Suggested Reading
A More Effective Approach for Preventing Wildland-Urban Fire Disasters, Jack Cohen, Ph.D., 2022. While extreme wildfires will evade control and inevitably spread to communities, wildland-urban fire disasters are not inevitable. We can effectively prevent wildland-urban fire disasters by reducing home ignitability … without necessarily controlling wildfires or altering vegetation.”
Has the Forest Service Been Making Wildfires Worse? Christopher Ketcham, October 23, 2020. “There is no evidence whatsoever that forest thinning reduces the risk of wildfire,” Richard Hutto, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana who specializes in wildfire ecology, said, summing up current research.
Another fuel break underway along Rodeo Road, Joe Stone, June 14, 2023. The research of Alexandra Syphard, senior research ecologist, demonstrates that the most effective strategies “by far” are to address the “structural characteristics of the house associated with ember penetration” and defensible space up to 5 feet from the home. “Anything beyond 60-70 feet was not significantly beneficial when it comes to structure loss.”
The Forest Service has Painted Itself into a Corner, Andy Stahl, February 18, 2023. The staggering cost to taxpayers of removing worthless trees requires a public relations campaign equal to the task. … Change worthless trees to “hazardous fuels” and the Forest Service can sell its logging strategy as a Superfund-style cleanup program that protects homes and communities. Never mind that the “hazard” to homes and communities has nothing to do with how national forests are managed.
A New Kind of Collaborative in Colorado, Joe Stone, Spring 2023. Forest health collaboratives became, in the words of Barry Rosenberg, “a significant contributor to the most catastrophic Forest Service logging program that I have witnessed in 37 years as a forest advocate.” The Envision Forest Health collaborative is spending tens of millions of dollars on fuel treatments. It would be much more cost-effective to spend that money creating defensible space and fire-wise homes.
Forest Health Council reports progress toward wildfire resiliency, Kim Marquis, March 2, 2023. “In its latest annual report, the Envision Forest Health Council reports $23 million raised to date … including $3.7 million” in Chaffee County tax revenues.
Fire Mitigation, Joe Stone, February 28, 2022. Chad Hanson, Ph.D., said, “Logging over 8,000 acres of forest wildlands under the guise of terms like ‘fuel breaks’ and ‘thinning’ will not stop or curb wildfires that are driven mainly by weather and climate factors and climate change. And the tree-thinning will not protect Salida, Colorado. In fact, in many cases fires burn faster and hotter through the so-called fuel breaks and burn down towns.”
To Prevent Forest Fires, Thinning is Not Always the Answer, Catriona MacGregor Glazebrook and Walker Laughlin, March 3, 2021. California forestry agencies and the U.S. Forest Service pledged in 2020 to thin out 1 million acres of forest each year by 2025. Yet, thinning is largely ineffective at preventing fires. It can even make them more harmful.
Why Thinning Forests is a Poor Wildfire Strategy, George Wuerthner, January 27, 2014. The fires that are responsible for burning the vast majority of all acres in the West are exactly the fires thinning—even when done properly—cannot halt. Wind blows burning embers several miles ahead of a fire front, easily hopping over thinned forest patches.
Fire severity in southwestern Colorado unaffected by spruce beetle outbreak, Robert Andrus, et al., University of Colorado Boulder, 2015. The lack of correlation between spruce beetle infestation and severe fire damage suggests that factors such as topography and weather conditions play a larger role in determining the severity of Colorado’s subalpine wildfires.
Study confirms extreme wildfires of 2020 in Western Oregon were not unprecedented, Bill Gabbert, July 6, 2022. “Our findings suggest that these severe fires are normal for west-side landscapes when you look at historical fire regimes at longer time scales,” said Matthew Reilly, research forester and lead author of the study.
The truth about forest fires, safety, Richard Hutto, June 21, 2023. As a fire ecologist, I found it especially frustrating to read Kendall Cotton’s uninformed opinion piece of 19 June about fire and forest management. We live within a disturbance-dependent forest community that requires severe fire to initiate natural forest succession which, in turn, supports all Rocky Mountain plant and animal species.
Thinning Nuance, George Wuerthner, July 6, 2021. When a forest stand is thinned, the forest is opened up to greater wind penetration, and the wind is the most crucial factor in wildfire spread. Thinning also results in more fine fuels on the ground that will carry a fire. And opening up the canopy allows greater solar penetration meaning fuels and soils dry out quicker.
The Habitat Improvement Myth, Forest News, Spring 2023. Forests are a process. When we interrupt that process with our “management” activities, we set the process back to the beginning stages in the succession of ecosystem development, that process that begins with, for instance, bare ground after a fire.