“Forest Wildfire Legislation: Do We Need To Control Wildfire?”

Society of Environmental Journalists - Breakfast Panel

Chad Hanson

Research Ecologist, John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute; and Co-editor and Author, "The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature's Phoenix"

Bill Snyder

Retired Forester, Northern California Society of American Foresters

George Wuerthner

Moderator & author of "Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy" and "Yellowstone & the Fires of Change"

Dominick DellaSala

Conservation Scientist & Ecologist, President and Chief Scientist, Geos Institute; Editor and Primary Author, "Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology & Conservation"; and Co-editor and Author, "The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature's Phoenix"

Sacramento CA - Sept 23, 2016

Introductory Note

This Society of Environmental Journalists breakfast session is best described in the conference’s program: “A discussion on the pros and cons of forest wildfire legislation, including the Emergency Wildfire and Forest Management Act now before the Senate. The panel will discuss this act and other legislation dealing with wildfires and firefighting. Is the current Forest Service approach to wildfire control and timber management working to reduce fires and thus risk to humans? Are wildfires really a disaster and do we need to spend more on fire control? Finally, what are the potential consequences to ecosystem health from legislative proposals to increase logging on public lands?”

Outline

MEGA-FIRES in FORESTS
BIODIVERSITY of POST-FIRE FORESTS
HABITATS of POST-FIRE FORESTS
SNAG FOREST VALUES v LEGISLATORS’ BUZZWORDS
LARGE-FIRE INCIDENTS & SUPPRESSION
HOW to PROMOTE HEALTHY FORESTS
NEW STUDIES on FIRE & FOREST ECOLOGY

Key Quotes I visited California’s blackened forests and realized that there’s a lot of biodiversity in a burnt forest…. Over the past decade or so, scientists have catalogued their forests’ biodiversity surviving severe fire and seen that the variety of species in big, blackened patches matches the variety in an old-growth forest…. Over millennia many wildlife species evolved to depend on the unique habitat attributes created particularly by patches of high-intensity fire. Technically, we call this habitat “complex early seral forest” – colloquially known as “snag forest.” – Dominick Dellasala

MEGA-FIRES in FORESTS

DOMINICK DELLASALA Why do we need wildfires in our ecosystems? Many who’ve walked through a recently burned, blackened forest think it was destroyed by recent fire. So, in my talks I show a slide showing a forest that is half green and half blackened. When I ask people which is more important, most people think it’s the green forest. Having worked in rainforests for much of my career, I used to think the same. Then I visited California’s blackened forests and realized that there’s a lot of biodiversity in a burnt forest.

In recalibrating my thinking of what a forest is, I listened to nature define a forest. That recalibration led to my book. I wrote of hiking with my 8-year-old daughter up to the East Antelope forest-fire burn at the top of the mountain, and we had our lunch in this burnt forest. There was high-severity burn, and all the trees were dead. My daughter said, “Wow, look at all these songbirds – and all the woodpeckers, butterflies and wildflowers. As she described it, I thought, “Wow, if an 8-year-old can get it, maybe a member of Congress can get it.”

I know that’s a big leap, but she inspired my developing awareness of why these forests are so important. It’s not just green vs. blackened forests. Both are important. Chad and I put this together eventually. We started in 2015 with 8-9 months to put this together in a book with 27 world-wide scientists sharing their experiences of large burn areas. They were not ecological disasters. They were renewal events. Large fires are not just one big, blackened patch. They are a mosaic of different fire effects, we call pyro-diversity. Pyro-diversity means variety.

Variety in nature is the “spice of life”: the more variety you see in the landscape, the more habitat there is for critters. Pyro-diversity begets biodiversity. Yet, getting that message across to the public has been the hardest part of being a conservation scientist. Everyone “gets” the rainforest; but when we look at these blackened forests, we need to recalibrate our vision of a forest. These megafires cover big areas. Visiting the King Fire yesterday, we saw big patches of high-severity fire. Over the past decade or so, scientists have catalogued their biodiversity surviving severe fire and seen that the variety of species in big, blackened patches matches the variety in an old-growth forest.

The number of species, including unique species, in these blackened patches are as important as those in an old-growth forest. The public “gets” old-growth forests. There’s no longer any social license to log old-growth forests. But the public has a hard time understanding why blackened forests are important and linked. So, what do we do to these forests after fire affects their progression through time? Fire just resets nature’s clock and the successional stages after a forest fire; as those big, blackened trees hold the soil together. They’re shading the developing conifers, their progeny, from intense sunlight. They’re restarting the whole process. So, the dead blackened trees are the most important parts of a forest.

