Wildfire Science – Page 2 – Forest Unlimited

Industrial forestry contributes to the West’s wildfire crisis

Author Craig Patterson

Imagine words so prophetic yet so misunderstood that agencies and science get sabotaged by ignorance and greed.

The U.S, Forest Service refuses to admit that past management has had significant ongoing consequences and that we can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.

Case in point: the wildfires currently raging throughout the West.

The Forest Service says we are experiencing these cataclysmic wildfires due to fire suppression and climate change, and that thinning the forests will reduce the danger.

Now witness California, Oregon and worldwide, as wildfire records are broken yearly.

Forty years ago, I remember the old bulls saying, “We don’t put out fires in the woods. Either the rains come or they run into an old growth forest and fall to the ground as a surface fire and go out.”

Now, with 95 percent of the old growth gone, only the rains really help extinguish fires of any size and consequence. Until we acknowledge and understand the connections between past practices and current realities, we will continue to experience uncharacteristic fire danger.

The Forest Service and many scientists ignore these most significant changes that have occurred in essentially three generations. This is why crown fires have become far more common today and are nearly impossible to be put out. They are consequences of past management.

Logging and replacing healthy, diverse forests with tree plantations has eliminated a key factor that seriously affects wildfire behavior (surface fire) and corresponding intensity. Rain is the other factor. Last year we spent the summer fighting uncontrollable wildfires. Then the rains returned, and three days later — problem over.

Healthy intact forests maintain shade and absorb the rain in aquifers, moderating erosion and drought while supporting diverse species in symbiotic harmony. Clearcutting causes soil, water and slash to heat, leading to erosion and ultimately leaving no forest if the integrity of the soil goes.

In the beginning, Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt defined the mission of the Forest Service to obtain “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.”

But after World War II, automation and technology drove the Forest Service to pursue the greatest good for fewest number for shortest time. Between 1950 and 1990, the Willamette National Forest cut more than 25.5 billion board feet of timber, whereas in the previous 58 years it cut 3 billion to 4 billion board feet. Where and how are the environmental, economic and social consequences accounted for in management or science? Meanwhile, the extent and consequences of today’s wildfires are too overwhelming to ignore.

Now we have our sacred cow — restoration as a focus and a determinant of places and projects to fund. However, ignoring past logging consequences allows current logging to persist. Today many restoration technologies and practices actually follow and supplement industrial forestry while consequences and lessons remain disconnected.

Today McKenzie Bridge is ground zero for the Goose Project, a restoration project which has been forced upon us under the guise of making us more “fire safe.”

Yet I’ve seen log trucks rolling by with three or four logs to the bunk. Old growth trees pushing 4 feet in diameter being cut in the name of “restoration.” Cutting these big trees makes us less fire safe, not more.

Little about industrial forestry is sustainable — environmentally economically or socially; yesterday, today or tomorrow. It’s a short boom followed by protracted bust every time. Privatized profits and socialized liabilities do not make for healthy forests or healthy communities.

The jury is in if we see the forest holistically and with common sense. How we repair the blind spots in our wildfire management philosophy and practice are questions that need to be asked. Our children and grandchildren depend upon it.

Craig Patterson of McKenzie Bridge has been a member of a forestry cooperative and delivered a paper to the National Roundtable on Sustainable forests in Washington, D.C, in 2005.

Fighting wildfire from the inside out

Author: Hector Amezcua

In the wake of the Camp Fire, I’ve been reading about the work of wildfire scientist Jack Cohen. During his many years with the U.S. Forest Service, Cohen studied which houses in fire-prone areas tend to burn and which survive. His work is deeply respected and several of his videos are on YouTube. They should be required viewing for anyone living in a wildfire zone.

To his surprise, Cohen found that the houses closest to catastrophic blazes often withstood the fires even when those farther away burned. It often wasn’t the approaching flames that threatened houses the most. The bigger danger, it turns out, were the thousands of small embers, called firestarters, that blew off of fires and traveled for miles on the wind.

The discovery led to experiments in which mockups of houses were blasted with showers of firestarters in order to study their vulnerabilities.

Cohen found that houses’ immediate surroundings were more important than the condition of the surrounding forests. Conventional wisdom tends to focus on clearing brush. But wood decks, wood siding and vents through which embers can enter attics and crawl spaces all are serious vulnerabilities.

Paradise Wildfire Photo Shows Mature Trees

November 26, 2018

In this photo of the remains of a section of the Paradise wildfire, note the number of mature trees standing around and among the all the burned houses.

View this video to find out how to protect your home from wildfire:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_syp1ZScM&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0vuvq2N69BYuRFruiIUnNnI5RyaVB2_ss34nJ105bXILI42NbyGXBTWfg

Forest ‘Restoration’ Rule is Ruse to Increase Logging

By Chad T. Hanson
January 31, 2018

The U.S. Forest Service recently proposed a sweeping effort to identify aspects of environmental analysis and public participation to be “reduced” or “eliminated” regarding commercial logging projects in our national forests. The Trump administration is attempting to spin this as an effort to promote “increased efficiency” for the expansion of forest “restoration,” but these are just euphemisms for more destructive logging.

