Matthew Koehler

You can read Bob Berwyn’s full article right here. The new study can be accessed here. Below are some highlights.

Thinning and suppression aren’t working, and fire scientists now say we need to let fires burn to help landscapes adapt to climate change  —  while controlling development in the red zone to limit damage….

The researchers behind the new study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that, instead of trying to fight every fire or thin vast areas in futile prevention efforts, the Forest Service should focus on protecting communities and limiting new development in fire-prone areas, while letting some fires — even large — burn, which will help Western landscapes adapt to climate change in the decades ahead….

America has spent about $3 billion on cutting crowded trees and clearing brush on 17 million acres of forest since 2001. During that same span, wildfires continue to rise, and there’s no proof that thinning is working. Schoennagel says most of the thinning has been on federal lands, but the dangerous fires are on private lands.

“I wondered for years why a different PR message is not going out. We cannot change this equation through thinning,” Schoennagel says.

“We need to shift our view and keep in mind what the future variabilities might be, and how we can manage for that,” Schoennagel says. That requires perceiving landscapes and ecosystems in a new way. For example, long-lived forests in mountain areas established themselves when climate conditions were suitable. In the climate-changed future, those conditions will no longer exist. “We should allow those areas to burn and adapt for future conditions. I think we see fire as a consequence, but it can also be a tool to help us keep pace with climate change,” she says.

The following press release is from the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council. If anyone has any specific questions about this lawsuit, please direct those questions to the groups and people involved with the lawsuit. Thanks. – mk

Two conservation groups, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council, filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Missoula on Monday challenging the Telegraph Vegetation Project in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest about 5 miles south of Elliston, MT. The conservation groups contend the project threatens the area’s elk herds as well as federally protected grizzly bears and lynx and violate a number of federal laws.

Logging and road-building will impact elk, grizzly and lynx

“The Forest Service decision authorizes logging on 4,613 acres, including 300 acres of logging with 83 acres of clearcutting within the Jericho Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area,” explained Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

“Clearcutting is not forest restoration,” said Dr. Sara Jane Johnson, Ph.D. and former Gallatin National Forest wildlife biologist. “95% of forest species in the area would be hurt by bulldozing in over 10 miles of new logging roads to log and burn 1,989 acres of elk hiding cover in the Jericho Elk Herd Unit and 2,758 acres of hiding cover in the Spotted Dog – Little Blackfoot Elk Herd Unit. Despite the fact that the Forest Service conceded the project will displace elk, the agency plans to allow clearcutting in elk security areas in the middle of hunting season. By its own analysis, the agency admits this will drive elk out of public lands, onto private lands, resulting in less elk opportunities for hunters and impacting the ability of Montana’s wildlife managers to meet their elk population objectives.”

Agency ignored legal requirement to analyze cumulative impacts

“The Forest Service failed to follow the requirements to analyze in one EIS the cumulative effects of the Telegraph timber sale concurrently with the proposed Ten Mile Watershed logging project, although the projects are immediately adjacent to each other,” Garrity said. “The Ten Mile project calls for building up to 43 miles of new logging roads and removing elk and grizzly bear hiding cover on over 38 square miles by logging and burning. Of this, 3,944 acres logging and/or burning will occur in the Jericho Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area in the Ten Mile Project.”

“Cumulatively the Telegraph and Ten Mile timber sales would log or burn 47% of the Jericho Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area, which is legally protected by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule,” Johnson added. “After these two timber sales are completed the Forest Service will destroy up to 47 square miles of occupied lynx habitat, which violates the lynx amendment to the Forest Plan. Lynx is listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, which requires the agency to recover lynx, not eliminate them from the landscape southwest of Helena.”

“Cumulatively, the Ten Mile and Telegraph projects will reduce elk and grizzly hiding cover below 50%, which violates the agency’s own Forest Plan. The greatest impacts will be along the continental divide at the Ten Mile South Helena and Telegraph project boundaries adjoin. The agency admits that due to the clearcutting and roadbuilding, elk may flee to unlogged private lands to the south.”

