The forests of Cedar Mountain, with its heart-breakingly beautiful views, are both burning to death and dying from bark beetle plagues. Their cause is the same: too many trees, due to modern ignorance. Effective forest-saving principles were known to Native Americans for hundreds of years — but not now. Still, armed with knowledge, we can save what’s left.

Unlike us, even children in Utah’s ancient and early historic Native cultures knew that optimizing plant spacings determines nature’s fate — abundance or disaster. Forest examples: wider-spaced trees can’t ignite each other. Sunlight reaches soils. Biodiversity increases 90 percent-plus. With great sophistication, Native Americans used the tools they had. They, like nature-based cultures worldwide, dedicated tremendous resources creating explosions of biodiversity, wildlife, food plants and perennial streamflows, while keeping fires small and short, thus protecting their families. They lit small, “patchy” ground fires while lower fuel moistures prevented explosive fire behavior. This thinned forests and created firebreak meadows.

For 300 years, colonists, explorers, pioneers and scientists witnessed Native American “Light Burning” practices. Many, many country people emulated them. If not, wildfires soon exploded, as in Idaho’s 1910 “Big Blowup” that killed 79 firefighters. Flushed with Industrial Age arrogance, in a fateful, racism-tinged overreaction, Native American fire use methods were banned. Logging became the main fire control tool. A nature-tolerable 1,000-acre fire was considered huge in the Cedar Mountain region, but all was not well.

By the 1990s, a well-intended anti-logging environmentalist backlash developed. Center for Biodiversity director Kieran Suckling stated, “We squashed the timber industry and the Forest Service, and dictated the terms of surrender [sawmill infrastructure almost extinct].” Erosion damage, endangered species, un-scientific overharvest and aesthetics were stated motives. Tragically, these activists, and anyone lacking Native nature-sophistication, were “strangers in a strange land.” The plant-spacing magic was lost on them. “Leave Nature Alone!” assumptions are 19th century romanticism, not science. Natives never left nature alone. Biodiversity and fire safety were life and death matters. By contrast, urban environmentalists saw exploding wildfire damage as “natural”, not realizing that, per acre, wildfires cause 3 orders of magnitude more erosion, endangered species/habitat loss, sterilized soils and flooding than any logging the Forest Service would allow (USDA-RMRS data). Logging disturbance heals lightning-fast, by comparison.

Fuel loads grew 11 percent annually — for 30 years. Wildfires became gigantic. S.M.U, etc. tree ring data prove that fire sizes beyond “small and patchy” scales are not natural, they’re wildly atypical — non-existent even in the horribly hot, dry (therefore fire-prone) “Medieval Warm Period” when parts of Utah were covered in sand dunes. Native management prevented catastrophic wildfire, even then. Climate change cannot be blamed.

Like 80 percent in Utah, Cedar Mountain’s long-unlogged watersheds, clogged with beetle-killed deadfall, were in “Pre-catastrophic fire condition” (State Forester Report). We cannot now “Light Burn” our way to fire-and-beetle-resilient forests. Escaped Ranger-lit fires have done vast damage. One Park Service fire burned 600 homes and other buildings in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example. Forests must be made fire-safe through logging, first. There’s no other way. Love for nature led the hardline Center for Biodiversity and Grand Canyon Trust and the Four Forests Restoration Initiative group to work hard opening a way for conservation logging, under careful ecological parameters, in Arizona. It must happen, West-wide.

We must stop arguing and sitting around helplessly. Only the media and elected officials can create timely action. I challenge them to become wildfire-competent, read Dr. Stephen Pyne’s books, the RMRS literature, and talk to him and people like NAU’s Dr. Wallace Covington. Any person or group who love nature should also get up to speed, and demand an end to this mess.

Steven H. Rich lives in Salt Lake City.