Why does government refuse to do the one thing that would help our forests and climate?
Guest essay by Greg Walcher
For years, politicians have waged war on coal, stifled oil and gas production, and advocated carbon taxes and other extreme measures to reduce carbon dioxide, while ignoring one of the most important things they could do to help.
It reminds me of my own lifelong battle with weight and the associated health issues. I get so frustrated that I sometimes swear I would do anything – anything! – to lose weight. Well, anything except eat less and exercise. But anything else.
That same kind of hypocrisy surrounds rants about our carbon dioxide emissions. Even people who are “deeply concerned” about dangerous manmade climate change drive cars, heat their homes, and sometimes even turn on lights. They embrace modern living standards, while also embracing faddish environmental claims and policies that contribute mightily to problems they insist disturb them greatly.
A popular bumper sticker screams, “TREES ARE THE ANSWER.” Yet when it comes to managing our national forests, many of those same advocates look away, while millions of acres of once healthy trees die, fall down, rot or burn up.
It’s ironic, because those forests provide the world’s greatest resource for cleaning carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere; because the rotting and fires themselves emit greenhouse gases; and because atmospheric carbon dioxide makes all plants grow faster and better and with improved tolerance to drought.
As Colorado State Forester Mike Lester testified recently before a state legislative committee, “When so many trees die and large wildfires follow, our forests quickly turn from a carbon sink into a carbon source.” Trees absorb carbon dioxide as people absorb oxygen, and that balance is critical to sustaining life, as we all learned in grade school.
Yet instead of doing everything in our power to make sure we have abundant thriving forests of healthy trees, we allow them to die and burn and thus belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.
Lester’s excellent testimony accompanied the release of the Colorado State Forest Service’s annual Report on the Health of Colorado Forests. This year’s assessment is the worst ever, and hardly anybody noticed. There was no outcry from global warming alarmists around the world, as there should have been. In fact, their silence on this issue is deafening. And it’s not just Colorado. It’s every state, and beyond.
The more concerned people are about climate change, the more they should be interested in active management to restore forest health. Yet many of the groups pushing urgent climate policies are the same groups that continue to fight logging, tree thinning and other management necessary for healthy forests. The result is more of the same disasters we have seen unfolding for over 20 years: dead and dying forests, catastrophic wildfires, habitat devastation, loss of human property and lives, and destruction of wildlife.
The new forest health report shows that over the last seven years, the number of dead standing trees in Colorado forests increased almost 30 percent, to an estimated 834 million dead trees. There are billions across the other Rocky Mountain States.
The report makes clear that this continuing trend of tree mortality can lead to large, intense wildfires that totally incinerate and obliterate forests, soils and wildlife. In fact, it is only a matter of time before this happens, if the U.S. Forest Service does not act.
Ironically, the most productive forest health restoration projects in Colorado have been partnerships of the State Forester with water providers like Denver Water, Northern Water Conservancy District and Colorado Springs Utilities. That’s because 80 percent of Colorado’s population depends on water that comes from the national forests.
However, the U.S. Forest Service, which owns almost all of the forestland in the State, continues to work with its hands tied behind its back, its timber programs woefully underfunded and vast sums syphoned off every year for fire suppression. Fire control ought to be funded separately, so that active management of healthy forests is not the perpetually lowest priority.
The Forest Service spends a fortune on planning, writing reports, and defending itself against environmental lawsuits, leaving few funds for what it is really supposed to be doing.
What a golden opportunity for the new Congress and Trump Administration. Reversing this demoralizing trend would restore forests, protect and increase wildlife, bring back thousands of forest products jobs, revitalize rural economies, and do more to reduce carbon dioxide than any previous policy.
The previous Administration created the Office of Sustainability and Climate Change, and Regional Climate Change Hubs, maintained a Climate Change Adaptation Library, mapped drought frequency and intensity, and created massive reports blaming humans for climate change. One study was a vulnerability assessment for the Southwest and California, titled “Southwest Regional Climate Hub and Climate Subsidiary Hub Assessment of Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies.”
All this activity is impressive, and scientific study will always play a role. But none of it actually affects climate change. Growing healthy trees would. Can we get back to that?
Or like me and my weight problem, are we willing to do anything to address climate change and improve our forests and wildlife habitats, except the one thing that might help the most?
Greg Walcher is president of the Natural Resources Group and author of “Smoking Them Out: The Theft of the Environment and How to Take it Back.” He is a former secretary of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.
In 1978 when the film “Star Wars” was all the rage, I designed a bumper sticker “May The Forest Be With You” but never had any printed. Sad!
It’s not too late! Star Wars is part of the culture now. Great slogan.
