CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Forest Service Clearcutting and Intentional Burning is Killing, Not Saving, our National Forests

Stumps and slash piles in an Oregon Coast Range clearcut. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Trump administration and some Democrats support “managing” our national forests like tree farms, not forest ecosystems, by calling for ever more logging and burning in a futile attempt to prevent wildfires. But studies show logging tends to increase, not decrease, extreme fires through drying, less snow retention, and higher wind speeds.

Dr. Jack Cohen is the retired chief scientist at Missoula’s Forest Service Fire Sciences Lab. He and other wildfire scientists have written numerous peer-reviewed studies that show we can’t fireproof forests — and that “home hardening” is the best way to protect homes from wildfires.

As Cohen told the Missoula Current recently when discussing their latest paper, Wildland-urban fire disasters aren’t actually a wildfire problem:

Fire is inevitable. But nobody’s figuring it out. We’re starting from the presumption that it’s wildfire that spreads through a community that lays it to waste. We even have the agencies responding in that fashion by being obsessed with this notion of wildfire control. So they do fuel treatments to have safe firefighting. That’s not only counter ecologically, it doesn’t work. In the past five years, a number of incidents with more than 100........

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