The US cashes in on timber from ‘devastated’ areas – but such land is actually ‘the rarest and most biodiverse habitat in the Sierra Nevadas’, says an expert

Less than a mile from Yosemite national park, Chad Hanson is wading through a sea of knee-high conifers that have burst from the ashes of the vast 2013 Rim fire. The US Forest Service essentially says the baby trees don’t exist.

The agency says that “catastrophic” fires have “devastated” parts of the forest, painting an eerie picture of swaths of blackened tree trunks like something out of a Tim Burton film.

But the vibrant green pines, firs and cedars surrounding Hanson among the patches burned during California’s third-largest wildfire tell a different story.

Hanson, a California fire ecologist, is on a mission to stop the forest service from expanding its clearcutting of trees in snag forest, the name for the burned areas. The timber is then sold to private companies to be burned for energy or for products like animal bedding. A bill making its way through Congress would allow the government to sidestep environmental laws to speed up logging in national forests, as well as the herbicide spraying that accompanies such projects.

Hanson says the agency is unnecessarily clearing dead wood and obliterating crucial habitats for owls, woodpeckers and small mammals.

The dispute illustrates intense philosophical differences over how to handle wildfires. When should they be allowed to burn freely and what should happen afterward?

But, Hanson said, philosophy – and science – are taking a back seat to profits.

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“It’s not that they don’t understand the science. They don’t care,” said Hanson, 50, who co-founded the Earth Island Institute’s John Muir Project, which advocates minimizing human effects on forests. “They only care about commodity production and they don’t care whether they drive species into extinction.”



“Snag forest habitat is the rarest and most biodiverse habitat type in the Sierra Nevada, comparable to old-growth forest but even rarer, and has essentially no protections,” Hanson said. “Where they did post-fire logging and removed snag forest habitat is prime hunting and foraging habitat for the spotted owls. Those spotted owl territories lost occupancy. The owls are gone.”

Even with the millions per year it’s been making on logging for decades – the forest service sold $186m in timber in 2016 alone – the federal government wants to make more. At an October press conference touting the bill as a solution to wildfires in the western United States, the mostly Republican sponsors called forest fires “catastrophic” and said forests should not be allowed to grow naturally.

“A lot of people imagine these are green, healthy trees,” said Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington state congresswoman. “But, you know, it’s actually the opposite.”

But the agency is painting an incomplete picture, Hanson and other scientists say. Trees may not look pretty after a fire, they say, but removing them is far more damaging to the environment than the fire itself.

Among the reasons the forest service gives for its logging is that the forest can’t regenerate on its own after a fire. A forest service audio tour of the Rim fire area essentially tries to sell visitors on the premise that fire has created a wasteland.

“After witnessing the devastating effects of the Rim fire, creating a healthy forest that can bounce back after a disturbance became our goal,” the audio notes as visitors look at a burned area clearcut by the forest service.

But the agency’s own environmental impact study notes logging dramatically harms new tree growth, noting: “Salvage and fuels reduction operations that have occurred in the project area have reduced conifer regeneration density by 72% and oak regeneration by 26%.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Troy Drouin, a firefighter, takes a break before mopping up hot spots near Yosemite. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

The forest service also says clearcutting fire-damaged forest reduces the risk of future fires. “If we left all that material, the fire intensity would be tremendous,” said Maria Benech, who coordinates restoration of the Rim fire area for the forest service.

That argument, Hanson and other scientists argue, is completely contradicted by studies that have shown fire-damaged trees do not add to the risk of future fires.

Forest service officials say biologists are careful about destroying snag forest habitats and that only 25%-40% of any burned area is logged.

“I think one has to be careful of painting a universal picture,” said Richard Fitzgerald, a senior program analyst with the federal agency. “There’s still a number of trees left for habitat.”

But that remaining number of trees is far from enough to sustain owl and woodpecker populations in the Stanislaus national forest, environmentalists say. The small percentage of the Rim fire area being logged, they say, essentially constitutes the only suitable foraging and nesting areas for the birds.

With more logging on the way in the Rim fire area, biologists say federal foresters have already devastated wildlife near Yosemite.

“They were not at all careful, from my perspective, when it came to the spotted owl,” said Justin Augustine, a biologist and attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “When you’re dealing with a species that is in heavy decline, you need to err on the side of caution when it comes to loss of habitat.”

The forest service view of burned trees is less than sophisticated, said Dominick DellaSala, an Oregon fire ecologist who, with Hanson, co-edited a 2015 book on fire’s ecological importance.

“I had to recalibrate my sense of what a forest is, based on what I was seeing on the ground,” he said. “I don’t think the agency has caught up to that.”