Forest Management

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

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“Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management” was written by Steve Ellis, Chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), who is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest Supervisor and retired Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director for Operations—the senior career position in that agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

I have extracted a few snippets (Emphasis added) from the above article published by the NAFSR:

1) Last year was a historically destructive wildfire season. While we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021, nationally 64 large fires have burned over 3 million acres. The economic damage caused by wildfire in 2020 is estimated at $150 billion. The loss of communities, loss of life, impacts on health, and untold environmental damage to our watersheds—not to mention the pumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere—are devastating. This continuing disaster needs to be addressed like the catastrophe it is.

2) We are the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), an organization of dedicated natural resource professionals—field practitioners, firefighters, and scientists—with thousands of years of on the ground experience. Our membership lives in every state of the nation. We are dedicated to sustaining healthy National Forests and National Grasslands, the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, to provide clean water, quality outdoor recreation, wildlife and fish habitat, and carbon sequestration, and to be more resilient to catastrophic wildfire as our climate changes.

3) As some of us here on the Smokey Wire have been explaining for years, the NAFSR very clearly and succinctly states:
“Small treatment areas, scattered “random acts of restoration” across the landscape, are not large enough to make a meaningful difference. Decades of field observations and peer reviewed research both document the effectiveness of strategic landscape fuel treatments and support the pressing need to do more. The cost of necessary treatments is a fraction of the wildfire damage such treatments can prevent. Today’s wildfires in overstocked forests burn so hot and on such vast acreages that reforestation becomes difficult or next to impossible in some areas. Soil damage and erosion become extreme. Watersheds which supply vital domestic, industrial, and agricultural water are damaged or destroyed.”

4) This summer, America watched with great apprehension as the Caldor Fire approached South Lake Tahoe. In a community briefing, wildfire incident commander Rocky Oplinger described how active management of forestlands assisted firefighters. “When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him.

5) And in a Sacramento Bee interview in which fire researcher Scott Stephens was asked how much consensus there is among fire scientists that fuels treatments do help, he answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll be honest with you, it’s that strong; it’s that strong. There’s at least 99% certainty that treated areas do moderate fire behavior. You will always have the ignition potential, but the fires will be much easier to manage.” I (Steve Ellis) don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a wildfire commander with decades of experience recently told me this figure would be at least 90%. What is important here is that there is broad agreement among professionals that properly treated landscapes do moderate fire behavior.

6) During my career (Steve Ellis), I have personally witnessed fire dropping from tree crowns to the ground when it hit a thinned forest. So have many NAFSR members. This is an issue where scientist and practitioners agree. More strategic landscape treatments are necessary to help avoid increasingly disastrous wildfires. So, the next time you read or hear someone say that thinning and prescribed fire in the forest does not work, remember that nothing can be further from the truth.

Jim Furnish Op-ed On the Black Hills in The Hill

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This photo is from the op-ed; copyright by Mary of the Norbeck Society. I’ll take it down if they prefer, but it is the photo in the op-ed.
Thanks to Matt for finding and posting this op-ed by frequent TSW commenter Jim Furnish in the thread about the Black Hills. Some of his claims are more generalized about the Forest Service in general, and so I think worthy of a separate discussion.

(Note: the infamous Forest Service Retirees’ Info Network has suggested that there is a media campaign by ENGOs brewing about the Hills.. stay tuned for more press stories)

First of all, you gotta love the headline (I’m suspecting Jim didn’t pick it but..) “Forest Service Putting National Forests in Peril”. We’re all glad, I’m sure, that after four years of “Trump Administration Does Bad Things” the power has returned to non-politicals within a federal agency. Whew, thanks for delegating, Congress and the Biden Admin!

This is a good time for recycling this quote from Earl Butz.. in a piece by Char Miller

Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s controversial secretary of Agriculture, was a profane man known for his hair-trigger temper and rough handling of subordinates. So when the chief of the Forest Service stood him up for a meeting, Butz unloaded in response: “There are four branches of government,” he reportedly snarled, “the executive, legislative, judicial and the Gawd-damn U.S. Forest Service.

But back tot he op-ed..

