CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The “Most Western Forests Were Open and Park-like” Myth

One of the frustrations I face as an advocate for forest protection is the continuous stream of misinformation from government agencies such as the Forest Service and state forestry, as well as from many conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy.

For example, I received an article from the Forest Service titled “Multiple treatments are key to resilient Western Forests. In the opening paragraph, the article asserts: “Forests in the West used to be a lot more open, so wildfires were much less severe.”

The problem with this characterization is that only about 10% of western conifer forests were historically “park-like”, dominated by frequent low-severity blazes.

The primary tree that fits this model is ponderosa pine. However, even in these pine forests, high-severity blazes occurred, leaving many trees dead.

Most western forest types (and most non-forested areas like chaparral) tend to have much longer fire intervals, often many decades to hundreds of years between significant ignitions.

These trees include fir and spruce, hemlock, cedar, Douglas fir, western larch, some pines like lodgepole pine, whitebark, Bishop pine, Monterey pine, and white pine, as well as aspen. None of these trees fit the high-frequency-low-severity model. When these forests burn, they exhibit significant high-severity mortality.

In addition, most non-forest plant communities, like sagebrush and chaparral, are burned at long intervals and are not adapted to frequent fires.

In between these major fires, down logs, snags, and ground litter........

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