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When the U.S. Forest Service logs “dead and dying” trees impacted by mountain pine beetles as part of a ‘salvage’ timber sale, might they also literally be cutting down the toughest and strongest trees that contain the best genetics?

New research from one of the nation’s leading entomologists lends some credence to that theory.

I was first made aware of this concept back around 2005, when we had just spent a day in the woods with a number of University of Montana scientists and reachers from the College of Forestry & Conservation, including Dr. Diana Six.

We were taking a look at the Bitterroot National Forest’s proposed Middle East Fork Healthy Forest Restoration Act Timber Sale. While conservation groups like WildWest Institute and Friends of the Bitterroot were generally supportive of about 2,000 acres of ‘thinning’ and ‘fuel reduction’ work immediately around a community of homes and cabins up the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, we strongly objected to the fact that the Forest Service and logging industry wanted to cut down nearly 2,500 acres of previously unlogged, native forests – including some Douglas fir that measured 3 feet in diameter – far from homes under the guise of “restoration” and “fuel reduction.”

In fact, much of the 2,500 acres of unlogged, native forests were previously considered old-growth habitat by the Forest Service until 2005 – when the Forest Service resurveyed the stands and determined they weren’t old-growth forest habitat after all supposedly because of the number of dead and dying trees, especially huge Douglas fir, which were impacted by bark beetles.

One thing back on that field tour in 2005 that Dr. Diana Six really got us thinking about was the genetics of trees that were dying as a result of bark beetles, but not yet dead. Of course, all living things are dying – including you and me – but what if the Forest Service was actually cutting down dying trees that might rebound and successfully fight off the bark beetle attack? Might these trees, if the Forest Service didn’t let the timber industry cut them down on our public lands, actually have possessed in their DNA the best genetics to fight off future bark beetle epidemics?

On September 11, 2007 I took some reporters to the Bitterroot National Forest for a tour of what the Bitterroot National Forest did under the guise of “community fire protection” and “restoring fire adapted ecosystems” over four miles away from the nearest home in the area. Here’s what we found.

Now, while I realize that mountain pine beetles (the subject of Dr. Six’s latest research) are different than Douglas-fir beetle; it seems as if the same general concept applies to all trees that someone fend off beetle epidemics.

Below is the press release from the University of Montana.

MISSOULA – A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees.

UM Professor Diana Six made the discovery after studying mature whitebark and lodgepole trees that were the age and size that mountain pine beetle prefer, but had somehow escaped attack during the recent outbreak.

After DNA screening, survivor trees all contained a similar genetic makeup that was distinctly different from the general population that were mostly susceptible to the beetle.

“Our findings suggest that survivorship is genetically based and, thus, heritable,” Six said, “which is what gives us hope.”

In western North America, whitebark pine, a high elevation keystone species recommended for listing as an endangered species, and lodgepole pine, a widespread ecologically and economically important tree, have experienced extensive mortality in recent climate-driven outbreaks of the mountain pine beetle.

“Our results suggest that surviving trees possess a wealth of information that can be used to inform our understanding of the genetic and phenotypic bases for resistance and to develop management approaches that support forest adaptation,” Six said.

The study was published July 23 in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science and is available online right here.

An op-ed from the NY Times last week by Chad T. Hanson and Michael Brune, who are against forestry provisions of the Farm Bill, now in Congress: “Using Wildfires as an Excuse to Plunder Forests: Logging won’t end the blazes that are sweeping the West.” Hanson is an ecologist whose research focuses on forest and fire ecology. Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club.

The authors make at least one point of fact that hasn’t received enough attention:

“Most of the homes that were destroyed by wildfires over the past year, as in the Tubbs fire and Thomas fire last fall in California, were not primarily in forested areas, but in grasslands, shrub lands and oak savannas.”

They are correct that taking measures to help individual homes survive fires is important, but grasslands, shrub lands, and oak savannas will need some form of fuels management if the threat of large fires in these types of ecosystems is to be significantly reduced. Doing nothing means that large fires will remain a threat.

However, Hanson and Brune recycle old falsehoods in an attempt to make their case.

The Farm Bill provisions the object to “would include logging of old-growth forests and clearcutting of ecologically important post-fire habitat, upon which many imperiled wildlife species depend.”

