The project was to start this spring. But in February, two conservation groups filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service, saying the agency failed to comply with federal laws requiring proper environmental impact assessments. And they alleged the project would disrupt essential habitat for endangered species like grizzly bears and lynx that live in the area. In May, a US district judge issued an injunction to stop all management actions from proceeding until the case could be settled.

Then came summer, with its dry heat and powerful thunderstorms. In July, lightning sparked a fire on a steep, isolated slope and a month later another storm started a second blaze. For firefighting purposes, they are now considered to be a single incident, which to date has burned 17,722 acres, mostly within the project area.

Here’s the straightforward logic of Zinke’s scapegoating: Environmentalists block the Forest Service from lowering the fuel load on the land, land catches on fire, and now it’s harder to put out. Thanks, tree-huggers.

But fire scientists say it’s more complicated than that. Many question the ecological (and economic) value of thinning forests out, for three big reasons. One, the evidence for its efficacy is both scant and at times contradictory. Two, probabilistic risk assessments show that the thinning doesn’t really help much because the likelihood of a fire starting close enough to interact with thinned areas is negligibly small. And three, in the worst weather conditions—dry, hot, and most importantly, windy—no amount of thinning or selective logging is going to make much difference.

A case in point: that Park Creek fire burning outside of Lincoln. It started on a remote slope that wasn’t slated for any prescribed burns or dead tree removals. But such treatments wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, according to Carl Seielstad, a fire ecologist at the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis at the University of Montana, because the closest road is more than mile away, at the bottom of a slope. If you know anything about fire behavior, you know it moves much faster uphill. And in this case there wasn’t much in that direction, except more trees. “Without any roads in this area there was nothing for firefighters to anchor to,” says Seielstad, pointing at a 3D rendering of the fire’s path he’s pulled up on his computer. “It’s fair to say that regardless of treatment, this area would probably have been impossible to contain.”

Seielstad has been fighting, researching, and teaching about wildfires for 17 seasons. He says on the first day of his classes every semester he tells his forestry department freshman the founding principle of fire management: weather, topography, and fuels determine a fire’s behavior. But fuels are the only one you can do anything about. Even so, he says, the impact of thinning forests is mostly speculation. Its “effectiveness is hard to study because you can’t control any other variables out in the wild,” Seielstad says. “Sometimes it reduces the speed and intensity of a fire, sometimes it does the opposite.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that current models used to predict fire behavior aren’t particularly useful for forests that have been attacked by bark beetles, because scientists don’t yet have a lot of good data for how bug-butchered timber actually behaves. And, as Steven Running, a climate scientist who studies forest carbon (and shares a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for his work on the IPCC’s first global warming report) points out, the vast majority of forests around the world don’t come with detailed plot records. Meaning that scientists are always making assumptions about how old and how dense a forest is, what kinds of species make up a given hillside, and how fuel loads are distributed on the landscape. “When it comes to fire danger we don’t have much of an idea about how much dead material is lying around on the ground,” he says. “So when lightning strikes we don’t really know what’s out there, not in any detailed way.”