Here’s a question for greens; If burning carbon is devastating by producing so much CO2, isn’t the real catastrophe that it takes oxygen to burn carbon, so eventually the world will run out of oxygen in the air – and then what will we breathe?
Help, help, we are all going to die. Now there’s a doomsday movie for sure.
Artificial green blight vs Natural green blight
Greg Walcher is right about forest fires, but is misguided in his worries about CO2 which is not a climate problem but just a plant food. Clearing out CO2 is like taking food off the trees plate.
The pine beetle devastated the Continental Divide Region east of Butte, Montana. The Forest Service issued a logging permit for the area. It had become, unquestionably, a significant fire hazard, and with additional decay getting worse. An environmental group sued to have the permit rescinded claiming that machinery logging the timber may in fact set fire to the area. The environmental group won its case – the epitome of stupidity
Great article! Glad to see a Colorado State forester’s insight. My younger brother graduated from that university in the early ’70’s as a forester, and he, back then, informed me that the UC Berkeley school of forestry philosophy was winning out in the Forest Circus, and as a consequence of this, expect the health of the forests to be severely degraded in the decades to come.
Greg: Thanks for the thoughtful insight into forest management practices. As you well know the US FS is incapable of managing a timber sale and have given that responsibility off to the Colorado State Forest Service. We tried to get a control burn on Nick Mnt for 10 years to help open a corridor to the Grand Mesa for deer and elk, but FS just couldn’t get it done.
Lynn Ensley
I am only starting to understand the complexities of managing wild environments. Forest “infilling” may be one of the problems we face with mule deer population management. Last evening at a meeting with Colorado Parks and Wildlife we were informed that the deer and elk are recruiting quite robustly in the wake of a big fire that burned almost five years ago in an area in the north east. Also, but CPW didn’t say this, it could be a contributor to the decline in the greater sage grouse too with infilling of juniper/pinons on the west slope.
Not only does juniper infilling degrade sage grouse habitat, it also provides a perch for hawks and eagle to sit and pick off lumbering grouse. In Colorado, we need to burn 250,000 acres each year just to keep up with succession.
“…for cleaning carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere..”
That’s like trying to clean eggs from a cake you have just baked.
Actually if you look at many of the European forests, they are mono-cultural. The forests that best support wild life, conserve water, prevents erosion are forests that are routinely harvested so that trees always range from new growth to older trees.
Radiata pine, grown in New Zealand, an introduced species, grows like a rash, profitable to foresters, but, in essence, a weed.
Driving by the burn scars in the Google Earth shot linked here to Denver thru Deckers and Buffalo Creek and Pine , I call BS on those who talk about the fire being necessary for forests . Maybe some somewhere but not these . The terrain remains nearly as naked as when I moved here a dozen years ago .
And the main lack is new seedlings . In the same period seedlings have proliferated in old ATV track on our property near existing pines .
Surely if these massive areas were privately owned , they would not be allowed to be barren assets for decades . The failure of absentee WDC stewardship of these lands is a major motivation for the burgeoning growth of the http://www.AmericanLandsCouncil.org/ and other movement to restore control to the western states which the eastern states enjoy .
http://cosy.com/y17/Burnzones20160908.jpg
Any good taken to an extreme is bad. But yes, forests do need fires – http://creationrevolution.com/plants-that-need-fire-to-survive/
Before man, there were fires. After man, there will be fires. Preventing fires is preventing a normal part of nature. The eco warriors have taken their nuttiness to extremes so that when there are fires, they are worse than normal due to the prevention of cleaning out the forest floor and thinning the trees. That is what you are seeing.
But fires are necessary.
As I said , fire may be necessary somewhere for some species , but not these CO Front Range forests . Nor , clearly , boreal forests which rarely are dry and hot enough to support fires .
I remember reading https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ecology-of-fire/ when I had a subscription to SA back in high school . It became the lynch pin of the let it burn school of forestry .
I certainly can’t argue the there always have been and always will be fires . But it’s worth noting that that biggest still nearly naked patch , the Hayman Fire , 15 years ago , was started near Lake George by a USFS employee burning letters from her estranged husband .
I don’t know what “worse than normal” means when before man there never was cleaning and thinning of the forests .
My argument is economic and aesthetic . The burned barren land is ugly . And a wasted resource .
I’ve seen the distinction between French gardens and English — between manicured and more natural . The “natural” is a fine aesthetic — but not multi decade wastelands . For the record , Pike Forest by us is now , if anything , too aggressively cleaned and “controlled” burned . But they call it experimental .
However , I’ll repeat that the meme that these forests “need” fire to reproduce is patently false .