Today the Biden Administration announced new policies to protect old growth forests. Building on their first ever nationwide inventory of old and mature forests on public lands, the new priorities focus on combatting climate change with forward looking actions to protect these huge carbon sinks and their ecosystems.
The US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have managed over 100 million acres of old and mature forests for over 100 years. Unfortunately, previous government policies have often “balanced” protection with helping the timber industry earn over $250 million annually logging our publicly owned forests.
Park Service scientists (at Sequoia NP pictured above) have spent many years downplaying climate change as a cause of forest fires, instead focusing on past “fire suppression” errors and arguing for restoring “native burn practices”. Newsletters describing recent wildfires at parks I visited this summer completely ignore climate change and describe their “prescribed burn” efforts as extremely effective, even after over 95% of some forests have burned to death. Unfortunately, your tax dollars have been used to spread this misinformation.
- Canadian wildfires this year burned 46 million acres of wilderness forests in remote areas consistently ignored by firefighters, proving that “fire suppression” is NOT the primary cause of today’s wilderness wildfires.
- In 2020-21, huge consecutive wildfires killed 13%-19% of the world’s Giant Sequoias (above), despite decades of aggressive “fire suppression” under the direct supervision of the scientists who claimed that would protect them.
- Logically, forests that evolved over 100 million years before the arrival of humans do not require “native burn practices” to be healthy.
- Environmentalists have sued the USFS, BLM & NPS for mismanaging wilderness with scheduled fires, tree density limits, species removal, reseeding, and other human intervention in violation of the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Today, faced by the unprecedented size, frequency and destructiveness of recent forest fires, the same park scientists in California now admit that they were wrong to ignore or downplay the predominant threat of the climate crisis and are refocusing their efforts on ways to save forests without making the problem worse by burning them down intentionally. They are now considering how to create firebreaks by cutting down dead trees and burying them in sand. Instead of immediately reseeding with the same type of trees that keep burning down every few years, scientists are now trying to manage their forests considering and mitigating climate change.
The Biden Administration deserves credit for changing the direction of our national forest policy, hopefully before it is too late. Instead of maximizing timber company profits, the goals are to protect the old growth forests, increase resilience to climate change, improve clean air water and wildlife habitats in forests and watersheds, and to cooperate with native, international and other stakeholders to reforest.
“[T]he Forest Service and the BLM will engage the public, Tribes, land managers, experts, and stakeholders in informed discussion around management issues, threats, trends, and opportunities for climate-smart management and conservation of mature and old-growth pinyon-juniper woodlands on federal lands.“
I encourage you to read the news about the Biden Administration’s new approach to stewardship of our old growth forests and, of course, to help Joe & Kamala win reelection. Thanks.