Agency used non-federal definition of the Wildland Urban Interface 


“While the lynx amendment allows logging in the Wildland Urban Interface, it also defines the Wildlife Urban Interface to be within one mile of communities,” Garrity explained. “But the Forest Service used a new definition provided by local counties and then remapped the Wildland Urban Interface to include areas over five miles away from communities.”

Project will cost taxpayers nearly $5 million to subsidize the timber industry

“The decision calls for clearcutting a total of 2,724 acres and prescribed burning 1,065 acres, bulldozing 10.3 miles of new logging roads and rebuilding another 32.6 miles of over grown logging roads. The Forest Service admits that the Project is a money-losing venture that will cost taxpayers $4,761,673 – almost 5 million dollars. In return, a popular area of the Helena National Forest will suffer a projected 10-year project that will destroy habitat for elk, lynx, and grizzly bears — but will have new brand logging roads and massive clearcuts,” Garrity concluded. “The Forest Service is showing that its top priority is increasing the size of its own bureaucracy and subsidizing the timber industry with federal taxpayer dollars, which is why we’re taking this terrible project to court.”

Yesterday, the homepage of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management looked like this:

Today, (at least as of 5:15 pm EDT) the homepage of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management looks like this:

Read more here.

This piece was written by longtime Wilderness advocate Howie Wolke. – mk

When it comes to wilderness, bigger is better.

From a human perspective, it is difficult to experience wilderness values such as awe, oneness with nature, solitude and challenge in isolated natural areas hemmed in by roads or noisy machines. The authors of the Wilderness Act rightly understood that if folks accepted postage-stamp sized natural areas as “wilderness”, then our perception of wilderness would lose its unique distinction. And as the wilderness idea is cheapened, so too, is wilderness on the ground.

Conservation biologists teach us that large, wild areas with connectivity to other wildlands protect native species populations from inbreeding, random loss of adaptive genetic traits (common in small isolated populations), disease, and environmental events such as wildfire, flood or prolonged drought. Species with specific habitat needs such as old growth forest or undisturbed sagebrush steppe are particularly vulnerable to problems associated with small isolated habitats. So are large carnivores, which naturally occur in much lower densities than prey species, and thus are spread thinly across large areas. Many of these vulnerable creatures are called “wilderness dependent species” and small isolated wildland tracts do not promote their survival.

As human population growth continues to explode, wildlands are increasingly impacted by adjacent human activities. Logging, mining, road building, poaching, urban sprawl, off road vehicles, livestock grazing, fences, power corridors, dams and diversions and more all serve to isolate wilderness areas. When wilderness boundaries are amoeba-shaped with “cherry-stemmed’ exclusions, we create lots of edge compared with more secure interior habitat. Along the edges are where many destructive human activities occur. So not only is bigger better, but so are areas with holistic boundaries that minimize edge.

Unfortunately, many conservation organizations are beholden to foundations that demand “collaboration” with traditional wilderness opponents. These collaborations usually produce compromised “wilderness” proposals that exclude most potential conflict areas in order to mollify the opposition. Resulting wilderness units are small, isolated and oddly-shaped, laden with boundary intrusions and non-wilderness corridors that create much edge and minimal secure interior habitat.

Of course, our political system is based upon compromise, and compromise works when both sides have legitimate concerns and common goals. When it comes to wilderness, though, remember that nowadays each wilderness debate begins with an already greatly compromised remnant wildland. So further compromise creates the political illusion of “win/win”, but on the ground the land and the wildlife usually lose.

So, bigger is better. In North America, healthy populations of grizzly bear, wolverine, lynx and many other species thrive only where big wilderness is a dominant landscape feature. Healthy watersheds thrive only where entire watersheds are protected. And dynamic natural vegetation patterns can be maintained only in large protected landscapes. For example, maintaining natural wildfire patterns is incompatible with small nature preserves near suburbs or commercial timber stands.

Protecting and maintaining real wilderness won’t get easier. But unless conservation organizations develop a better understanding of what real wilderness is and the importance of size, connectivity and wholeness, it is unlikely that the very concept of wilderness will survive for many more generations. And I mean generations of four-leggeds and all members of the biotic community, in addition to the upright two-legged great apes that we call “human.”