Big fire and insect events are the way that these forests replenish that supply of what we call biological legacies. Chad will talk about how those forests are at risk due to the legislation that’s going through the Senate right now, having already gone through the House of Representatives. We’re concerned because what we do to these forests after a fire and its renewal process affects them – probably for at least a century. So, the fire is not the disaster. The logging that happens after the fire is the disaster. When we were on the King Fire yesterday, we saw big patches of high-severity forest that went through the King Fire burn. They are incredibly important, because they’re huge trees. Only three of these trees fit on the logging trucks going by. I estimated that every 3 to 4 minutes a logging truck carried off these biological legacies, thus destroying renewal processes in these forests.

This is what we will see increasing if current legislation passes. That’s why we’re here today to discuss the importance of these burnt landscapes and why we need them as much as we need old growth and green forest. They are at risk right now. Probably the most difficult and challenging part of my 30-year career is how to get people to think about the importance of forests, even when they have burned; and get legislators to think like my 8-year-old daughter who says, “Wow, these places are really cool.” They have a lot of biodiversity in them. They need to be part of our conservation and responsibly managed public lands.

HABITATS in POST-FIRE FORESTS

CHAD HANSON I’m a research ecologist with the John Muir Project, involved with post-fire habitats. Few have visited snag-forest habitats created by high-intensity fire, especially in un-logged forests right after a fire, which do look bleak to most people.

In 2002, I was monitoring a timber sale – a post-fire logging project on the Eldorado National Forest [in eastern California’s central Sierra Nevada mountains]. There I met a logging crew cutting a burned area of high-intensity fire. The foreman of the logging crew said, “I understand why you don’t want us to cut live trees; but all the trees here that we’re cutting were killed. This forest has been destroyed by fire. What harm could our cutting possibly do? Who could possibly use this area?”

His was a fascinating question; and I didn’t have a good answer for him at the time. That question led me back to graduate school for a degree in Ecology. Even then, there was a small but growing body of research, which has since surged into a huge body of research in the last 15 years. Now hundreds of scientific studies say our western US conifer forests, including Ponderosa pine and mixed conifer, historically faced mixed-severity fire regimes.

SNAG FOREST SPECIES

CHAD HANSON California has low- and moderate-intensity fires, plus small and large patches of high-intensity fires, especially in high-fire weather. Over millennia many wildlife species evolved to depend on the unique habitat attributes created particularly by patches of high-intensity fire. Technically, we call this habitat “complex early seral forest” – colloquially known as “snag forest.” As Dominic mentioned, snag forest habitat is comparable to old-growth forest in terms of wildlife abundance and native biodiversity. In fact, many species are very uniquely adapted to and depend on snag forests – rarely found outside of snag forest habitat. Many of these species are declining and have become rare due to loss of their habitat due to fire suppression and post-fire logging.

One key structural element of snag forest habitat is an abundance of “snags,” i.e., standing dead trees. As their tops break off or fall in post-fire years, they become wonderful downed logs that are great habitat for small mammals, invertebrates and amphibians after the fire. The fire itself attracts wood-boring beetles, some evolved to detect fire through smoke or heat. Some have infrared receptors that evolved in their bodies so they can detect fires from dozens of miles away. Then they make a beeline for the fire area, often arriving before the smoke has fully cleared. They lay their eggs on the charred bark of a fire-killed tree. The larvae develop and bore under to feed on fresh-killed trees.

Woodpeckers depend on and feed on native wood-boring beetle larvae, that in turn depend upon fire or periodic drought conditions to create patches of dead trees. The monogamous black-backed woodpecker is the absolute champ of foraging on wood-boring beetle larva and excavating nest cavities in these relatively-hard, new snags. The male will create 2, 3, or sometimes 4 nest cavities in a single season in the same territory. One black-backed woodpecker eats 13,500 wood-boring beetle larvae every year. So, a single pair needs generally at least 200 or 300 acres of mature dense forest that burns at high intensity to have enough food to survive.

Woodpeckers are incredibly sensitive to post-fire logging. Some nest cavities that the males create aren’t used, because every spring the female picks the one she likes the best. The unused cavities are thus available for secondary cavity nesters in the forest, including bluebirds, nuthatches, even flying squirrels. So ecologically, woodpeckers are a “keystone species” since their importance in the ecosystem is disproportionately high.

Flying insects, including butterflies, wasps, bees, are attracted to native flowering shrubs that germinate following intense fire. These insects provide food for the many flycatching birds; and the shrubs and downed logs provide great habitat for small mammals. Thus, forest shrubs provide food for birds and small mammals. Berry-producing shrubs feed the bears before winter, and shrubs also provide forage for deer. Spotted owls preferentially hunt and select these areas for foraging because that’s where the small mammal prey base is the best. We call this “the bed-and-breakfast effect.” We often see that juxtaposition of dense old forest that burns at high intensity creating great snag forest habitat. These extremes are so important for biodiversity.

