Setting the Record Straight About Forest Restoration: Susan Pritchard Op-ed

 

 

 

Last week, I quoted an objection letter from Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project..now it’s true that most people don’t read objection letters, so I thought I’d take a look at what Hanson is saying these days.

As detailed in our EA comments and attachments, which we incorporate by reference here, the final EA violates NEPA, as amended by the Builder Act of 2023, by failing to take a hard look at the submitted science showing that no removal of trees–not even small trees–is needed before conducting burning, even in the densest and most long-unburned stands, and even in stands with high levels of dead wood. Fire behavior is fundamentally about fire weather, and burning can be safely conducted in any forest if burning is done in mild fire weather during the early or late part of fire season (June or Oct./Nov.)

For at least 20 years, we’ve been hearing the same knowledge claims from the same folks.  My question is “how does one person/group get so much press attention when they are outliers?”

Let’s look at Susan Pritchard’s (UW fire scientist) op-ed in the Methow Valley News, November 13, 2025. In this case, an article in High Country News (which didn’t mention Hanson, but is also interesting (focused on collaboratives, timber companies and restoration).

Here’s what the HCN story had to say about collaboratives..

These forest collaboratives, touted as a model of consensus-driven conservation, have quietly become influential engines for federal forest management decisions across the West. But critics worry the groups are too aligned with timber interests that prioritize commercial logging, and that they helped pave the way for the Trump administration’s latest effort to expand logging on public lands throughout the country by skirting environmental protection laws.

Sorry folks who do the hard work in collaboratives, “critics” think you are Trump-adjacent? But you have existed long before this Admin.  It’s almost as if (as Tony and JWT say/said) some parties’ interests are keeping the fight going.

Anyway, back to Pritchard’s op-ed (not paywalled).

For those of you who feel strongly this way, there is likely no evidence to convince you otherwise. After countless conversations on this topic, I do not want to challenge anyone’s core values and belief systems — it would not be constructive based on where you might stand on this issue.

I am writing instead for community members who have questions after reading articles that have been recently published in the Methow Valley News and elsewhere that cast doubt on the legitimacy of landscape restoration projects involving forest thinning and prescribed burning. Some weeks ago, the Methow Valley News republished a story from High Country News entitled “In Washington, ‘collaboration’ gives way to timber interests” This article was followed by a My Turn article by Bird Shafer, inviting the community to join the Methow Forest Forum to discuss proposed landscape restoration plans with an invited lecture by Chad Hanson, a well-known anti-logging activist.

Of all the scientists who study Washington forests, why pick one whose on-the-ground experience is in  California? Again, we see the (top-down) “cutting trees is bad and here are my reasons” vs. bottom-up “scientific studies of observations of fire behavior.” We also see (my pet peeve) the lack of  institutions or places in which different views interact with each other, so that the public and the scientists can learn from each other- perhaps online- with time for reflection and citations.. like the discussions on TSW.

Some misinformation campaigns focus on a message that fire-adapted communities should focus instead on home hardening (i.e., screening vents and decks) and maintaining defensible space (i.e., reducing burnable live and dead vegetation around homes and neighborhoods). Over the past 25 years, losses of wildlife habitat, old trees, and watershed quality have continued to rise as wildfires have grown larger and more severe. After many decades of fire suppression, forests have become dense and prone to burning in high severity (stand-replacing) fire events. In some cases, prescribed burning can be conducted without forest thinning, but in many fire-excluded, dense forests with hazardous accumulations of understory and overstory fuels, thinning is necessary to allow fire to return without endangering forests, watersheds, and communities. For some perspective on how wildfires have impacted North Central Washington, including the Methow Valley, visit: https://arcg.is/8y0mP.

I’ll only add to her arguments, that people don’t want fires running through their communities, as I said in 2010 in a series of posts entitled Science or “Scienciness”- Situations That Shout Watch Out. and 4.

In this case, the difference in framing is as simple as it’s not about the structures- it’s about the fact that people don’t want fire running through their communities. It is about all kinds of community infrastructure, stop signs and power poles, landscaping, fences, gardens, trees and benches in parks, people and pets and livestock having safe exits from encroaching fires. It is about firefighter safety and about conditions for different suppression tactics. That’s why fire breaks of some kinds around communities (not just structures) will always be popular in the real world. Of course, people don’t actually fireproof their homes either in the real world. “How can we best keep wildfires from damaging communities and endangering people” would be a more complex, but more real framing of the question. Note that one scientific discipline can’t provide the answer to this framing- there are elements of fire science, community design, fire suppression practice, sociology, political science and economics.

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Back to Pritchard’s op-ed:

Fuel reduction treatments have been well studied, and scientific guidance is particularly strong for forests in eastern Washington and other semi-arid landscapes. Forest thinning followed by prescribed burning or other forms of biomass removal is highly effective not only in reducing the severity of future wildfires but also allowing for safer and more effective places for firefighters to fight fires where necessary.

Misinformation campaigns sometimes suggest that open forests burn more intensely than dense forests. This is not true in forests of the Methow Valley and other parts of eastern Washington and Oregon. Summers in the Methow Valley are generally dry and hot, and most forests are susceptible to fire for long periods of the wildfire season, whether or not they have open or closed canopies. Fires that burn in fire-maintained, open-grown ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests tend to be fast-burning, low intensity events that quickly burn grasses and pine needles but allow old and large trees to survive. Does this type of treatment endanger our communities? No — when combined with prescribed burning, forest thinning generally allows wildfires to have a lighter touch on the land and be more readily defended as needed.

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I also ran across this relevant Powerpoint by Pritchard. Note how she uses photos of the real world (bottom-up) to refute general claims (top-down).