Howie Wolke is a wilderness guide/outfitter based in Montana’s Paradise Valley and was recently president of Wilderness Watch.

The following was posted on the Facebook page of the California Chaparral Institute. – mk

The Forest Service has canceled plans to construct a massive fuel break in a remote corner of the Los Padres National Forest after the California Chaparral Institute and our partners, Los Padres Forest Watch, challenged the project in federal court.

Today, our organizations, along with the Forest Service, notified the U.S. District Court that the project has been canceled and requested that the lawsuit be dismissed.

The project would have removed native chaparral habitat across a six-mile-long, 300-foot-wide corridor along the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains along the Gaviota Coast, one of the crown jewels of Santa Barbara County. The site was located far away from any structures, and contained some of the most significant stands of Refugio manzanita, one of the rarest and most endangered manzanita species in California.

The Forest Service approved the project last September without preparing an environmental assessment and without proposing any measures to protect manzanitas and other rare plants and animals in the area.

By filing the lawsuit last November, we hoped to protect the Refugio manzanita and other rare plants and animals in the path of the fuel break. The suit was also aimed at encouraging forest officials to focus their limited resources on reducing fire risk directly in and around communities.

The vast majority of fire ecologists agree that the best way to protect communities from wildfire is to create defensible space immediately around homes, and to retrofit structures with ignition-resistant building materials like fire-rated roofs, dual-paned glass, and screening. Clearing vegetation in remote areas, far away from structures, is a costly and often ineffective way to stop wildfires and protect homes.

We appreciate the Forest Service’s decision to reconsider this flawed project, and we will continue to assist forest officials in identifying and implementing proven, cost-effective ways to directly protect homes from wildfire.

Our organizations were represented by Earthrise Law Center, the environmental law clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, OR – one of the top environmental law programs in the country.

Thanks to longtime blog commenter and contributor, David Beebe, for posting information about this release from PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) in this comment at a previous post. – mk

Washington, DC — Recent timber sales from Alaska’s vast Tongass National Forest have been financial as well as ecological debacles, according to internal reports released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In violation of its own policies, the U.S. Forest Service let timber operators benefit by cherry-picking more valuable trees and leaving intended salvage trees standing.

A June 20, 2016 Forest Service “Washington Office Activity Review” examined two large Tongass timber sales and found –

• Staggering monetary losses in each, “close to 2 million” in one sale, an amount “more than double the original stumpage” according to a post-harvest Monitoring Report. In the other sale, Forest Service maladministration led to “a reduction in sale value exceeding $1,700,000”;

• Despite being stewardship sales to improve forest health, the agency allowed companies to ignore prescriptions by “favoring removal in the larger diameter, more valuable species groups, such as western red cedar and spruce” while significantly undercutting far less valuable hemlock; and

• Required law enforcement timber theft prevention inspections appear to have been bypassed. Nor could the forest produce a written contract or other “pertinent documentation” for this high-volume sale. That sale also allowed “purchaser selection of trees without prior marking” and the forest’s only follow-on monitoring was completely “reliant on the purchaser’s own data.”

“This national forest runs major commercial timber sales like a cookie jar without a lid,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the review’s call for “an independent review [to] inform solutions and prevent similar issues in future timber and stewardship contracts” has run into a stone wall. “These reports read as if some Forest Service staff are coconspirators in wholescale timber fraud.”

Under the Secure Rural Schools program, a portion of all Tongass timber sale proceeds go to local communities and schools. Depressed sale values therefore cost both the U.S. taxpayers and Alaskan schoolkids. PEER is asking the Inspector General for the U.S. Forest Service’s parent agency to perform a “forensic audit” of recent sale proceeds to calculate total losses, as well as recommend steps to ensure that these sales yield the fair market value they are supposed to produce.

These were also stewardship sales using harvests to reach prescribed tree species cut criteria but they lacked any “defined process for independently confirming whether the criteria are being met. This obfuscates the acceptability of the end result.” Another issue the review identified was temporary timber roads improperly left open “for several years following commercial activity.”