Last summer, the Trump administration endorsed the Resilient Federal Forests Act, an extreme bill that would dramatically curtail environmental analysis and restrict public participation to increase logging of old forests and post-fire clear-cutting in our national forests. The bill passed the House of Representatives in the fall but stalled in the Senate. This new regulatory proposal is simply an effort to implement the same pro-logging agenda without going through Congress.

The proposal targets an astonishing “80 million acres of National Forest System land” for commercial logging — much of it comprising old-growth forests and remote roadless areas — based on the claim that logging and clear-cutting of these areas is needed, ostensibly to save them from fire and native bark beetles. Not so.

The overwhelming scientific consensus among U.S. forest and fire ecologists is that these natural processes are essential for the ecological health of our forests, including large events that create significant patches of dead trees, known as “snag forest habitat.” It may seem counterintuitive to some, but the science is telling us, loudly and clearly, that this unique forest habitat is comparable to old-growth forest in terms of native biodiversity and wildlife abundance. Many native species depend upon patches of dead trees, and the understory vegetation that grows in such patches, for food and homes. Forests naturally regenerate after fires, including the largest ones such as the 2013 Rim Fire in the Sierra Nevada, creating a complex and rich ecosystem.

The Trump administration’s claim that increased logging will curb forest fires is equally suspect. Science tells us that forests with the fewest environmental protections, and the most logging, actually burn more intensely, not less. This is because logging companies remove relatively non-combustible tree trunks, and leave behind flammable “slash debris” — kindling-like branches and twigs — and remove much of the forest canopy, which otherwise provides cooling shade.

The Forest Service has now begun promoting the notion that the 257,000-acre Rim Fire emitted about 12 million tons of CO2, based on a computer model that makes the mythological assumption that trees are essentially vaporized during fires. This is part of the “catastrophic wildfire” narrative that the Trump administration has weaponized to argue for rollbacks of environmental laws, and more commercial logging.

In fact, even in the most intensely burned patches, only about 2 percent of the total biomass of trees is actually consumed. Don’t be fooled. Trump’s proposal is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on our national forests for the benefit of the logging industry.

Chad T. Hanson is director of the John Muir Project (www.johnmuirproject.org) and the author of “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix” (Elsevier, 2015).

How to reduce catastrophic fires

by Rick Coates

Fire season in California is normally a tense time.

Particularly in Sonoma County where so many of us live in and about the forest and depend upon the tourism that it generates. The recent large fires in Mendocino County and the ongoing drought has only heightened our fears.

One would think that CalFire would be looking for ways to decrease the likelihood and intensity of fires. One would expect that both the Governor and the Legislature, who must allocate taxpayer money to fire fighting, would be interested in ways to decrease the frequency and damage of fires. So I offer these suggestions in hope that they are listening.

It has been known for a long time that clearcutting, contrary to intuition, actually increases the likelihood of catastrophic fire. In 1970 a Stanford University study by Allan Cox and Davison Soper documented this effect. They found a high correlation between those areas that were clearcut and those areas that experienced major fires. The likelihood of fire in heavily cut areas was nearly 10 times greater than in uncut forests! In fact in 1969, a court of law confirmed that clearcutting increases fire danger.

Of course correlation is not causation, but it is difficult to see how forest fires might cause clearcuts. (“Selvage” logging of burned over forest was not included in the designation “clearcut” in the Stanford study.) After a little thought, it is far easier to see why clearcuts might cause fires.

Here is what the research shows:

A great deal of slash is left over from a clearcut which is where a majority of fires start and spread. In response to public pressure CalFire instituted meager regulation of slash but the industry fought them and the final regulations were pitifully inadequate.

After a clearcut, larger areas are opened up to grasses which dry out in the summer increasing flammability.

Clearcuts usually require extensive roadbuilding which produces even more slash and opens up formerly inaccessible areas to hikers, campers, fisherman, marijuana growers and the homeless with their cigarettes and campfires.

Clearcutting large areas changes the microclimate from cool, still and humid to hot, windy and dry. Shade no longer exists. They are no trees transpiring water vapor to increase humidity. Without the capture of fog by conifers, the forest floor dries out. Missing are the larger fire-resistant trees. Redwoods in particular are fire-resistant due to their fibrous asbestos-like bark and retention of huge amounts of water.

Due to the dry microclimate, regrowth is generally limited to fire-prone brush species like bay laurel and tanoak. Brush also grows back after the first fire setting up conditions for a fire encore. A clearcut is the “gift” that keeps on giving.

Of course climate change is making all these effects worse. And clearcutting is making climate change worse. Trees absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and convert it into cellulose. Clearcutting a forest halts this process. But worse still, the resulting forest fires release all that sequestered carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere!

Inexplicably, clearcuts are still legal! If fact they are still done on a large scale by Gualala Redwoods Inc. along the Gualala River in northwestern Sonoma County.

If CalFire is serious about reducing the number of fires their firefighters must fight, they will tighten the requirements to remove slash. If the Legislature and Governor are serious about reducing the costs of forest fires to lives, property, taxpayers and the climate, they will ban clearcuts!