Here’s to a new way to manage forests
By Dominick A. DellaSala Oct 5, 2019
Originally published October 5, 2019 at the Santa Fe New Mexican
Santa Fe is blessed with magnificent national forests, wild rivers and some of the cleanest airsheds in the nation. Many people are here to be part of, connect with and heal through nature. It’s only natural that there is public outcry when forests are cut down or burned.
I was asked recently by local conservationists to take a hard look at the Santa Fe National Forest from the perspective of forest-fire ecology. I toured Santa Fe’s municipal watershed at Black Canyon and burned areas outside Los Alamos. I viewed forest “restoration” in the Jemez Mountains. What I witnessed was ill-informed tinkering with forest ecosystems that likely will continue for decades under the U.S. Forest Service’s new management plan currently in public review.
As a conservation scientist, I recommend a new direction rooted in protecting the strongholds of plant and wildlife habitat and clean water found mainly in intact roadless areas and unlogged recently burned forests. Targeted science-based surgical treatments also are needed to restore forests degraded by logging, livestock grazing and road building.
During my hike into the large burn patches, I experienced a remarkable fire-created charcoal forest jump-started by pollinating insects, seed-dispersing birds and a rejuvenated web of life as diverse as an old-growth forest. Nothing was wasted. Dead trees shaded new plants from intense sunlight, eventually decomposing as nutrients for fast-growing progeny. There is no end or beginning to this forest-fire cycle that I call “Nature’s Phoenix” except when interrupted by fire suppression and logging. I recommend safe coexistence with these fire-adapted forests that thrive when allowed to burn at various intensities.
Roadless areas free from logging and having fewer fire-suppression effects could provide managers with the blueprint for restoring forest integrity. Instead I found inappropriate “restoration” treatments in roadless forests.
In the municipal watershed at Black Canyon overly aggressive forest thinning and repeat prescribed burns converted the once-diverse forest into a degraded savanna that looks nothing like the blueprint. In one area, the Forest Service removed all but about 10 percent of the smallest trees, exposing the few remaining ones to blow down. The new forest plan would authorize such treatments over thousands of acres. Imagine leaving only about 20 spindly looking trees widely spaced across an area the size of a football field once populated by hundreds of wind-firm trees.
Other inappropriate treatments I observed were championed by the Southwest Jemez Mountains Landscape Collaborative that promoted “saving” a pine forest from a mistletoe infection by clearcutting infected trees and then some. The result was a weed-infested field where soil life was killed by intense pile burning and compaction from heavy machinery.
In both cases, a surgical touch is the more appropriate treatment. Such an approach would leave many more clumps of large and small trees to preserve more of the vital genetic coding for weathering climate disruptions. The Forest Service could also introduce “contour” felling of larger trees staked horizontally along steep slopes in the municipal watershed to reduce erosion into the reservoirs from periodic monsoons. “Girdling” (circular cut through the tree bark that kills the tree) of small trees in overly dense areas would help to improve wildlife habitat.
Another problem I see is the annual use of low-intensity burns to reduce fuels. These prescribed fires cannot create the diverse wildlife habitat produced by mixed-intensity, lightning-caused wildfires. The Forest Service must scale back burning and work with public health officials to provide hourly smoke monitoring needed to protect vulnerable populations including the young, elderly, asthmatics, chemically sensitive individuals, pregnant women and those with cardiovascular and lung disease. Managing lightning-caused fires for ecosystem benefits is preferred to frequent prescribed burns and may even produce less smoke cumulatively. Closing and obliterating roads would also limit human-caused fires as well as slow the spread of weeds and stop chronic sediment bleeding into streams.
An immediate need is helping residents living near wildlands make their homes firesafe. If done effectively, the vast majority of these homes could survive even large wildfires. This means homeowners must retrofit homes with fire-resistant materials, screen open vents and gutters, prune branches within 60 feet of the home, and install emergency sprinklers. Local officials also must adopt stricter building codes, create better fire-warning and evacuation infrastructures and provide assistance for low-income homeowners to become fire-wise.
Ending sprawl into fire-unsafe areas is another top priority because the majority of fuel treatments are ineffective at reducing risk. In a recent study, scientists determined that only 24,000 of the 7.3 million acres of thinned and prescribed fire-treated forests over a 20-year period across the West actually encountered a fire when “fuels” were lowest. That is, the odds of encountering a fire were less than 1 in 100 and are not improved appreciably by greatly increasing thinning.