Large-scale Logging of old-growth forests isn’t occurring on federal lands in the western US and isn’t likely to be used where fuels reduction is the goal. And “clearcutting of ecologically important post-fire habitat” typically occurs on very small portions of burned areas, such as the Chetco Bar Fire on the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest in 2017, which burned 170,321 acres of National Forest System lands. The USFS says it plans to salvage 71 million board feet of burned timber from 4,090 acres, or 2.5% of the Chetco Bar Fire area — 97.5% of the “ecologically important post-fire habitat” will remain.

(Note that the Chetco Bar Fire burned a total of 191,197 acres, a bit less than the area of New York City, 197,760 acres.)

The authors insist that “logging does nothing to curb fires. On the contrary, increased logging can make fires burn more intensely. Logging, including many projects deceptively promoted as forest ‘thinning,’ removes fire-resistant trees, reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy and leaves behind highly combustible twigs and branches.”

Forest thinning, if applied at the appropriate intensity for a site’s conditions, can lead to a significant decrease in fire severity and extent. See “Basic principles of forest fuel reduction treatments,” by noted fire ecologist James K. Agee and Carl N. Skinner of the USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station, who report in Forest Ecology and Management that “Applying treatments at an appropriate landscape scale will be critical to the success of fuel reduction treatments in reducing wildfire losses in Western forests.”

Back in April 2013, I wrote a post for this blog titled “Rough and Ready: The Other Story.” Here’s the opening for paragraphs of that April 2013 article:

Earlier in the week the owners of the Rough and Ready Lumber mill south of Cave Junction, Oregon announced they were closing their doors for good. There was one reason cited by the owners: A lack of logging on Forest Service and BLM lands in southwestern Oregon. Jennifer Phillippi even went so far as to describe the situation this way, “It’s like sitting in a grocery store not being able to eat while the produce rots around you.”

Well, if you wander away from the timber mill’s talking points even a little bit and talk with actual neighbors in southwestern Oregon who have witnessed Rough and Ready’s handywork over the years, you get a much different story – a story of over-cutting, mis-management, toxic contamination and political manipulation.

Also in April 2013, the NBC station in Medford, Oregon had more information on the announced closure of the Rough and Ready Lumber mill near Cave Junction, Oregon:

Today, as the last saw mill in Josephine and Jackson county announces it’s plans to close, some residents are sharing the other side of the story: one they say includes political manipulation, mis-management, and contamination. For some, the news that Rough and Ready Lumber in Cave Junction is going out of business threw up a red flag. Residents fear the threat to close is a ploy to gain access to more timber.

Residents say they’ve seen this happen before. “It’s been some years back the Rough and Ready mill was up for sale,” says South Cave Junction Neighborhood Watch member, Guenter Ambron.

“It’s just wrong,” says a neighbor of Rough and Ready, too scared to identify herself on camera for fear of retaliation. She tells us there’s more than meets in the eye in the company’s announcement to close. “I think it’s being used as a tool to push our representatives and governor into giving them O&C lands,” continues the neighbor.

She says at one point, Rough and Ready was considered a self sufficient company with private logging lands, but she says it’s their own fault they’re out of wood. “If they actually maintained their resource lands and had not clear cut and sprayed with poisons they would actually have a constant supply of timbers to harvest.”

Rough and Ready was in the news again recently. On September 5, 2018 the Oregonian published an article titled, “Oregon sawmill deal cost taxpayers millions. Was it a crime?”

Last month, the state forcefully reasserted that a corporate arm of Portland-based Ecotrust unlawfully inflated project costs and omitted material facts to get millions in tax credits it didn’t qualify for.

A question now, some legal experts say: Will the state investigate that as a potential crime?

Officials at state economic development agency Business Oregon used unusually strong language in a memo to Ecotrust managers, characterizing the tax credit deal as built on untrue and incomplete information. The deal, approved in 2014, was intended to throw a lifeline to the Rough & Ready sawmill in Southern Oregon….

The complicated transaction at issue began in 2013, when Rough & Ready was looking for a bailout and Ecotrust stepped in with the know-how to connect the sawmill to investors via tax credits. The mill owners and Ecotrust executives sought to rebuild the Josephine County economy by restarting the mothballed mill.

