Why cutting down trees may be the best way to save forests from wildfires

“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.

What’s happening

As wildfires like the ones that blanketed the northeastern U.S. in smoke earlier this month become more frequent and more powerful, governments are adopting new approaches to protect forests and the communities that live near them.

While that includes using new technologies to track and manage active wildfires, the most significant change is a new emphasis on a strategy experts call “fuels reduction” — ridding forests of the materials that allow fast-moving “megafires” to develop.

Early last year, the U.S. Forest Service announced a plan to treat more than 50 million acres of forest across the country over the next 10 years to make them less susceptible to fires. Congress has allocated billions of dollars to fund the effort.

Fuels reduction largely relies on two main strategies: Prescribed fires and forest thinning. Prescribed fires are fires that are started deliberately by forest managers to burn up highly flammable materials like dead trees and ground-level brush. Forest thinning is a similar process, but done by humans. Sometimes it is nothing more than individuals on foot trimming small saplings and clearing dry debris by hand. In other cases, forest thinning involves using heavy machinery to cut down full-grown trees to make forests less dense and create fire breaks.

Why there’s debate

Somewhat surprisingly, it’s forest thinning — not prescribed fires — that is the subject of the most controversy. While there are examples of prescribed burns getting out of control, most experts generally agree that periodic fires are necessary to create a healthy forest ecosystem and more than a century of aggressive fire suppression in the U.S. is at least partly to blame for the rise in megafires.

When it comes to forest thinning, especially when it includes knocking down living trees, there’s less of a consensus. Advocates, who include most forestry leaders in the federal and state governments, say it's crucial to prepare forests so wildfires that will inevitably come are more manageable. They argue that, while it may seem counterintuitive to cut down part of a forest in order to save it, fires that hit untreated wilderness become so powerful that there’s effectively no way to stop them from spreading to new areas where they destroy more forests and threaten communities. Many add that thinning also means the remaining trees are more resilient and capable of completing their natural cycle of post-fire renewal because they have less competition for water and sunlight.

But critics of the practice, including several environmental groups, question how effective forest thinning is at reducing the potency of forest fires and say it does serious harm to wild ecosystems. Many make the case that the most important way to reduce wildfire damage is to do everything possible to limit the effects of climate change, which has driven temperatures up and caused droughts that dried out forests. Cutting down carbon-absorbing trees, they argue, works directly against that goal. Others have no issue with clearing low-lying brush and grass, but say large-scale thinning can often be used as guise to allow logging in vulnerable forests.

Perspectives

Environmentalists are so desperate to save every inch of forest, they’re leaving them to be burned beyond saving

“The Left continues to treat forests as pristine natural shrines that must be kept free from human interference at all costs. … All we accomplish with a vacuous romanticism that insists on leaving nature in its ‘natural state’ is create an unnatural accumulation of fuel that will eventually rage in an uncontrollable inferno.” — Editorial, Washington Examiner

Rakes and chainsaws aren’t the solution to a climate-level problem

“When the whole forest is a dry tinderbox, having one area where you’ve done a fuels reduction may not be anywhere near enough to reduce fire risk. We are not doing nearly enough to tackle the root of the problem, which is climate change.” — William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah, to Bloomberg Law

Letting wildfires run rampant is much worse for the climate than cutting down a few trees

“Yes, cutting down mid-small and middle-sized trees does reduce the carbon sequestration that’s happening in Western forests. But they are at such a risk of annihilation by wildfire that we have to make them less flammable in order to save any of our forests and the incredibly important ecosystem that they are, at all.” — Emily Shepard, freelance writer and former firefighter, to Oregon Public Broadcasting

Whatever its benefits, thinning isn’t enough to stop megafires

“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control. Nothing could be further from the truth.” — Jack Cohen, wildfire researcher, to ProPublica

Thinning is often used as an excuse for wide-scale logging

“The Biden administration is telling the public they need to ‘thin’ small trees and underbrush. The public hears that and they think: pruning shears. They don’t realize this is actually bulldozers and chain saws. These are industrial, commercial logging operations.” — Chad Hanson, forest ecologist, to Denver Post

The thinning process leaves forests more vulnerable to human-caused fires

“Logging requires road building and skid trails, leaving lasting ecosystem damage: soil compaction, surface erosion, increased stream sedimentation, degraded water quality and aquatic habitat, reduced biodiversity, spread of invasive vegetation and suppression of forest regeneration. Nearly 85% of forest fires are human caused, and roads invariably increase human presence in the forest and ultimately more fires.” — Brian Moench, Deseret News

Forest thinning only works when it’s paired with controlled burns

“Thinning and prescribed burning are the one-two punch that will knock out many severe wildfires. Prescribed fires do have drawbacks. … Nevertheless, they are sorely needed, and without them, thinning rarely succeeds.” — Emily Shepard, High Country News

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Photo Credit: (Robert Galbraith/Reuters)