The Forest Service is taking public comment through Nov. 7 on the Santa Fe National Forest Plan Revision that will serve as the forest management blueprint for decades to come.
To build trust, the agency must become accountable to the public it serves. This means admitting when “restoration” goes wrong and stopping use of misleading terms like “catastrophic” to describe diverse post-fire landscapes. It means leaving many more trees in place by being surgical instead of widespread with treatments, protecting roadless areas and listening to public concerns about the health effects of smoke and chemicals used to start and spread fires.
It’s time to use a more holistic medicine-like approach that responsibly treats the forest and people with the kind of respect and dignity the agency wishes to receive in return. I suggest you visit www.santafeforestcoalition.org to comments on the forest plan revision and participate in educational hikes and other activities.
Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D, is an award-winning scientist with more than 200 publications and books, including being co-editor of The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.
Robert Macnee, Ph.D. is Deputy Director of Resilience Services at Climate Resilience Consulting, where he helps governments, institutions, and communities reduce climate risk in equitable and practical ways. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Management focused on climate change impacts on health and communities, and brings over a decade of experience spanning economic development, resilience planning, and implementation.
Samantha Medlock is President of Climate Risk Advisors, helping communities and organizations advance equity, sustainability, and resilience. Her career began chasing floods as a local official in Texas Flash Flood Alley—a hands-on experience that still shapes her approach to climate and disaster risk management.
Arsum is the Senior Adaptation and Coastal Resilience Specialist for the National Wildlife Federation’s Southcentral Region. In this role, she advances climate adaptation efforts, with a focus on nature-based approaches to address the impacts of climate change and extreme events across the Gulf region. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications on climate impact assessments and adaptation solutions. Additionally, she regularly participates in state-based coastal resilience and hazard mitigation planning across the Gulf, collaborating with regional and local stakeholders.
Jim is a multilingual world traveler. Based in Bavaria during the 1970s, Jim spent most of this period in India, Afghanistan and Nepal, where he founded and operated a charitable medical clinic serving Tibetan Refugees. He settled in Oregon in 1983 on a forested ranch in the Umpqua National Forest.
Dr. Micah Hahn is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health in the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. She received her joint PhD in Epidemiology / Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MPH in Global Environmental Health from Emory University. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow for the CDC Climate and Health Program, and in this position worked collaboratively with the CDC Division of Vector-borne Diseases and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research focuses on understanding the health impacts of climate change and working with communities to develop locally-relevant adaptation and resilience-building strategies. Dr. Hahn is also on the Management Team of the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Michael is a former Founding Principal of Resilient Cities Catalyst, a global non-profit helping cities and their partners tackle their toughest challenges. He is currently the Executive Director of Climate Resilience Academy at the University of Miami.
Dr. Quintus Jett is a consultant, educator, and strategist for public causes. He has a doctorate in Organizations & Management from Stanford University, and a two-decade faculty career which spans schools, departments, and programs of business, engineering, liberal studies, divinity, and public and nonprofit management. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dr. Jett launched a volunteer project in New Orleans, which enlisted residents, students from over a dozen colleges and universities, and hundreds of others to field map the city’s Gentilly district, Lower Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East. Dr. Jett is an innovator in higher education, bridging the divide between academic research and the other priorities of the modern university, including student access and diversity, community engagement, and providing foundations for life-long learning in today’s rapidly changing world.
Scott is Monfort Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He has written about 100 publications in the peer-reviewed climate literature, is a former editor of the Journal of Climate, and served for five years as founding Science Chair of the North American Carbon Program.
Linda has many years of experience in disaster preparedness and resilience. She has been an elected official on the Linn County Iowa Board of Supervisors, Chair of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, the East Central Iowa Council of Governments, the statewide Mental Health Developmental Disability and the Linn County Board of Health. Langston is a former president of the National Association of Counties (2013-2014).
Ken works with families and organizations as a mediator, organizational consultant, trainer and facilitator. Along with his passion for helping people prepare for and reduce climate change, Ken also volunteers as a mediator through Mediation Works and is passionate about supporting youth through mentoring with Boys to Men of Southern Oregon.
Matthew is a retired high school teacher who was once honored as Oregon High School Social Studies Teacher of the Year. Before his teaching career he was in the restaurant business in Portland. He is also a lawyer who has been a member of the Oregon State Bar Association since 1980.
Andrea is the Resilience Policy Advisor for the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency. She works across state agencies and with local governments to increase the state’s resilience to the impacts of climate change.