League of Women Voters hears wildlife presentation

Kirk Boxleitner | Sep 30, 20210

Research ecologist Chad Hanson, author of “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate,” addressed the Mason County League of Women Voters about his book during its Sept. 21 membership meeting.

Hanson hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with his older brother in 1989, and witnessed the logging of public lands. He said the attendant “loss and devastation of wild places” made a lasting impression on his political outlook.

Hanson illustrated how people can protect against wildland fires by trimming and building space between trees and shrubs within 100 feet of houses.

“That doesn’t mean cutting down mature trees,” Hanson said. “You actually want the shade from those trees.”

That includes maintenance such as sweeping the roof, cleaning rain gutters, installing fire-resistant roofing and ember-proof vents, trimming tree limbs at least 10 feet from your chimney, and removing dry grasses, accumulations of flammable debris and the lower limbs of mature trees.

Hanson noted that logging of wildlands is often touted and funded as a defense against wildfires, but he asserted that logging exacerbates the problem, not only by fostering a false sense of security among homeowners, but also because wildfires are not stopped, instead “burning fastest and hottest through these (logged) areas, as we saw tragically in Northern California in 2018.”

By contrast, Hanson cited his “home hardening” strategies as affording “over 99% home survival,” and allowing “everyone to evacuate safely,” even from “fast-moving, intense wildfires.”

Hanson decried “fuel-reducing” logging as filling the atmosphere with even more carbon, making wildfires burn faster and hotter as a result.

Hanson warned that merely renouncing fossil fuel use won’t undo the environmental damage that’s been done — unless we adopt “nature-based climate solutions,” by protecting natural ecosystems such as forests so they can absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.

Hanson suggested that sufficient protections of our forests through reduced logging and wood consumption could account for as much as half the planet’s needed climate change mitigation.

Hanson also sought to dispel misconceptions such as the “overgrown forests” allegation, which blames environmental laws and regulations for allowing forests to accumulate too much carbon-rich biomass.

Hanson accused the U.S. Forest Service of abetting the “overgrown forest” belief because of the revenues it generates from selling trees on public lands to private logging corporations.

“In every forested region of the United States, current levels of forest carbon storage are substantially lower than the biological potential of those forests,” Hanson said. “Our forests have less carbon and biomass in them now, in most cases, than they had historically, and in many cases, far less.”

Hanson dismissed the notion that denser forests burn more intensely, citing studies that showed “it’s typically the opposite,” due to having more canopy cover. Forests that have not burned “in a very long time,” rather than being tinder boxes, have likewise been shown to burn less intensely, Hanson said.

“Forests that hadn’t burned in (more than) 75 years had the lowest levels of high-intensity fire,” Hanson said.

Hansen cited weather and climate factors as the primary drivers for forest fires, therefore making climate change “a significant influence” on such fires.

“My colleagues and I did the largest scientific analysis ever done on this question,” Hanson said. “We looked at three decades of fire data across the Western United States, and we found that weather and climate variables were dominant, while logging was a key secondary factor, but not in the way most people think. Forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging had the highest fire intensities. Basically, the more trees you remove from the forest, the hotter and faster the fires tend to burn, often toward towns and communities.”

Hanson added that denser forests act more effectively as windbreaks against the gusts that drive wildfires.

“In addition, logging leaves behind a lot of combustible slash debris and spreads invasive combustible grasses, which also make things more conducive to fire,” Hanson said.

Indeed, because logging results in disruptions to forests ranging from soil compaction to nutrient removal, Hanson asserted that logging does more damage than even the most intense of forest fires, which he touted as yielding “rich, natural regeneration” of complex, diverse new ecologies.

“Because so little carbon is actually consumed in even a large forest fire, and because of all the vigorous post-fire regrowth, nutrient cycling and sequestration, a forest becomes a carbon sink again in a relatively short period of time after a fire,” Hanson said. “Logging is the real carbon bomb, not wildfires.”