“As a businessman, President Trump would presumably not write a sales contract so open-ended that it is tantamount to a license to steal,” added Ruch, pointing out that during the campaign, candidate Trump promised to increase timber jobs, presumably by directing more and larger timber sales from national forests. “We are asking the Senate to extract pledges from the upcoming nominees for the Chief of the Forest Service and the Agriculture Undersecretary for Natural Resources & Environment to ensure that all future timber sales protect both the forest resources and the taxpayer’s pocketbook.”

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Read the Forest Service Timber Sale Review

View Post Harvest Monitoring report

See PEER call for forensic audit

Look at PEER letter to U.S. Senate

Look at long history of commercial timber theft on the Tongass

The following guest column was written by Brett Haverstick, the education and outreach director of Friends of the Clearwater, a public lands advocacy group in north-central Idaho. – mk

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the U.S. Forest Service. The public is being misled into thinking that our forests are “unhealthy” and that they need to be “restored” due to “beetle infestations” and “insect and disease.” All of this is euphemism to drastically ramp up logging.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to “thin the threat” and use thinning for “fire hazard reduction” across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature. Recent studies suggest forests with stands of “dead trees” are at no more risk of burning — and possibly less — than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn more slowly because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins. To the contrary, thinning “live trees” places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

The Forest Service is currently identifying “priority areas” on the national forests that need to be treated (read: logged). A provision of the 2014 farm bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires.” Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate- and weather-driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree density and beetle infestation do not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed-conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not “catastrophic,” but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance that is critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is “fire-scapes.”

Building roads and logging in postfire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. “Salvage logging” impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impairs streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that “snag forests” are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s national forests. Managed forests are neither healthier nor more resilient to wildfire. The real catastrophe is that the forest service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

According to Western Watersheds Project, yesterday federal public lands management agencies slashed grazing fees by 11% on 220 million acres of America’s public lands – including within some designated Wilderness areas. Below is the WWP press release. – mk

LARAMIE, Wyo. – The public lands management agencies announced the grazing fee for federal allotments today, which the federal government has decreased to a mere $1.87 per cow and her calf (or 5 sheep) per month, known as an Animal Unit Month, or AUM.

“This has got to be the cheapest all-you-can-eat buffet deal in the country,” said Erik Molvar, Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project. “Our public lands are a national treasure that should be protected for future generations with responsible stewardship. It makes no sense to rent them to ranchers for below-market prices to prop up a dying industry that degrades soil productivity, water, wildlife habitat, and the health of the land.”

Two hundred and twenty million acres of public lands in the West are used for private livestock industry profits through the management of approximately 22,000 grazing permits. The low fee leaves the federal program at an overwhelming deficit. This year’s fee is a a decrease of 11 percent from last year’s fee of $2.11 per AUM far less than the average cost for private lands grazing leases. The fee is calculated using a decades-old formula that takes into account the price of fuel and the price of beef, and this year’s fee falls far below the level of $2.31 per AUM that was charged in 1980. Additionally, the fee doesn’t cover the cost to taxpayers of range infrastructure, erosion control, vegetation manipulation, and government predator killing – all indirect subsidies that expand the program’s total deficit.

“The subsidy to public lands livestock grazers just got bigger,” Molvar said. “It’s a totally unjustified handout that persists for purely political reasons, with little or no benefit to Americans.”

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As all of us clearly know, the person who ultimate oversees the U.S. Forest Service is the Secretary of Agriculture. Lots of people seem to assume that the U.S. Forest Service falls under the Secretary of Interior, but nope.

The choice for Sec of Ag is a huge deal if you care about public lands because the U.S. Forest Service manages 193 million acres of federal public lands all across the country (154 national forests and 20 national grasslands). That means that the U.S. Forest Service manages 30% of America’s federal public lands legacy. The USFS also manages 33% of the acreage within America’s 110-million acre National Wilderness Preservation System.

Some background information about Sonny Perdue can be found here.