Perhaps the saddest part is that big old trees, if left to grow, are the natural outcome of ponderosa pine ecology, storing carbon, providing wildlife habitat and seed for new trees and stabilizing soils. But the Forest Service requires that loggers cut down all the big old trees, reducing the forest to ecologically impoverished, even-aged tree farms, and increasing susceptibility to future fires.

It sounds like this is about the Hills, but the photo shows apparently some big old trees.. so I’m not sure if the photo is relevant to the argument Jim is making.

Note that the link goes to a piece by Law and Moomaw.. I noted that these scientist were heavily cited in the letters of some ENGO’s in the Response to Comments in USDA’s Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry request, by groups who were against tree cutting. IMHO the stand in the photo also doesn’t look more susceptible to future fires, at least not for a while.

The Black Hills logging debacle represents a decades-long drama playing out on most forests across the country. Commercial logging trumps other forest values like carbon storage, clean water, wildlife habitat and old-growth woods.

So the FS is still logging old growth, across the country? Seems like in the plans and projects I’ve looked at there has been a great deal of concern for carbon storage, clean water, wildlife and old growth.

But most curious to me was this, back to “thinning for fuel treatment” but now using anecdotes.

A raging debate questions whether thoughtful logging can actually limit fire risk and severity by reducing fuels in advance. The Forest Service says emphatically “yes,” but anecdotal evidence yields troubling results throughout the fire-prone western United States. The arson-caused Jasper Fire burned through a thinned landscape thought to be in ideal condition. High temperatures, low humidity and heavy winds — the usual culprits — blew the fire up mercilessly.

Reduced logging is long overdue in this treasured landscape. What the Forest Service is doing in the Black Hills reminds me of its tragic liquidation of mature and old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Then, as now, I urge the Forest Service to follow the advice of its own scientists.

I think Jim means the Hills and the silviculture report, but if you follow the advice of scientists, conceivably you would also follow the many scientists who support tree thinning as a fuel reduction measure either on its own or prior to prescribed burning.

So maybe this media campaign is designed to put pressure on the Admin to reduce harvesting on the Hills. That’s fine, but don’t blame the FS as an independent political actor out to destroy America’s forests, nor question the utility of fuel treatments; a “raging debate” ??. I don’t think that those arguments are 1) accurate nor 2) necessary to make the case, which specifically is for reduced commercial harvesting on the Black Hills.

One Experimental Forest- Super-Sized : OSU and Elliott State Forest

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Thanks to Peter Williams for this one, reported in Nature.

If the project — proposed by DeLuca and other researchers at OSU — launches successfully, the newly created Elliott State Research Forest in southwestern Oregon would occupy a roughly 33,000-hectare parcel of land. This would be divided into more than 40 sections, in which scientists would test several forest-management strategies, some including extensive logging. The advisory committee for the project, which comprises environmentalists, hunters, loggers and members of local Indigenous tribes, approved the latest research proposal on 22 April.

Controversially, the study would allow logging in a new research forest, in an attempt to answer a grand question: in a world where wood remains a necessary resource, but biodiversity is declining, what’s the best way to balance timber production with conservation?

Well, it will answer that question at least for areas similar to Elliot State Forest, anyway, or at least illuminate trade-offs. Is it controversial to allow logging in a new (or old) research forest? Most of them, at least on Forest Service land, were established to do precisely that. Here’s a link and map of all Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges. At least two of them, H. J. Andrews in Oregon (16K acres) and Hubbard Brook in New Hampshire are also Long Term Ecological Research units and get infusions of funding from NSF.

It’s also interesting that some environmental groups are on the advisory committee, while others think clearcutting shouldn’t occur at all, and others don’t trust OSU. The advisory committee would conceivably review plans for specific sites, though, so mistakes like the 16 acre old growth one shouldn’t occur in the future.

Questions:

“As currently designed, the project would leave more than 40% of the forest — a section of old growth that has been regenerating naturally since the area last burnt, a century and a half ago — untouched by logging.”

Is 150 years old considered “old growth” in that area? Or are there pockets of old-growth in the burned area that will be untreated?

But the Elliott research forest would be larger than most of its predecessors, and advocates say that it would provide scientists with the first opportunity to test ecological forestry at such a large scale.

