Sen. Curtis’ bill is the opposite of ‘fixing’ our forests

The Manti-La Sal National Forest covers more than 1.2 million acres in the central and southeastern parts of Utah and the extreme western part of Colorado. (Photo by Danita Delimont/Getty Images)

During the Vietnam War, an American officer offered one of the most infamous quotes of all time. Referring to the U.S. military’s decision to bomb into obliteration a town of 35,000 people, he said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” This quote comes to mind when examining a bill sponsored by Utah Sen. John Curtis, ironically named “Fix Our Forests Act,” S.1462, (FOFA). It should be renamed “We Have to Destroy our Forests to Save Them Act” (WHDFSTA). The bill is forest malpractice, climate malpractice, and public health malpractice.

Sen. Curtis’s S. 1462 is a legislative enactment of Trump’s recent executive order to dramatically ramp up logging on federal lands, exempting 60% of national forest lands from meaningful environmental analysis and public participation under the pretense of a wildfire “emergency.”

Remember Donald Trump is the environmental expert that insists the climate crisis is a hoax, and attributed Western forest fires to insufficient raking of the forest floors. The same expert that in February ordered the emptying of a reservoir critical for Central Valley farms for a photo op pretending that it would send water to fight Los Angeles wildfires. Billions of gallons of agricultural water were squandered, not a drop made it to Los Angeles.

This “WHDFSTA” bill is being justified as emergency wildfire control and a “fuels reduction” imperative, using a complete misrepresentation of what caused the devastating LA County fires in January. Those fires occurred in chaparral and grass lands, not forests. The California Chaparral Institute states that fire suppression efforts have protected chaparral, and not led to an “unnatural” accumulation of vegetation. Moreover, fires spread by 100 mph Santa Ana winds, a natural phenomenon, are not stopped by landscape fuel reduction, thinning, or prescribed fires.

For decades America’s forest management has been conducted for the benefit of the timber, fossil fuel, and ski industries, and Wall Street real estate trusts, rather than to protect the forests themselves, including spending billions to subsidize the timber industry. The bulk of research promoting forest thinning is clouded by conflict of interest. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) treats forests as a commodity. Consider this parallel. If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration heavily promoted Prozac, received revenue from Prozac sales, and published research showing its efficacy, the conflict of interest would be obvious. It is a similar conflict of interest with the USFS and the timber and wood products industries.

While trimming around mountain homes helps reduce fire risk, remote, large scale “forest thinning” is a far different matter. For at least 20 years experts have been challenging the efficacy of thinning trees to reduce wildfire spread, and over 40 studies, including from different countries, contradict this conventional wisdom.

The largest relevant study ever done, of over 1,500 fires covering 23 million acres, concluded the more “thinning” of trees in a forest the more quickly and intensely a wildfire burns. One author writes, “Dense, mature forests tend to burn less intensely … because they have higher canopy cover and more shade, which creates a cooler, more moist microclimate. The higher density of trees of all sizes can act as a windbreak, buffering gust-driven flames. Thinning and other activities that remove trees, especially mature trees, reverse those effects, creating hotter, drier, and windier conditions.” Even a USFS review of the largest fire in New Mexico history, a mismanaged prescribed burn, agreed.

Unless thinning is done on an unrealistic, massive scale and frequency, it has little chance of happening at the right time or place to minimize a wildfire. Over a 15-year period wildfire had only a 1-2% chance of even encountering a thinned forest, and leading ecologists have concluded that “fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends.” The most widely cited forest ecologist in the world, Dr. David Lindenmayer, author of 48 books on forests, says, “logged forests always burn at greater severity than intact forests.”

Curtis’s bill is climate malpractice, and climate is now the primary driver of wildfire risk. Even USFS researchers acknowledge that “wildfire reduction strategies (like forest thinning) reduce carbon sequestration potential in the near term, but provide long term benefit.” That is a scientific contradiction. Climate scientists are adamant that drastically reducing near-term carbon releases is the only thing that will prevent exceeding the threshold for disastrous climate feedback loops.

The bill is public health malpractice. “Prescribed burns,” and burning tens of thousands of slash piles, often part of a thinning strategy, produces massive amounts of deadly air pollution. A new study concluded America’s “prescribed burns” annually cause about 10,000 premature deaths and $100 billion in health costs, about the same as from wildfires.

National forests cover about 15% of the state of Utah. Sen. Curtis’s bill is a huge mistake, further endangering our forests, our health, and our climate future.