“The major problems of the world are a result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” Gregory Bateson 

The U.S. Forest Service suffer from an exceptionally large gap here. 

The Forest Service have misrepresented their own data. The original Forest Service research is, thankfully, archived by the U.S. Government. The ecologist Chad Hanson went through that archive carefully. 

That original data unequivocally indicate much higher forest density than the Forest Service now report. The original data show hundreds of trees per acre. 

These findings about forests are, as Hanson puts it in his book, Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, “more reliable than any other body of research in the history of forest and fire ecology science.” He refers not only to the Forest Service data, but to many other supporting studies. 

If we think about this issue ecologically and scientifically, can we really find it reasonable that forests need human intervention to survive, and that we need to log up to 80% of the forests—in order to “save” the forests? 

Forests have been around for tens of millions of years. They are not merely adapted to fire, but we must see fire as essential to healthy forests. Fire is a creative force in forests, and current forests are fire deficient. Our challenge is how to protect forests from logging, and how to protect human beings while we learn to live skillfully with natural fire ecologies. Our forests need patches of high intensity fire in order to thrive, and there is no evidence whatsoever that forests have ever survived by means of low intensity fire alone. Quite the contrary.

Snag forest patches (forest patches disturbed by intense fires, drought, and/or infestation) are vital ecologies, often with greater biodiversity than old growth forest.

There is no such thing as an “overgrown forest”. It’s a nonsense concept, ecologically speaking. 

Your article quotes Malcolm North as saying, “This is a fundamentally different approach to growing and managing forests.” Indeed, in the sense that human hubris has never reached such heights, nor has bad thinking. But, fundamentally speaking, this plan only differs from others in its attempt to allow open season logging of 80% of our forests. Of course, it would be fundamentally different if we decided not to protect any of our forests from logging.

We need forests—wild forests managing themselves, by means of the processes that kept them alive for millions upon millions of years. Do we really think the thinking that degraded these forests in just a few hundred years has a better track record than their millions of years of success prior to human “forest management”? 

The data are unequivocal about this too: Logging forests makes fires worse, logging is one of the most carbon-intensive industries, the U.S. leads the world in logging (beating even Brazil), and the U.S. Forest Service funds itself in significant part through logging. The U.S. Forest Service should be called the U.S. Logging Service. That may sound inflammatory, but it’s accurate. 

The primary drivers of wildfire are climate collapse and weather. Obviously, the former drives the latter. We do need to think through fire safety to protect life. But Paradise and many other tragedies show that logging makes things worse. These are case studies in the tragic ignorance of a logging-based approach to “protecting” the forests and human life.

Please listen to the track below to hear an interview I did with Chad Hanson, PhD. Please don’t share the interview, since it hasn’t been edited and released publicly.

You can find his book at the link below. Let me know if you want to learn more, or if there is anything I can do to support a better understanding of forest ecologies. We depend on healthy forests. We are better for having them. I agree with the botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger that, “An intact forest is a mighty act of peace.”

https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813181073/smokescreen/