I’m curious about the larger ones.. the H.J. Andrews is “only” 16,000.. I wonder where those larger ones are? I also wonder what are the kinds of specific questions for which you need more than 10,000 acres of designed experiment to answer.

Totally off the subject side note: I ran across this while looking at the (excellent) H.J. Andrews website. I found it a bit disconcerting.

CONSERVATION ETHICS
Natural resource management can be seen as a set of practices, which reflect certain ideas about the world. Ideally management practices will be consistent with our best scientific ideas about the workings of both biophysical and social systems, but management practices also and inevitably manifest our ideas about what is good, what is right, and what is valuable. For example, we manage riparian zones in certain ways because we understand certain relationships between riparian zones and streams and rivers; but also because we believe certain management practices will achieve important goals, or protect important values, related to streams and rivers. In this way, management fuses science and ethics.

At the Andrews Forest, we consider ethics an inherent part of our work. We seek not only to understand how ideas work in socio-ecological systems, but also to explicitly consider how they ought to work, particularly at the interface of science and management. Formal methods of critical thinking, or argument analysis, are used to understand and evaluate both the science and ethics of management decisions, predicated on the belief that decisions made through such a process of sound and rigorous reasoning will be more systematic, more transparent, and ultimately more reasonable than they might otherwise be.

I didn’t learn much about ethics in my science education, except research ethics. I grant you that my education was a long time ago.  Still, I found it pretty fascinating that the scientists are “explicitly considering how social systems (well, at least socio-ecological systems) “ought to” work. Because it sounds like “we reason more reasonably than people who make management decisions” or “we are more attuned to ethics than they are.” I’m not sure that there’s relevant social science research behind either claim.

Forest management in the climate context

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I thought the graphics from this research article did a good job of illustrating the role of forests and forestry in climate change mitigation.

Even if there is a lot of uncertainty in the assumptions and modeling, forest management is likely where the greatest opportunities are for land management to contribute to climate mitigation.  (Note that fire management is a relatively minor contributor.)  (AFOLU – the new acronym of the day – is Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use.)

Thus, ecosystems have the potential for large additional climate mitigation by combining enhanced land sinks with reduced emissions…  We describe and quantify 20 discrete mitigation options (referred to hereafter as “pathways”) within the AFOLU sector …  We refer to these terrestrial conservation, restoration, and improved practices pathways, which include safeguards for food, fiber, and habitat, as “natural climate solutions” (NCS).

Improved forest management (i.e., Natural Forest Management and Improved Plantations pathways) offers large and cost-effective mitigation opportunities, many of which could be implemented rapidly without changes in land use or tenure. While some activities can be implemented without reducing wood yield (e.g., reduced-impact logging), other activities (e.g., extended harvest cycles) would result in reduced near-term yields. This shortfall can be met by implementing the Reforestation pathway, which includes new commercial plantations. The Improved Plantations pathway ultimately increases wood yields by extending rotation lengths from the optimum for economic profits to the optimum for wood yield.

Work remains to better constrain uncertainty of NCS mitigation estimates. Nevertheless, existing knowledge reported here provides a robust basis for immediate global action to improve ecosystem stewardship as a major solution to climate change.

Unfortunately, the major role of forests in NCS mitigation strategies is pretty minor with regard to overall climate change mitigation needs.  (I.e. planting a trillion trees won’t do the trick; we need significant emissions reductions.)

 

Climate tipping point for forests

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www.e-education.psu.edu

Add to this diagram – “Respiration (when overheated).”

We’ve talked about how older forests may sequester less carbon and dead forests release carbon (for example, here).  New research indicates that forests also sequester less carbon and start to release carbon (while they are still alive) if the temperature gets too high.  As reported here:

‘We’re in Bigger Trouble Than We Thought’

The data show a clear temperature limit, above which trees start to exhale more CO2 than they can take in through photosynthesis, said co-author Christopher Schwalm, an ecologist and earth system modeler at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. The findings mark a tipping point, of sorts, at which “the land system will act to accelerate climate change rather than slow it down,” Schwalm said.