In 2014, Perdue mocked “the left” and “mainstream media” for its coverage of climate change. Writing in an op-ed published in the National Review, Perdue challenged the connection between climate change and drought, extreme precipitation, and other weather events. He also wrote that climate change has “become a running joke among the public” and “liberals have lost all credibility when it comes to climate science because their arguments have become so ridiculous and so obviously disconnected from reality.”

In 2007, in the midst of an epic drought, Perdue implored residents to pray for rain, holding a prayer vigil outside of the Georgia state Capitol.

His track record on environmental issues is not much better. As governor, he championed the expansion of factory farms, and pushed against gas taxes and EPA efforts to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Perhaps Sonny Perdue will host a prayer vigil or two during wildfire season. Maybe he could also ask the Lord to forgive environmentalists for causing all these wildfires.

The following article, written by George Wuerthner, was originally published at Earth Island Journal. – mk

New study about low conifer regeneration lacks context
By George Wuerthner

Recently researchers at UC Davis and the US Forest Service presented a new scientific study that suggested a dire future for forests in California. The study on conifer establishment after wildfires in California found that 43 percent of their study plots did not have conifer regeneration that met Forest Service Stocking Standards, implying that without additional management we may face a future without forests.

The findings were viewed with alarm by some, with some news reports suggesting that California’s forests were not regenerating after high severity wildfires.

To be fair, the study was not intended to review all the benefits of high-severity blazes, but what it lacked was context. First, even the authors admitted that the paradigm used to determine conifer regeneration is biased towards timber production. Besides, there are many nuances in interpretation that were only mentioned in the body of the study that few bothered to review. As a result, the report has generated undue concern and panic among the public that the state’s forests may be disappearing.

With regards to context, the authors, for one, choose to focus on the increase of wildfires in the past three decades, arguing that blazes during this period were more severe and extensive than wildfires in the past. They attributed this to fire suppression, past logging, and other forest management practices which they alleged have led to this significant increase in large wildfires. While these factors likely contributed to the observed greater tree density and fuel loads in forests to some degree, the report ignores the influence of past, wetter climatic conditions on limiting wildfire, and the ongoing drought that is likely contributing to greater fire occurrence.

Furthermore, the study made statements like “the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires across much of the western United States are increasing” without providing a time factor. Inreasing, compared to what? That’s important because there is ample paleo and even historic evidence of large high-severity blazes that have occurred in the past. For instance, during the Medieval Warm Spell between 800 to 1200 AD there is evidence for extremely large and continuous wildfires across the western US, including in California.

Even more recently there was significant climate variation that influenced wildfire behavior and spread. Between the 1940s and 1980s, for instance, the overall climate around the West was cooler and moister than in the decades past. These moist and cool conditions naturally reduced fire ignitions and fire spread. They also facilitated greater seedling survival and hence led to an increase in tree density.

So was fire suppression as important as commonly assumed or did climatic conditions contribute to the increase in tree densities and a reduction in fires? Likely both are responsible, but almost universally fire suppression is given more credit than is reasonable.

This context is important because most current management, including so-called forest restoration, is justified on the belief that human inference with natural processes has created current forest conditions, and thus requires human intervention, usually in the form of logging.

And while California has experienced some large wildfires with extensive high-severity patches, one shouldn’t ignore the fact that the state has experienced one of the longest and most extreme droughts in the past 1,000 years. Given such historic drought conditions, one would expect there to be significant wildfires.

And when considering the climate change context, it would help to look at wildfires (as well as other natural processes like bark beetles) as helping to thin forests to help them adjust to new climatic parameters. The lack of conifer regeneration may be viewed as a good thing that is balancing the vegetation’s hydrological needs with available soil moisture.

The Forest Service, however, requires a certain amount of conifer regeneration within five years after logging. If there is insufficient natural regeneration, the Forest Service requires timber companies to plant conifers on the site, often creating even-aged, single species plantations that are biological deserts.

But is this silvicultural standard an appropriate way to measure the ecological effects of wildfire? I would argue it is not.

