist who has worked in different regions might.. the west is really, really, different from place to place. In Colorado you can go to the Hayman Fire and see no tree regeneration after 15 years. It’s like thousands of areas of fire break. Other spots in California could be tinderfests of bear clover in the same time period. In parts of Oregon, you might have 20 foot tall tree saplings with a nice brush understory. My point is wildfires that burn large acreages can’t increase indefinitely (more and more acres forever) because once they’re burned after decades of fire suppression, their fuel characteristics will change. How can we know how they will change? The simple answer is that we can model it till we’re blue in the face but we will still not have a clue. We can only know that fuel load will be less for a number of years and and will regrow at different rates in different places.

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      • Yeah, you graduated from 2 of the most liberal/socialist institutions in the country…I find that your thinking has been influenced by a bunch of idiots that have an agenda they’re pushing on their students. Sell your doomsday crap somewhere else.

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    • Is it possible, just maybe, that “there are multiple negative consequences from active forest management?”

      P.S. Also, is there any evidence that Dr. Jennifer Balch thinks “that ‘logging’ is solely about fire safety?” Nope. So that appears to be just another classic Strawman Argument from Larry.

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      • Science backs the multiple benefits to forest health and ecology. The long term benefits of thinning have been accepted by the scientific community. When those benefits are ignored, I suspect the entire message of the presentation. It’s called “cherry-picking”, Matthew.

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  4. So the question still stands. If the severity of wildfires is the result of climate change and can’t be effected by forest management, then why are we not seeing the same exponential growth in fire size and severity on State/Private forest land? Are only federal lands being effected by climate change? Or could it be that suppression tactics, combined with management or lack of, contribute more to fire severity and size than does climate change?

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    • Um, cool story Forester, but we are seeing exponential growth in fire size and severity on state and private land.

      Anyone can look at the NIFC website over the past decade to confirm this fact. Even last year, based on protection agency at least, state and private lands accounted for almost 1/2 of all acres burned in the entire U.S.

      Also, did you see this study, which directly contradicts your claim?

      Study: Wildfires Burn More Severely On Private Timber Plantations Than Public Forests

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      • Fires on Forest Service lands in the Sierra Nevada damage important lands, including rare spotted owl and goshawk nesting habitats. Many fires on other lands include grass, brush and non-timbered areas. Additionally, there is steeper ground in National Forests than on other ownerships, resulting in more and worse erosion problems.

        The Rim and Kings fires, along with others, had serious impacts that are still being felt, today. When “protected” forests burn intensely, the damages are long-lasting and especially bad for wildlife, and other protected species. We have seen excellent examples in Yosemite National Park of how slowly forests recover, with intense damage and multiple re-burns documented and observed. The A-Rock Fire is a perfect example, with minimal recovery happening since 1989. I’m sure that we’ll see similar results in the portion of the Rim Fire, that burned with Yosemite’s boundaries.

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