SNAG FOREST VALUES v LEGISLATORS’ BUZZWORDS

CHAD HANSON Legislation takes all these lessons that we’ve learned into account. Now there are two pending bills. The Senate’s just passed a version of House Resolution Bill 2647 through the Agriculture Committee as S-3085. The other one – the Wildfire Budgeting Response and Forest Management Act of 2016 – is similar but not been introduced yet. It is now being discussed in the Senate now and is being promoted primarily by Senators Crapo (Idaho R) , Rikowski (Alaska R) and Wyden (Oregon D). They are some of the top recipients of timber-industry campaign contributions in the Congress. Essentially these bills, in various forms, ignore all lessons we’ve learned through the scientific research in the last 15 years about the incredibly high importance of this snag habitat and the natural benefits of patches of high-intensity fires, small and large. Instead, the legislators’ approach is to severely weaken the National Environmental Policy Act so logging projects, up to 3,000 acres or more, would be exempt from environmental analysis; normal disclosures of adverse impacts; and normal public participation requirements.

The Forest Service euphemistically presents logging projects as “forest health projects,” “restoration projects,” “fuel-reduction projects,” “wildlife habitat improvement”…. There’s a list of terms we see as euphemisms. If they present projects that way, they can be exempted from environmental analysis. This includes any type of logging. Anything goes: clear cutting of old-growth forest; clear cutting of snag forest habitat; high-grade logging of old-growth trees. Anything is possible when they use these buzzwords. This is being done and based upon the politics of fear about fire. To return to mid-20th-century logging of National Forests, terms like “catastrophic wildfire” and “megafires” are used to demonize fire – particularly high-intensity fire and snag-forest habitat patches, either created by drought, native bark-beetles, or fire.

All logging provisions are strapped to provisions to address this fire-borrowing issue that is a legitimate budgetary concern. Thus, if money appropriated for fire suppression runs out during fire season, they borrow from other funds unrelated to fire suppression. That creates budgetary hassles and legitimate concerns. So instead of addressing those issues, they understand that the agencies want this borrowing fire money issue fixed, and so they’re bootstrapping logging provisions to that to get what they want.

Indicative of the wrong-headedness of these regressive legislative proposals and science, are the provisions that would exempt environmental analysis for any project to clear-cut an area, to ostensibly to create early successional forest for wildlife. This bothers Dominic and me because as ecologists we know the profound difference between early successional area clear-cuts, vs. early successional habitats created by fire.

LARGE-FIRE INCIDENTS & SUPPRESSION

BILL SNYDER Hi! I am a retired forester after a career primarily in the Sierra Nevada for about 40 years. I appreciate Chad’s views and others’ thoughts on this, having gone through a few of these large-fire incidents myself. It is an interesting and complex problem we face in California. I think everybody generally agrees that we’ve had a relatively long history of fire suppression, and that has impacted and affected the natural ecosystems in several ways.

Before talking about an ecosystem, you need to specify the type of ecosystem you’re discussing. Certainly, mixed-conifer pine forests in the mid-elevation Sierras are a unique system compared to chaparral or desert. Threats to a desert might be from invasive species, such as grasses that come in and predispose ecosystems to higher levels of fire. They are stressors within that system that the native vegetation has not developed under naturally.

Chaparral is a little different issue. Most people think it is a fire-driven ecosystem – but it’s not. It has relatively long fire-return intervals. What affects those systems is the juxtaposition of human beings within those millions of acres of chaparral forest and the millions of people that occupy those acres. It is human-caused fires that create threats to those ecosystems.

But to get to the point: the incidence of fire is increasing. The size and severity of the fires is increasing. From a budgeting perspective, particularly on federal lands, that has led to federal agencies are having to essentially borrow from – or some people might say “rob” – other Forest Service programs in order to fight fires.

Looking at statistics, up to 42% of the Forest Service’s total budget was spent in fire-fighting.

That affects other agency programs, and takes money from state and private forestry, vegetation management, maintenance of roads and bridge maintenance. It defers maintenance, causing budgetary stresses. I think the legislation originally proposed is trying to figure out how to pay for federal fire-fighting efforts, without borrowing from budgets of other agency programs.

As Chad points out, any good concept has things tagged onto it. In this case, federal legislation looks at exemptions from or streamlining NEPA and EA processes, exemptions and other things. The more you add, the more controversial things become. In California — the state with which I’m most familiar— our population, fire suppression, and ecosystems have been significantly altered over time. How can we establish a needed holistic approach?

