Senators Curtis, Hickenlooper, Padilla, and Sheehy introduced Senate 1462 Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) legislation. Similar legislation has already passed the House of Representatives.
FOFA is a solution looking for a problem. Unfortunately, our forests do not have problems; even if they did, FOFA would not fix them.
The idea that logging and prescribed burns can prevent large blazes is analogous to the belief that removing “bad blood” in the Middle Ages could cure illness.
Ostensibly, the problem FOFA seeks to solve is large wildfires. FOFA supporters believe logging, prescribed burning, and other “active forest management” practices can preclude the large blazes that have occurred across the West in recent decades.
Part of the reasoning driving support for FOFA is the myth that fire “suppression” has created “fuel build-up.”
The real problem with our forests is the failure to understand fire ecology. First, most plant communities in the West are dominated by long fire rotations, often hundreds of years between blazes. This includes common forest species like lodgepole pine, aspen, spruce, fir, juniper, and sagebrush communities.
Furthermore, more acres are burned in non-forest plant communities like chaparral and grasslands, including some of the biggest blazes in recent years.
It is natural for dead material to accumulate under such scenarios. Still, these sites don’t burn frequently because they are too cold, dry, and moist or characterized by other factors that limit fire spread.
The cause of large blazes is not fuel, though it is a justification that conveniently fits the timber industry’s interests in logging; it is climate change.
One of the issues with FORA is the failure to understand what drives large wildfires. There are four key ingredients: drought, high temperatures, low humidity, and, most importantly, high winds. You will not get a large conflagration if you don’t have these four elements in the same place as an ignition.
Think about someplace like the cool, moist forests along the Oregon or Washington coasts. There is more “fuel’ in those biomass-rich forests with the largest trees found in North America than any other part of the West, but large blazes are almost non-existent. Why? Because even if you have an ignition, the cool, moist conditions preclude fire spreading.
Last time I checked, logging and prescribed burns do not change the local climate conditions. However, logging does increase solar drying of vegetation and greater wind penetration, two factors that increase wildfire spread. Logging also releases more carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to even greater global warming.
The most significant factor in large, high-severity blazes is wind. And wind drives embers over, around, and through logged forests and over prescribed burns. I’ve seen multiple places where wind-driven blazes have jumped across places with limited fuel, like 16-lane highways (no fuel) or even the mile-and-a-half-wide Columbia River. The only “fuel break” I’ve ever seen that stopped a wind-driven wildfire is the Pacific Ocean, which halted the westward advance of the Pacific Palisades blaze.
There is no serious debate among scientists about human-caused carbon emissions heating the planet. So, ultimately, the best way to reverse the occurrence of large blazes is to reduce carbon releases. The Trump administration can pretend that climate change isn’t real, but if your home burns up in a wildfire, climate change gets real very quickly.
Rather than a “Fix Our Forests Act,” we need a “Fix Our Climate Act.” Until carbon emissions are under control, the next best solution is a “Fix Our Communities Act,” which can provide funding to harden communities and upgrade building codes to require fire-resistant structures.
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