To get the $3.1 million in state credits it sought for the Rough & Ready deal, Ecotrust needed to show Business Oregon the mill would spend at least $8 million on qualifying expenses. Its 2013 application promised it would do just that.

However, in its August 16 memo recently released to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Business Oregon said Ecotrust managers made “material misrepresentations and omissions” and failed to “accurately describe” their plans.

The state found Ecotrust failed to disclose that it orchestrated a one-day loan of nearly $5 million from Chase Bank to Rough & Ready. That loan, Business Oregon concluded, did not “represent an arms-length transaction” and was used in essence to let the couple who own the sawmill buy it from themselves.

The transaction was included in the overall budget for the project, which meant it qualified on paper for more credits than it would have otherwise. But Business Oregon determined the transaction should not have been counted and, if it had been disclosed, the deal likely wouldn’t have been approved.

The undisclosed loan “unlawfully” boosted the project budget, and Ecotrust and Chase “improperly benefited” as a result, according to the Business Oregon memo, written by director Chris Harder.

Rough & Ready’s owners and Chase Bank knew the one-day loan was “circular” and was not used to make a valid purchase, Harder wrote. Ecotrust structured the deal so that the loan passed from Chase to Rough & Ready via a second corporate subsidiary of Ecotrust established just for the sawmill deal.

Chase, which provided the loan and then was able to buy the resulting tax credits at a deep discount, declined to comment on the appropriateness of the single-day loan. A Chase spokeswoman said the bank makes investments “supported by economic development authorities that intend to meet local needs.”

The Rough & Ready sawmill went belly up barely a year after the deal closed, erasing all 70 promised jobs. Taxpayers lost at least $7 million in state and federal underwriting on the deal gone wrong….

Some legal experts say the state should not only seek to claw back the money, but should also seriously consider a criminal investigation….

Hafez Daraee, a corporate defense attorney who is not involved in the case, said someone who knowingly makes a misrepresentation in the course of receiving public financing could face civil financial penalties.

“The rule of thumb is if you try to fudge your numbers, the government has every right to come after you, as they should,” Daraee said….

The quagmire Business Oregon now finds itself in was avoidable. There were clear signs the Rough & Ready project was doomed from the start, The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported in March.

Glaring signals included an overly rosy financial analysis and a hand-written budget proposal in which all expenditures came out to an even $100,000. But the state and federal tax credit programs that financed the project allow for little scrutiny of potential deals and rely heavily on the accuracy of submitted applications.

The memo relates that Ecotrust had to show the project had $8 million in qualifying expenses to land $3.1 million in tax credits. To reach that threshold, the memo asserts, Ecotrust inflated the project’s expenses using a “one-day” loan. Mill owners Jennifer and Link Phillippi used a $4.8 million from Chase Bank to essentially buy the mill from themselves and then paid off the loan the next day. Yes, you read that right.

Yesterday, the editorial board of the Oregonian published this editorial, titled, “Oregon sawmill deal cost taxpayers millions. Was it a crime?”

[Oregon Attorney General Ellen] Rosenblum should investigate Ecotrust’s use of the New Markets Tax Credit program to determine whether its practices rise beyond sloppiness to criminal malfeasance.

Rosenblum knows more now, considering that Business Oregon officials have spent the past six months scrutinizing Ecotrust CDE’s deal. In mid-August, officials reported their findings to the Oregon Department of Revenue. Among numerous accusations, the memo claimed that Ecotrust “omitted material information,” “failed to accurately describe the sources and uses of proceeds” and “failed to disclose the intentions” of the one-day loan.

The memo relates that Ecotrust had to show the project had $8 million in qualifying expenses to land $3.1 million in tax credits. To reach that threshold, the memo asserts, Ecotrust inflated the project’s expenses using a “one-day” loan. Mill owners Jennifer and Link Phillippi used a $4.8 million from Chase Bank to essentially buy the mill from themselves and then paid off the loan the next day. Yes, you read that right….

Business Oregon shouldn’t continue to extend the deadline that would provide Ecotrust a second chance. Instead, the state should seek to recoup the tax credits that this deal never should have received. And, Rosenblum should aggressively investigate what went wrong and who was responsible.

