The logging industry and some members of Congress have been spreading misinformation and fear of fire about dead trees in California’s forests in order to promote a weakening of environmental laws and increased logging on national forests. Dead trees are not an end to a forest but are part of the renewal cycle of life and death that rejuvenates forest ecosystems.

There is a Republican-led effort to pass two similar logging measures — S3085, which already passed the House last year, and the Wildfire Budgeting, Response, and Forest Management Act of 2016, circulating in the Senate — both of which would eliminate most environmental analysis of the substantial impacts to fish, wildlife and water quality from clear-cutting both “snags” (dead trees) and live old trees, while reducing public participation and increasing taxpayer-subsidized logging.

Similarly, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has proposed spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to subsidize clear-cutting of more than 5 million snags on three national forests in California and has promoted the extreme step of eliminating the long-standing ban on exporting timber from public forest lands. Feinstein would like taxpayers to spend their hard-earned dollars paying to clear-cut trees in our national forests so they can be exported to developers in China.

But these arguments have no basis in sound science or stewardship of our public lands.

Logging proponents have described the patches of snags, resulting from either fire or drought and native bark beetle cycles, as devastation and loss. But last fall, more than 250 scientists sent a letter to Congress stating that these areas of “snag forest habitat” are “ecological treasures rather than ecological catastrophes” because they support levels of plants and wildlife comparable to old-growth forests. Many species are rare and imperiled, such as the black-backed woodpecker that depends on this unique habitat. Historically, snag forest habitat made up between 15 percent and 20 percent of our forests, while today it makes up less than 5 percent. Dead trees are the most important parts of a healthy forest as they anchor soils thus preventing erosion, shade new seedlings from intense sunlight and provide habitat for scores of insect-eating bats, birds and small mammals.

Supporters of the logging bills have repeatedly claimed that forests with high levels of snags will burn more intensely, a notion that has been soundly debunked by peer-reviewed scientific studies. A comprehensive study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that their “results refute the assumption that increased bark beetle activity has increased area burned.” Another study found that high snag densities in forests tend to “reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires” as most of the living flammable material was removed by insects.

Feinstein points to the Blue Cut and Soberanes fires, but fails to mention the Blue Cut Fire occurred in grassland and chaparral, not forest, and the forested portion of the Soberanes Fire had few or no snags, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s own mapping.

While Feinstein has promoted logging of millions of snags on public lands ostensibly to protect human communities and infrastructure, only a small subset of these dead trees are within falling distance of homes, roads or power lines. We should focus taxpayer dollars on “defensible space” within 100 feet of homes, rather than destructive logging in remote forests.

We need policies based on science, not fear and economic opportunism.

Chad Hanson, Ph.D., of the John Muir Project in Big Bear (San Bernardino County) and Dominick DellaSala, Ph.D., of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Ore., are the co-editors and co-authors of “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.”