It’s good we’re focusing here on a funding solution to putting out fires. But I think there are bigger issues regarding what to do with the current landscape we face. There are many challenges out there. One that distresses me is, while I understand the need to protect large trees, but I see stressors now impacting the Sierras – in particular with drought and insect-driven mortality. The fact we’ve allowed stand densities to increase to levels which now make them susceptible to bark-beetle infestations has led, I think, to higher levels of mortality than most people consider acceptable.

Thus, many trees at the lower elevation between oak woodlands and the transition to mixed conifers – particularly Ponderosa pine – are now under significant pressure. Many large trees have been lost due to insects. Could we have prevented that? Probably not entirely. But I think figuring out management of these landscapes to make them more resilient is important and involves more than buzzwords. I think science and ecosystem management need to be discussed. This bill does address suppression, but more important to me is what we do to move forward in today’s environment, given the last 100 years of suppression of fire that we created?

Regarding timber harvesting that has occurred, I was struck years ago by George Fiske’s photo series that looked at Yosemite Valley [c. 1880-1890], and its vegetation change over time. One of the more striking things about this photo series is today’s increase of vegetation density on the landscape. I think that’s true almost everywhere you go in the Sierras, and certainly we’re not going to roll things back to the 1900s. But I think we need to look at where we are now and what role fire will play in creating ecosystems that are healthier than they presently are.

HOW to PROMOTE HEALTHY FORESTS

DOMINICK DELLASALA I wonder if we could focus on how we move forward – the question that Bill raised. One of my thoughts on moving forward on this is that there have been a series of interesting papers that have come out in the literature recently about how we get to coexistence with fire? And it was very curious to me yesterday in the King Fire field trip that Forest Service was talking about how they were throwing everything they could at this fire. They were putting in as much resource as they could to suppress the fire – and it wasn’t working!

So, I asked, “Well, if you couldn’t stop the fire, why were you trying to stop the fire? And it was like a deer in the headlights. She didn’t know how to answer the question. In her defense, it’s because the agency is so locked into “suppression at any cost” that you might as well just throw money out the plane window instead of air tankers trying to suppress these big fire events, because you can’t stop them. So the resources really need to focus in on containment around structures and working with people to reduce their fire risk. What we do in the back country makes no difference when we have extreme fire weather blowing through canyons, putting firefighters at risk. We really need to let more of these fires go.

There’s a cost containment issue with suppression dollars spiraling out of control. It’s a blank check coming from Congress, just pulling money from one budget instead of another. We must contain and prioritize costs; stop putting firefighters at risk; and work with homeowners.

There are other reasons to restore our landscape. But I don’t think what we’re doing to those landscapes to reduce their susceptibility to fire is having the effect that we think it’s having. In fact, it might be having the opposite effect. One other thing I’ll mention briefly is, we have a new study coming out in the journal Ecosphere. Chad and I are co-authors, along with Curtis Bradley from the Center for Biological Diversity. That study looked at 1,500 forest fires from 1984-2014 across the western United States and all forest types. We accounted for the effects of climate, elevation, forest types…. We tested the hypothesis now in legislation: the more management we do with these forests, the lower the fire severity.

We looked at the 1,500 fires representing over 20 million acres of burned forest. What we found was the opposite. Forest fires burning in national parks and wilderness areas were burning more in this mixed-severity component that nature designed them to. Forest fires burning in heavily managed forest systems were burning in higher levels of high severity. This isn’t high quality high severity habitat. This is forest fires burning through plantations, through slash piles where they blow up. , we’re facing what this legislation is going to cause: more intense management on these landscapes, more severe fire in low-quality wildlife habitat.

BILL SNYDER As we look at what drives fire and fire behavior, I think “surface and ladder fuels” are generally recognized as the components which carry fire. Surface fuels are basically duff and litter and other plants on the surface. Now the ladder fuels typically are those fuels within the forest such as saplings, seedlings and things that can carry flames up into the crowns of standing trees. It would be interesting to look at Chad’s research and compare that to other research, We need to focus on what it is we can do to get prescribed fire, and to get fire back into these ecosystems in a way that makes sense.

I look at fires like the Rim Fire and recognize their fire behavior. It disturbs me as we look at climate and fires that burn with intensities that basically are stand-replacing events. It’s frightening to me to think about where we go. The Cedar Fire in 2003 burned a large part of Cuyamaca, a very isolated, conifer-dominated ecosystem on the peak that was essentially consumed, and no seed trees were left. It has basically come back; but from an ecological perspective, will there be a forest there in the future? Do we care? If we cared, could we have done something that would have led to a different outcome?