Across the state, Oregonians could use the help that sound economic investment can provide. But the investment needs to be real and long-lasting, with money going reliably home in their paychecks — not out the mill door through management fees.

Amen.

Get the full scoop from the Missoula Current. Below are some snips from the recent article.

As paleo-ecologists, Cathy Whitlock and Philip Higuera study past wildfires to better understand fire behavior. But what they see is that wildfires today are very different because of the Earth’s changing climate….

Higuera said that since the 1980s, the area consumed each year by wildfires is 10 times larger than the area that the Forest Service can log, thin, burn or restore.

“It forces you to recognize that you’re not going to get out of this problem simply by doing more treatment to the landscape,” Higuera said. “It’s unlikely that we would be able to eliminate years like 2017. So we need to expect and plan for more years like 2017.”

Whitlock and Higuera agreed that because wildfires are going to happen with increasing regularity as summers get hotter and drier, the Forest Service should use them as a tool to restore forest health. As long as they don’t threaten lives, wildfires can burn out all the dead wood and excess vegetation, setting the stage for a more healthy ecosystem.

Treatment projects tend to be small due to funding limits. So they should be focused on areas around people’s homes where they can make a difference, Higuera said.

The human factor can be a problem because people expect the Forest Service to put fires out. Also, too many people are building their homes in forested areas – the wildland-urban interface – that are bound to burn. In any given wildfire, firefighters spend an increasing amount of time and effort and risk lives to save homes rather than fighting fire.

Since 1990, 2 million new homes have been built in the wildland-urban interface – mostly in fire-prone low-elevation forests. Already 900,000 homes are in zones of high fire risk. By 2040, it is projected that 40 percent of the WUI will have an increased risk of burning, according to a 2015 University of Colorado study.

“I think that’s where the conversation needs to focus,” Whitlock said.

Education is needed to make people aware of the threats so they don’t build in risk-prone areas, but also so they understand the positive aspects of wildfire. Americans need to accept the inevitability of fire like they accept the inevitability of earthquakes or tornadoes, Higuera said.

“The forests are continually adapting to climate change and one way is by burning. I think what we’re seeing is the forests are equilibrating to climate change. The trouble is the climate is still changing. But these fires really should be thought of as a natural ecological process of adjusting to a new climate,” Whitlock said.

When most reporters cover wildfire and forest issues they seem to present an entirely false narrative (feed by the timber industry and pro-timber industry politicians, ad nauseam) that all forests in the U.S. are unnaturally over-crowded and dense and all forests used to burn frequently, but at a very low severity.

While that narrative might (generally) be true of a certain (but small) percentage of forests in the western U.S. (for example, such frequent fire, but low burn severity forests, make up only about 5% of the entire forested landscape in Montana and northern Idaho), the vast majority of forest ecosystem in the western U.S. have a much more complicated and mixed fire history. This includes huge forest ecosystems that were born of, and are maintained by, mixed- to high-severity fire regimes.

That’s why this piece in the Seattle Times by Hal Bernton is so important, and refreshing.

The article highlights a new study from a research team that included scientists from the University of Washington, Washington state Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service scientists. Better yet, the reporter got out into the forest with some of the leading forest and fire ecologists around.

One interesting tidbit of information in this article was the fact that early in Dr. Jerry Franklin’s career, he also dove into wildland fire issues. In fact, Dr. Franklin co-authored a 1982 study of Mount Rainier National Park, uncovered evidence of huge conflagrations 900 years ago that affected nearly 50 percent of the forested areas.

Apparently, if you believe Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that wildfires are caused by “environmental terrorist groups,” that huge conflagration that burned nearly 50% of the forested areas around present-day Mount Rainier National Park in approximately is 1118 A.D. is a real eye-opener, proving that “environmental terrorist groups” have been living in our midst for almost 1000 years now. Tune in to Fox News, The Daily Caller and Breitbart “News” for more breaking coverage exposing this 1118 A.D. “environmental terrorist” sect. In the meantime, here’s some snips from Bernton’s latest article:

On a remote ridge, the hemlock, silver and noble firs stood for several centuries, nurtured by deep winter snow and drenching rains. Then last year, amid the searing August temperatures, the Norse Peak fire on the east side of the Cascades pushed over the range’s crest and engulfed this stand, killing most of these trees.

