As the oak fire swept through more than 10,000 acres southwest of Yosemite National Park last weekend, it burned through forests where widespread logging, including commercial thinning, has accelerated in recent decades. Much of the canopy had been removed, exposing the remaining vegetation to more direct sunlight and creating warmer, drier and windier conditions that favor the spread of flames.
But when the fire reached the area hit by the 2018 Ferguson fire, it slowed to about 1,000 acres a day. The previous fire had left less kindling such as dry leaves, pine needles, twigs and saplings on the forest floor.
The public was concerned about the threat the oak fire, which has burned more than 19,000 acres and is less than 50 percent contained, poses to Yosemite’s famed Mariposa giant sequoia forest. One of the logging industry’s allies in Congress, Representative Scott Peters, Democrat of California, tries to exploit the concern about giant sequoias, a species that depends on wildfires to reproduce effectivelyto promote a series of sweeping commercial logging and environmental rollbacks under the guise of wildfire management.
The truth is that logging activities tend to: increasedo not decrease, extreme firesfor example by reducing the windbreak effect that denser forests have and by bringing in highly combustible invasive grasses spread by logging machines.
However, federal land agencies, such as the US Forest Service and National Park Service, are under significant political pressure to conduct commercial logging operations that benefit logging companies but tend to worsen overall burn severity. In December 2018, President Donald Trump issued a executive order directing the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to prioritize and expand commercial logging operations on public lands, targeting mature and mature trees and forests with chainsaws and bulldozers.
Yosemite National Park then began an unprecedented commercial logging program, with the park’s superintendent, Cicely Muldoon, agreeing. in August 2021 initiate projects on more than 2,000 acres of forest in the Yosemite Valley area under the auspices of thinning, without prior public notice, opportunity for comment, or environmental impact assessment.
That meant that when visitors arrived in Yosemite National Park this spring, they got a shocking sight at a crown jewel of the country’s beloved national park system. Fully loaded loggers swept the roads as commercial loggers fell countless mature trees — some over five feet in diameter — and dragged them to sawmills and power plants where they would be burned in the Sierra Nevada foothills. That logging was then Stopped temporarily in early July by a lawsuit led by one of us and filed by the Earth Island Institute.
The effects were not limited to increasing the risk of more severe wildfires. Groups of giant, dinosaur-like loggers called feller bunkers were also ecologically vital swaths of forest, on which many species of native wildlife, such as woodpeckers and bluebirds, depend for their survival.
Then, in June, a group of House Democrats and Republicans who joined the logging industry and led by Representative Kevin McCarthy and several others introduced the deceptively named Save Our Sequoias Act. The law would curtail environmental laws, facilitate commercial logging of mature and old trees, and expedite clearcutting in giant redwood groves in Yosemite National Park, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and national forests. In a letter dated June 17 about 80 environmental groups strongly oppose this destructive logging bill, for which the sponsors are trying to rally additional support in Congress.
Federal land agencies such as the Forest Service and scientists funded by this agency have promoted logging for decades, calling it forest fire management or biomass thinning. The Forest Service is even active in commercial logging, sell trees to private logging companies and maintain the revenues for its budget. In a case involving the Earth Island Institute, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit warned that the Forest Service issued a “substantial financial interest”, in logging, one that creates bias regarding wildfire science.
In fact, a large and growing body of scientific research and evidence suggests that these logging practices make things worse. Last fall more than 200 scientists and ecologistsincluding us, the Biden administration and Congress warned that logging activities such as commercial thinning reduce the cooling shade of the canopy and alter a forest’s microclimate in ways that increase the intensity of wildfires.
Logging broadcasts three times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere per hectare only as a wildfire. Most of the tree parts that are unusable for wood – the branches, tops, bark and sawdust from the milling – are burned for energy, sending large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. In contrast, wildfire releases a surprisingly small amount of carbon in trees, less than 2 per cent. Logging in American forests is now responsible for so much annual greenhouse gas emissions like burning coals.
Worryingly, in January the Biden administration announced a proposal to spend $50 billion in taxpayers’ money to cut down no less than 50 million hectares of American forests in the next decade, again using the wildfire management narrative as a justification. As part of this plan, which congressional proponents are trying to implement piecemeal in several legislative packages, including a wildfire and drought package passed by the House of Representatives on Friday and the new climate and tax agreement in the Senate — most logging would take place in public forests, including national forests and national parks.
President and Congress should instead increase forest protection from logging to reduce carbon emissions and allow intact forests absorb more of the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Failure to do so will put countless species at risk, exacerbate global warming and increase the threat of wildfires to vulnerable cities. Current logging subsidies should be diverted to programs to directly help communities become fire safe.
Such a policy could have prevented the loss of more than 100 homes in the oak fire. After all, fires start in forests, as has been the case for millennia. To assume otherwise is like living on the coast and not expecting hurricanes. We must help communities prepare.