Wildfire & Forest Management

Our forests are choked with fuel -- something we can fix right now. One free-market research group puts it this way: after a century of putting out every fire, 'unnatural amounts of highly flammable dead brush and undergrowth have built up in public forests.' The U.S. Forest Service reports a backlog of 80 million acres that need work, with 63 million acres facing high or very high fire risk. In 2015 it counted 6.3 billion dead standing trees in western forests -- all of that is fuel waiting to burn. The fix is proven. That same group says, 'Management practices like selective thinning and prescribed burning help clear deadfall and underbrush, reducing the fuel an unplanned fire can consume.' Treatments that include planned fire cut a later wildfire's severity a lot -- by 62% to 72% where they are done. Even after 10 years, thinning plus prescribed fire still holds a 49% cut. Thin out the small trees and do careful burns, and a wildfire moves slower and cooler, so crews can stop it more easily. We also should not wait years to act. Environmental-review rules take 'nearly four years to start thinning trees and nearly five years to start prescribed burning.' Speeding that up would let us treat far more land before it burns. And we should harden homes at the same time -- fire-safe roofs, screened vents, and a clear 5-foot 'Zone 0' buffer. California's nonpartisan budget office backs this mix, calling fuel reduction, defensible space, and home hardening 'widely considered good practices to reduce wildfire risks.' Managing the land and toughening our houses is the fastest, surest way to stop the next disaster.

The main engine of these mega-fires is a hotter, drier climate, and no amount of chainsaw work changes that. A peer-reviewed study in PNAS found that human-caused warming drove about 55% of the rise in forest dryness, and nearly doubled the forest area burned across the West. The Center for American Progress, a center-left group, sums up the science this way: 'climate change is the main driver of increasing fire weather in the Western U.S.' It adds that 'human-caused climate change is one of the dominant factors behind these increased wildfire risks.' If we ignore that, we lose. One fire ecologist, Chad Hanson, says forest work is not stopping the biggest fires. In his words, 'forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires.' He points to the deadly Camp Fire, which he says 'definitely burned more intensely and got there faster because of the logging' -- so, in his view, heavy cutting can speed a fire, not slow it. Spend the money where it saves lives: put it into homes and towns, not logging the backcountry. As Hanson puts it, 'the only effective way to protect communities from wildland fire is to focus directly on homes.' That means fire-safe materials and a clear buffer. Also, stop putting new houses in the most dangerous spots, and cut the pollution that heats the planet. As the Center for American Progress puts it, these steps 'must be paired with bold climate action to curb fossil fuel emissions.'