Now the charred trunks rise like ghostly sentinels in a forest littered with charcoal, which still gives off whiffs of the smoke that billowed from the 55,909-acre blaze. This austere burn zone is a typical aftermath to intense fires that, over the course of centuries, periodically feast upon the huge amounts of wood that grow in the west-side forests of our region.

The fire ecology of such forests, and how it may evolve amid climate change, is of increasing importance as wild-land smoke emerges as a regional concern. The polluted air that hung this summer over a vast stretch of the West Coast — from San Francisco to Vancouver, B.C. — has generated a fresh wave of support for more logging and cool-season burns to thin the forests and reduce the potential fuel.

These tactics are standard practice east of the Cascades. But in a peer-reviewed paper published this year, a research team of University of Washington, state Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Forest Service scientists caution that such tactics won’t do much to tame or head off west-side fires, which are forecast to happen more often — and burn more acreage — as climate change spurred by the combustion of fossil fuels reduces winter snowpack and increases summer temperatures.

But wetter forests, such as the stand torched in the Norse Peak blaze, have a very different relationship with fire. They burn infrequently but the toll on the trees often is severe. Trying to head off these fires would require thinning these public lands every decade or so, and that would change the natural character of these lands in what Franklin calls a “fool’s exercise.”

There also are benefits to these west-side fires, which Franklin says can act as powerful sources of forest renewal.

NPR interview, August 31: “Why Seattle Had The Worst Air Quality In The World At Some Points This Summer.” A professor of atmospheric sciences talks about wildfire smoke and air quality, but also forests (which, of course, he’s less qualified to comment on). Still, it is interesting that he says “only a small proportion of this is climate change.” Excerpts:

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
At some points this summer, the big city with the worst air quality anywhere in the world was not Beijing or New Delhi. It was Seattle, Wash. To talk about why and what this means for the future, professor Cliff Mass joins us now. He’s a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. Welcome.

…

MASS: Well, the big problem is our forests. We’ve suppressed fire now for almost a century. A lot of the forests surrounding Seattle are in very bad condition. They’re overgrown. They have a lot of slash, a lot of low bushes and trees. And they’re completely unlike the forests that were here 150 years ago. And the problem is when they burn, they burn catastrophically.

SHAPIRO: And I’m sure climate change doesn’t help.

MASS: That’s right. The question is how much of this is climate change. I suspect that only a small proportion of this is climate change. I think that the main problem is the forests, which are ready to burn. We have invasive grasses that have moved in that burn very easily. And human beings are increasingly starting fires with this huge number of people going in for recreation, other uses of the forested areas.

Now, on the long term, as the planet warms up, we certainly would expect more fires. So climate change, global warming probably contributed a small amount to it, but probably the key thing is what we’ve done to the surface of the planet.

SHAPIRO: Are there things that the government or citizens could do to try to prevent this from happening more?
MASS: Well, the key thing is to fix our forests. People know what to do. I mean, if you talk to the people in the Forest Service, it’s clear. We have to thin the forests and then let fire come back regularly but at a much lower intensity.

This is a pretty good story from NPR. One thing that is misses, I think, is that this isn’t all about USFS lands, especially in Northern California’s recent fires near Redding and Napa, where much private land burned. In this light, the USFS’s “shared stewardship” initiative is right on target — except that is does not call for funding to treat areas without merchantable timber that can pay for some or all of fuels-reduction projects.

The following piece was written by George Wuerthner. – mk

In the coming week or so, Congress will be considering the Farm Bill which has numerous inappropriate amendments for our public forests approved in the House but not in the Senate version. The bill’s fate will be decided in a conference committee between the House and Senate. It is critical that Senator John Tester not support the House bill as written because of numerous anti-environmental provisions that will fail to protect communities and increase fire intensity resulting from more logging.

Among the poison pills in the bill are provisions designed to speed logging in the West under the guise of reducing large wildfires. Not only is logging ineffective at halting large fires which are primarily driven by extreme fire weather/climate, but there are many ecological “costs” to logging including the spread of weeds, sedimentation from logging roads, loss of carbon storage, and disturbance to sensitive wildlife.

The House version of the Farm Bill would reduce the requirement for NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) which protects our public lands from unmitigated logging projects. This will eliminate government accountability.