If you think about conifers, particularly pines and Douglas fir, their primary survival strategy in these fire events is to survive and take advantage of the seed bed that’s been created. They compete with low-growing species and store seed to sprout in soil that responds to those events, plus they have other survival strategies. In large areas covered by high-severity fires, it takes time for conifers to return. It starts from the edges.

I’d like to see strategies that result in mixed-severity fires. We need openings, but we also need survival of individual trees to repopulate those areas. Otherwise, we’ll see climate, fire and other stressors driving some of these ecosystems to different species, type changes, and other things that will occur. I think folks who study climate modeling and how climate overlays plants and plant distribution recognize that we’ll see changes in California.

Certainly, vectors that cause change will be related largely to fire, given our climate. But there are also things related to drought – from extension of growing seasons to changes in precipitation patterns that will affect vegetation. It will be important to find a way forward that makes sense for our landscapes. I certainly look forward to reading the research and papers here at this [Society of Environmental Journalists] conference.

There is a lot of research indicating that treatment of stands and manipulation of surface and ladder fuels can influence fire and fire behavior. We can influence tree survivability when fires run through a stand. As with everything else, there are shades of gray; so we need to find a path through those shades of gray to get an outcome that can benefit those ecosystems which we allowed to get a little bit out of whack over the years with fire suppression and other management activities.

MEMBER of AUDIENCE I’ve been dealing with fire stuff for about 4 decades, and there’s been a real shift. There’s been a general acceptance n that there’s a role for wildlife to play in ecosystems. The debate now is more how and where. There’s general acknowledgement; but I don’t think the public has this down yet. People dealing with fires, scientists and foresters have come to a consensus that some fire in some places is a good thing. But we must figure out how to accommodate wildfire as a natural ecological process.

NEW STUDIES on FOREST & FIRE ECOLOGY

CHAD HANSON I love that so much is emerging about this field of forest and fire ecology in published studies. We often hear that because of fire suppression, the most fire-suppressed forest, particularly ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forest types, have become so dense with fuel accumulation, that they’ll burn mostly at high severity. But we’re finding there’s very little difference, if any. Oftentimes those forests burn less intensely – even if they have not burned in 80 to 100 years, or more. where historically, on average, they burn every 25 or so. One of the reasons for that seems to be that as these stands get more mature and canopy cover increases, there’s more cooling shade on the understory and surface fuels stay moister later into the fire season.

As the understory gets less sunlight and that stand gets denser and more mature, much of the understory vegetation, shrubs and small trees start to die back. There have been about 7 studies published finding those areas burn mostly at low and moderate severity, and that fire severity is not higher in the most fire-suppressed forest. The only one that was opposite was in a study by some Forest Service researchers who found a slight increase in fire severity based upon modeling, but there was no empirical data.

The other studies are all empirical studies based on actual fires in real-world circumstances. A study done earlier this year by Doerr and Santine pulled together all the literature on this issue looking at whether we have an unnatural excess of fire. In particular, they studied high-severity fire in these western conifer forests, especially Ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests that get a lot of the attention. Do we have that unnatural excess? Is fire getting more severe, which is what you hear constantly? They pulled together all the studies published on this over the past decade, particularly the most recent data in the last three or four years. Dominic and I have worked on a couple of those studies together and published them. Many groups of authors and different people from different institutions have looked at this. Their conclusion is that for the western USA, the literature shows little change overall in terms of high-severity trend. In other words, they’re saying that there’s been little change overall and it has not gotten more severe.

As well, that the area that burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement. In other words, they say we now have less of this snag forest habitat in our forest, including Ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forest, than we did historically, because of fire suppression.

When you have less habitat being created by fire in the first place and you compound that deficit with a huge proportion of it being removed by post-fire logging and subsequent activities like herbicide spraying and tree plantation establishment, that explains why many bird species and other snag forest habitat species have become so rare and are declining. This a major conservation concern. In terms of the extent, Dominic and I highlight the ecological importance of snag forest habitat. We don’t want too much fire. We also don’t want too little. Right now we’re in a deficit situation. That’s a conservation concern, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t theoretically have too much. We need to pay attention to that, but right now the conservation concern is the lack of abundance, not the overabundance.

Editor’s Note: Further questions posed during this breakfast pane have not been included in this posting by NWNL. Please contact NWNL if interested in asking for an unedited transcription, or an audio version courtesy of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Posted by NWNL on April 18, 2025.
Transcription edited and condensed for clarity by Alison M. Jones.

“Forest Wildfire Legislation: Do We Need To Control Wildfire?” California Megadrought