Having ample, rapid, and dense conifer regeneration is only important if your goal is logging for wood products. The focus on conifers skews the report because it gives the impression there was little vegetation on many of the plots. However, on most sites there was vegetation growing including regeneration of many native hardwoods like bigleaf maple, Pacific madrone, and black oak — all of which sprout from root crowns after a fire.

In addition, on many plots, shrubs like those from the ceanothus genus (California lilac, soap bush etc.) colonized burn sites, particularly high severity burn ones. These shrub species control erosion, and are important nitrogen fixers that help restore soil health. Other shrubs common on burn sites, like chokeberry and bitter cherry, are important food sources for wildlife.

In fact, in many instances, it is standard Forest Service practice in the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere to use herbicides on these nitrogen-fixing shrubs to hasten the establishment of conifers, therefore short-circuiting the natural ecological succession, and reducing the replacement of important nutrients in the soils.

In addition to shrubs, the report shows that there was a documented increase in “forbs” or flowering plants. These plants play an important role in forest ecosystems. Oaks, for instance, are an important source of mast (acorns) that many wildlife species from acorn woodpeckers to black bears feast upon. Many bird species utilize the shrub habitat for nesting and feed upon shrub, berries, and fruits. Shrubs are also consumed by deer and other browsing wildlife. And flowers are both consumed by wildlife and provide sources of pollen and honey for insects like bees and wasps.

But none of these ecological values were mentioned in the study.

Using the silvicultural standards for conifer regeneration that requires a certain number of confer seedlings established within five years also ignores the role that climate plays in conifer establishment. (Again, California has been experiencing one of the most severe droughts in history.)

Many conifers only have good seed production every five to ten years. Even in a good cone crop year, seeds require very a precise combination of moisture, temperature, and soil for successful germination and then another set of factors for seedling survival. The likelihood that all these factors would be met in five years is not high. So, expecting plots to have conifer regeneration after such a short period ignores the reality of climatic and tree biology factors required for regeneration.

Furthermore, the researchers own data showed there was less conifer regeneration on drier sites — exactly what one would expect during a severe drought that only exacerbates seedling failures.

Another important value of high-severity blazes that was not mentioned in the report is that they introduce snags and dead wood into forest ecosystems. The post-fire snag forest is some of the rarest and shortest lived habitat in our forest ecosystems. Studies have demonstrated that such snag forests — which include patches of native fire-following shrubs, downed logs, colorful wildflowers, and dense pockets of natural conifer and oak regeneration — are among one of the most biodiverse forest ecosystems. These short-lived forests exist only for a few years until the regeneration process is complete and new trees start taking over the space.

There were other methodological issues with the study. For instance, each study plot was only 1/70 of an acre. Given the natural heterogeneity of wildfires that result in mosaic patch of high, medium, low severity and unburned, small plots are unlikely to capture the diversity of regeneration that might characterize a larger plot. The study authors even acknowledged that much of the variation in conifer regeneration was due to non-fire attributes like slope, aspect (north slopes are moister) elevation, and other abiotic conditions that influenced conifer regeneration.

In addition, they acknowledge later in their paper that perhaps the Forest Service standard for conifer regeneration is too high, especially since most areas that meet such standard require thinning at a later date to reduce forest density. A lower stocking rate requirement would mean more of their plots would meet the Forest Service standards.

What all of this demonstrates is that much of the “problem” is an artifact of the unrealistic Forest Service silvicultural standards both for the number of conifer seedlings expected on a patch of land within five years and the bias towards timber production that ignores the many ecological benefits of high-severity fires. Many studies show it takes 30 to 60 years after a high-severity blaze for forest regeneration to occur under natural conditions. So what’s the rush?

Rather than alarming, lack of conifer regeneration allows other vegetation its “moment in the sun” so to speak, and provides for a much more diverse forest ecosystem. It also may be an important factor that is creating less dense forests that will be better adapted to future and predicted climate warming.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist who has been studying predators for four decades. He serves on the Science Advisory Board of Project Coyote and is the author of 38 books including Welfare Ranching, Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, Energy: The Delusion of Endless Growth and Overdevelopment, Thrillcraft, and Keeping the Wild.