The bill would also expand the use of “Categorical Exclusions” (CE) to 6000 acres that could lead to clearcuts as large as 9 square miles without any public review. Furthermore, there is no limit on CEs, so the agency could log one 6000-acre block and immediately adjacent log a second or third 6000-acre block.

How big is 6000 acres? A football field is about an acre—so imagine 6000 football fields being cleared of trees.

The worse thing about the proposed House Farm Bill is that these provisions are not based on science, but on flawed assumptions about the effect of logging on wildfires.

Recently more than 200 preeminent scientists signed a letter to Congress finding that proposed solutions to wildfire like thinning forests are ineffective and short-lived.

Worse, such solutions simply do not work under extreme fire weather conditions. With climate change, we are experiencing more extreme fire weather conditions.

To quote from the scientists’ letter: “Thinning is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity…However, as the climate changes, most of our fires will occur during extreme fire-weather (high winds and temperatures, low humidity, low vegetation moisture). These fires, like the ones burning in the West this summer, will affect large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and, in some cases, burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days.”

The letter goes on to say: “Thinning large trees, including overstory trees in a stand, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening up the forest to increased wind velocity, damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory vegetation, and impact wildlife habitat.”

“Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that degrades water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads”, the letter states.

It is critical that Senator Tester does not support phony solutions in the House Farm Bill will not work.

Over 38 Senators and over 100 Congressional Representatives signed a letter to Conferees to reject the House provisions. Hopefully, Senator Tester can join with his colleagues and reject this flawed plan for forest mismanagement.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist who has published 38 books including two on fire ecology.

A recent paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is informative: “Decreasing fire season precipitation increased recent western US forest wildfire activity,” by Zachary A. Holden et al. (subscription):

Abstract

Western United States wildfire increases have been generally attributed to warming temperatures, either through effects on winter snowpack or summer evaporation. However, near-surface air temperature and evaporative demand are strongly influenced by moisture availability and these interactions and their role in regulating fire activity have never been fully explored. Here we show that previously unnoted declines in summer precipitation from 1979 to 2016 across 31–45% of the forested areas in the western United States are strongly associated with burned area variations. The number of wetting rain days (WRD; days with precipitation ≥2.54 mm) during the fire season partially regulated the temperature and subsequent vapor pressure deficit (VPD) previously implicated as a primary driver of annual wildfire area burned. We use path analysis to decompose the relative influence of declining snowpack, rising temperatures, and declining precipitation on observed fire activity increases. After accounting for interactions, the net effect of WRD anomalies on wildfire area burned was more than 2.5 times greater than the net effect of VPD, and both the WRD and VPD effects were substantially greater than the influence of winter snowpack. These results suggest that precipitation during the fire season exerts the strongest control on burned area either directly through its wetting effects or indirectly through feedbacks to VPD. If these trends persist, decreases in summer precipitation and the associated summertime aridity increases would lead to more burned area across the western United States with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic impacts.

It’s been my observation that many of the pro-logging folks that participate on this blog seem to like and agree with much of what Dr. Jerry Franklin has to say.

Well, today 16 leading experts in forest ecology and management, including esteemed professors Norman Christensen of Duke University and Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington, sent a letter to members of Congress who will conference on the Farm Bill describing their concerns on the Forestry Title of H.R. 2, The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, the House of Representative’s version of the Farm Bill.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“Many of the House bill’s forestry provisions are not supported by science. For instance, the bill seeks to aggressively expand post-fire ‘salvage’ logging on public lands to prevent wildfire, when in reality post-fire logging occurs primarily for economic reasons and rarely contributes to ecological recovery in the disturbed area. Post-fire logging of dead or dying trees is appropriate near roads where standing dead trees pose a safety hazard but should generally be avoided in areas where maintaining natural ecosystem processes is a priority. However, the House language does not recognize this key distinction.”

“By exempting controversial projects from meaningful evaluation and public engagement, the House farm bill runs counter to basic principles of science-based forest management, including the use of best available science and the application of robust decision-making processes. If they were to become law, the House farm bill’s forestry provisions would result in poorly planned, ineffective and harmful management actions that fail to address the vital need to improve the climate and fire resiliency of our national forests and the safety of our communities.”

More information and details can be found here.