The Labor Day fires of 2020 took out half my town of Talent and nearby Phoenix. As I stood in the rubble, I was overwhelmed with anger about how this didn’t need to happen.
Most of the attention on fire-risk reduction is misplaced on attempting to reduce fuels in the backcountry (away from homes) that will do nothing to protect communities because it misses the mark on climate change and logging as the root causes.
Despite pumped-up press statements from groups supporting introduced bills like Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley’s “Wildfire Resilient Communities Act,” fires will take out even more communities because the approach is dead wrong. Merkley’s bill would allocate $30 billion to federal agencies for “fuels reduction” when they already are swimming in cash from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts. Only 10% of the funds in his bill would go to “community wildfire defense grants,” while doing nothing to solve for climate change.
Most of the increase in acres burning in the West are because of the 2% or so of fires that escape containment during hot, windy, and dry extreme-fire weather. Such conditions can spin off pyro-tornadoes and hurricane force winds as in the deadly fires of Paradise Valley, California and Lahaina, Hawaii. The fast-moving fire in my community jumped over six highway lanes taking out unprepared homes like falling dominoes despite millions spent by the Forest Service in backcountry logging. No amount of “ecologically appropriate thinning,” fuel breaks, or “controlled” burning can alter that reality. Senator Merkley’s bill would not even end logging of large fire-resistant trees most often included in “thinning sales.”
The fire mess is a house-of-cards that started in the mid-20th century during a brief (decades) cool down in the climate coupled with militarized fire suppression operations of the Forest Service seeking to stomp out every fire by 10 a.m. the next day. So naturally, this false sense of security enabled millions of homes to be built in harm’s way with limited zoning, no home hardening, and pressure on firefighters to bulldoze wilderness areas during dangerous fire weather. While Forest Service fire strategy dictates working with natural fire ignitions for ecosystem benefits under safe conditions, which would reduce far more fuels than all thinning operations combined, they are under enormous pressure to throw everything they can at a fire even when they can’t possibly put it out. And why not, they have a blank check from Congress with pressure to show results.
Climate attribution modeling is one of the most exciting fields in climate change science. We can now attribute at least half of the increases in acres burning since the 1980s to heatwaves and droughts caused by emissions from burning fossil fuels and land-uses like logging. Large fires triggered by these factors then rage over heavily logged landscapes, burning in lower intensities in forests protected from logging, with most fires spilling over into towns coming from private lands, not public lands. Yet, neither federal fire policy or Senator Merkley’s bill addresses this problem directly by cutting emissions across all sectors and reforming logging practices. There is no analysis of emissions from massive thinning that would exceed those from the fires themselves.
The only way out of this mess is to legislate drastic cuts in fossil fuels, ensure proper accounting of logging emissions, protect older forests from logging, and redirect the vast majority of spending to community fire preparation. Oregon has some of the best climate change scientists in the world ready to work with Senator Merkley who champions himself as a climate advocate. The current path we are on is dangerously complicit to the climate crisis.