“Seeing such a strong temperature signal globally did not surprise me,” he said. “What I was surprised by is that it would happen so soon, maybe in 15 to 25 years, and not at the end of the century.”

Other researchers commented on management implications of drought-stressed dying trees:” 

It may come down to looking at options for saving valuable, individual stands of trees,  and protecting genetically distinct and more resilient species. It could also be important to conserve corridors and patches of woodland to reduce the distance seeds must travel to enable forests of the future to spread or reconnect under more favorable climate conditions, he explained.

“We think a lot of these areas are going to go down, so where can we save some of it?” he asked.

There are obviously implications here for national forest planning.  It seems like it should be the role of the national headquarters to review and interpret the implications of new research for forest management, and to advise national forests regarding its implications for their plans and whether they should consider making changes.

Vegetation Change and Vegetation Management: A Potential New National Forest Report Format

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I remember Chris Iverson, noted expert in wildlife and forest planning, saying something once about forest plans like “if you don’t do much, you shouldn’t spend as much time planning.” As I recall, he was talking about the Chugach compared to the Tongass forest plans. But what exactly is “doing much”? What seems to be most controversial and widespread is vegetation management for forest management.

I thought it would be interesting to see where the Rio Grande (with a recent plan revision) fell on that scale, and many thanks to them for their help in collecting this information. I think it would be great to have this information available for all forests. First, the total acres of the Rio Grande is 1.83 million acres to give context. You could easily do this table with percentages and be able to compare the acres impacted by management across different National Forests, as well as vegetation changes due to human and other factors.

What we got from the Forest was total acres of all vegetation treatments, not duplicating the same acres with different treatments (double counting).

According to the forest, the average timber harvest has been around 3100 acres per year. All of that has been insect salvage except for 120 acres in 2017. So that’s about 2% of the forest per year. Of course, salvaging spruce beetle trees that are dead may have different impacts than green sales, but this table is about all acres impacted by vegetation management and other vegetation change.

After collecting this information, I realized that a 10 year timespan may have been better. In 2013, the West Fork Complex Fire burned 87,662 acres of the Rio Grande. Then there’s the spruce beetle outbreak itself over time, accumulating to 617,000 acres. I didn’t fill in that row in the table, but the information is available from the aerial survey folks.

It would be interesting to see at least 10 years with the acreage by type plotted over time, including large events like bug and fire acres, for each National Forest. I think it would be very informative to compare forests, both in total acres of different kinds of human and other vegetation changes, and percentages of the total acres impacted.

I’m not saying that this is the perfect formulation for people to get a grasp of “relative vegetation management” I’m just asking “doesn’t this way of looking at it tell us something of value”?

What would you add or change?

Also circling back to the forest planning question, if some forests, say in R5, have had up to 80 % of their forest affected by wildfires over the past 5 to 10 years, should everyone else stop planning so that they can go into revision? And if “fires are going to get larger due to some combination of fire suppression, increased ignitions and climate change” should then the amount of vegetation modeling done during plan revision be scaled back for fire-prone Forests as not a great investment? Perhaps less energy on modeling and more energy on responding to fire and other changes via amendment?

Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act

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We’ve been talking about developing an actual carbon policy for forest management.  Republicans have been willing to concede that planting trees would be beneficial, but others say that is not enough.  We now have a more comprehensive bipartisan legislative proposal that is getting some attention – The Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act.  According to the Washington Post, “The forestry proposal is the first to emerge from the Climate Solutions Caucus, which Coons and Braun launched a little more than a year ago.”  It “directs the U.S. Forest Service to set goals for how much carbon the forests, grasslands, wetlands and some coastal areas should sequester from the atmosphere.”

According to sponsor Senator Young (R-IN), among the things it would do is:

  • Requires that USDA establish objectives for increasing the net carbon stock of American forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coastal blue carbon habitats.

Young’s website provides a link to the bill.  The specific language applicable to the Forest Service is to establish within two years, “objectives for increased net carbon stock for the forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal blue carbon habitat ecosystems of the United States that are owned or managed by the Federal Government.” The objectives “shall be established at levels that assist in achieving (A) the optimally feasible and ecologically appropriate increase in the total net carbon stock.” Those objectives, “shall be based on information relating to the maintenance or restoration of the ecological integrity of the ecosystems described in subsection (a), including maintaining or restoring ecologically appropriate forest, grassland, wetland, and blue carbon habitat structure, function, composition, and connectivity…”  That sounds like it is straight out of the 2012 Planning Rule.  There is no mention of national forest planning per se in the bill, but it is hard to see any other vehicle for implementing this policy and these objectives on national forests.

