LOCAL FORESTS UNDER FIRE

BY JOSH SCHLOSSBERG

Aslew of so-called “wildfire risk reduction” logging projects are proposed for tens of millions of acres of public forests across the Western U.S. — 3.5 million acres in the Front Range alone — with several already completed or underway in Boulder and Jefferson counties.

The 2021 federal infrastructure bill allotted more than $3 billion to the supposed goal of “reducing exposure of people, communities, and natural resources to the risk of catastrophic wildfire,” with Colorado Rep. Joe

Neguse and Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper seeking another $60 billion. Coupled with a federal emergency action that expedites the removal of so-called “hazardous fuels” (aka trees) while skirting certain legal objections, our public forests are seeing more logging than they have in decades.

Before we move things any further down the road, is it not worth a look at some independent, non-agency funded science?

You’ve likely heard the claim that ed to close the Mexican border permanently and claimed pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for mass shootings.

RFK Jr. was once a crusading environmental lawyer fighting corporations. He now says “free market capitalism” is the answer to all environmental problems. He is leaving energy policy to the market and says talk about climate change encourages totalitarianism. He’s a pathological liar. It’s difficult to fact-check him in real-time. Does that sound familiar? Bannon and Stone want RFK Jr. to run as Trump’s vice president. decades of fire suppression has led to “overgrown” and “unhealthy” forests that threaten those of us living in the wildland-urban interface — it’s a narrative upheld by the forest products and biomass energy industries, federal, state, county and municipal government agencies, and elected officials on both sides of the aisle.

This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

It’s true that, over the last three years, Colorado experienced three of its largest and most costly wildfires in a century (each human-caused). But if we go back to early 20th and 19th century records prior to fire suppression, we find that dense forests and severe wildfires were the norm.

An April 2023 study in the peerreviewed journal Fire found that “abundant independent sources … in more than half of the 11 Western states [including Colorado] agreed that historical dry forests were highly variable in tree density and included a substantial area of dense forests.”

A 2014 study in PLoS One concluded that, across 54 sampled sites in local Front Range forests, “81% showed mixed- and high-severity fire effects … prior to fire suppression,” while above 6,000 feet “fire severities prior to any fire exclusion effects was sufficient to kill high percentages of mature trees.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that wildfires are burning near communities built at the forest’s edge. So, don’t we still need to cut trees?

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