Young’s website also states that, “This legislation is supported by The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, Bipartisan Policy Center, American Forest Foundation, American Conservation Coalition, National Association of State Foresters, Conservation International, and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.”

According the Environmental Defense Fund, it “follows recommendations from climate scientists and nonprofit organizations to focus on measuring climate impact instead of number of trees planted.”  EDF’s summary:

  • Expand existing U.S. Forest Service carbon accounting to include grasslands, wetlands and coastal ecosystems, in addition to forests.
  • Ensure that forests and other ecosystems will be valued not only for harvested materials, but also for important climate mitigation functions.
  • Measure progress using “net carbon stock,” a metric that reflects the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how carbon stores can grow or shrink over time.
  • Direct the Forest Service to share expertise, including technical capacity to increase carbon stored in urban forests, with states and recipients of U.S. foreign aid.
  • Provide funding to alleviate the nation’s 1.3-million-acre backlog of reforestation projects.

One section of the bill intends to provide financing “to facilitate the sale of credits in the voluntary carbon market or other recognized environmental market…”  However (as described in the same Washington Post article linked above), carbon offsets have become an issue in relation to the nomination of Mary Nichols, the longtime head of the California Air Resources Board, to be the new director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

One central point of contention is her achievement of California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. The program allows companies to offset harmful emissions by paying for forestation or other projects that decrease gases elsewhere. But opponents say it amounts to a license to pollute with poor and minority communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms.

Carbon has also come up in relation to the nomination of Tom Vilsack to be USDA Secretary.  The chance to work on Biden’s climate agenda may have made the job more attractive for Vilsack to return.  Carbon seems to offer an interesting opportunity for the USDA to actually unite its agricultural and forestry forces behind a common goal.

Woodman spare that forest (the climate needs it)

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Source: Biodiversity Sri Lanka

I’ve been wondering if there is a straightforward answer to the question of how to best manage forest lands to sequester carbon for the foreseeable future to reduce potential climate change impacts.  We’ve beaten around that bush a few times, such as here.

I thought such an answer might be found in the kind of forest management activities carbon offset programs are willing to pay for.  I recently ran across this example, which describes two new programs for small forest landowners.

“Forest carbon projects have historically faced skepticism around their additionality and potential for leakage — that is, the shifting of tree removals to nearby acreage. The concern is that despite paying a landowner to keep trees on one parcel, the same number will simply be removed elsewhere, resulting in a null offset with no net change in carbon storage. Yet SilviaTerra believes this problem can be addressed by creating a market in which all landowners are eligible to receive carbon payments as an alternative to timber revenues…  Payments are scaled to target the timeframe when forests have matured to a point of likely timber harvest… SilviaTerra believes that timber harvest deferrals hold the potential for removing over a billion tons of atmospheric carbon within the United States in the coming decade, or 4.3 billion tons globally.”

SilviaTerra is paying landowners to not harvest mature trees now, and presumably they would continue to do that indefinitely for a parcel because, (according to this article on the carbon value of old forests), “We now know that the concept of overmature forest stands, used by the timber industry in reference to forest products, does not apply to carbon.”   The Family Forest Carbon Program pays for “improved forest management practices,” “such as removal of invasive species or limiting thinning.”  Both seem to treat the answer to my question as obvious – the best management for carbon is “don’t cut down trees.”

Here is what the Forest Service has had to say about the best available science.  This 2017 General Technical Report covers a lot of the pros and cons and questions and considerations and reservations that we have previously discussed, such as wood products, wood energy and fire risk, but if the goal is to “maintain and increase carbon stocks,” the best answer appears to be “decrease carbon loss:”

“Decreasing the intensity of forest harvest is one way to decrease carbon losses to the atmosphere (McKinley et al. 2011, Ryan et al. 2010). Across diverse forest systems, the “no harvest” option commonly produces the highest forest carbon stocks (Creutzburg et al. 2015, Nunery and Keeton 2010, Perez-Garcia et al. 2007).”

The Report was written for a broad audience of landowners and managers, so it also discusses options for managed stands:

“Managed stands typically have lower levels of forest biomass than unmanaged stands, even though the annual rate of sequestration may be higher in a younger forest. In managed forests, reducing harvest intensity, lengthening harvest rotations, and increasing stocking or retention levels will generally increase the amount of carbon stored within forest ecosystem carbon pools in the absence of severe disturbance (D’Amato et al. 2011, Harmon 2001, Harmon and Marks 2002, McKinley et al. 2011, Taylor et al. 2008b).”

However, they also provide caveats and qualifiers associated with obtaining overall carbon benefits from any strategy that removes trees, which make it clear this would likely be a second-best strategy for carbon sequestration.

With regard to national forests, the Report recognizes the role of NFMA and forest plan revisions:

“Assuming carbon is one of these key ecosystem services, the plan should describe the desired conditions for carbon in the plan area that may vary by management or geographic area. In developing plan objectives, the interdisciplinary team should consider the linkage between carbon and how plan objectives would contribute to carbon storage or sequestration. Standards and guidelines may also be needed to achieve desired outcomes for carbon.”

We shouldn’t have to just assume the importance of carbon sequestration, since that is a decision a forest plan could make.  With an incoming administration that has said it would integrate climate change into everything it does, a good question to ask them would be why should the Forest Service not establish in its forest plans the desired outcome to “maintain and increase carbon stocks.”  This should create a presumption or default that trees should not be removed unless the Forest Service can demonstrate scientifically that it would improve carbon sequestration (apparently difficult to do), or if it would meet some other goal that the planning process has determined is a higher priority than climate change (such as public safety).  Climate change mitigation has typically been diverted to a side-channel during forest planning, but there doesn’t seem to be any excuse now for why at least managing for carbon sequestration isn’t mainstream.

Hundreds of Giant Sequoias Considered Dead From Wildfires

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It appears that rumors of ‘natural and beneficial’ wildfires in the southern Sierra Nevada have been ‘greatly exaggerated’. Even the Alder Creek grove, which was recently bought by Save the Redwoods, was decimated. Of course, this eventuality has been long-predicted.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-11-16/sierra-nevada-giant-sequoias-killed-castle-fire

National forests in the presidential campaign

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I found two articles in my newsfeed this morning from sources I have rarely or never heard from, and on both sides of the political canyon.  Both are related to the respective campaigns.

People for the American Way used a Forest Service case to make their point about the risk of more conservative judges being nominated by a Republican administration.  Here’s the headline: “Trump Judge Tries to Permit Forest Service to Proceed with Commercial Logging of Trees Without Assessing Environmental Impact: Confirmed Judges Confirmed Fears.”  They provide a reasonable summary of EPIC v. Carlson (which we reported here), but attack the dissent written by the Trump appointee, saying, “If it had been up to Trump judge Lee, however, that would not be the case, risking significant environmental injury.”

I’m not sure there is anything particularly unusual about this case – traditionally conservative judges seem to be more willing to defer to agency expertise (though Trump refers to agency expertise as “the swamp”).  I do think it is unusual for a national forest lawsuit to be dragged into a presidential campaign.

Then there was the logger who spoke at the Republican National Convention, and was featured in Breitbart.

“Under Obama-Biden, radical environmentalists were allowed to kill the forests,” Dane said.

“Under President Trump, we’ve seen a new recognition of the value of forest management in reducing wildfires,” Dane said. “And we’ve seen new support for our way of life—where a strong back and a strong work ethic can build a strong middle class.”

“We want to build families where we’re raised and stand by communities that have stood by us,” Dane said. “We want that way of life available for the next generation, and we want our forests there too.”

The debates about the “value of forest management in reducing wildfires” of course haven’t been settled.  But I’m more interested here in the idea that it should be the role of government to perpetuate anyone’s industry, job, hometown or “way of life,” logging in particular.  (I always thought Republicans wanted to limit the role of government.)