Trump is not good for the U.S. economy.

Not a short term fix but given the fire danger as well as the cost of managing forest lands it makes sense to relax logging standards and partner with commercial loggers to create sustainable and less flammable forests and to provide more American lumber to the market.

Why is logging dying? Blame the market.

Environmental regulations and endangered species protections are not at fault for Western logging’s decline.

George Wuerthner
OPINION June 15, 2016

Critics of public lands like to say that timber jobs declined and mills closed over the last 20 years because environmental protections such as the Endangered Species Act and other laws made the cost of logging skyrocket. This complaint is repeated so often it is usually stated as unqualified truth.

If you believe the rhetoric, the way federal lands are managed has been the problem. If only there were more private owners of the land, local economies would prosper, and there would be stable, long-term stewardship.
If only that were true. But if you compare the mostly private wood-products industry in the state of Maine to the West’s experiences on public land, you find that environmental regulations had little to do with the demise of logging.

Ninety percent of Maine is forested, and more than 93 percent of the state’s land is privately owned, mostly by large timber companies that sell trees to the wood- products industry. If private lands lead to prosperity and healthy landscapes, Maine should be the poster child for the country. And unlike the West, Maine, imposes minimal regulations on private landowners. There are also almost no listed endangered species in Maine to harry the timber industry.

Yet today, the forest-products industry in Maine is a shadow of its former self. In 1980, there were 25 pulp and paper mills in the state. Today, two-thirds of those mills are gone. Since 1990, the state has lost 13,000 of its approximately 17,000 paper-industry jobs, including more than 2,300 in the past five years.

The decline continues. Associated wood products companies in Maine have also seen a decline – everything from wood furniture, wood flooring and clothespin producers have closed up shop.

The decline in both employment and production in Maine was caused by the same forces that drastically cut forest industry jobs in the West: foreign competition, which brought in cheaper wood products, technological advances and new automation that allowed computers instead of people to run machinery. High energy prices and labor costs also played a role as plastic and steel moved in to replace wood.

Think about the brightly colored plastic Adirondack chairs for sale at Home Depot now replacing the wooden chairs on which they are modeled. Instead of wood rafters, steel-beam has replaced two-by-fours in some construction, and so forth. The decline in newspapers and print materials has also dramatically altered demand for pulp production. All of these factors are affecting the West’s wood industry as much as they affect Maine.

These days, most of the new sawmills and pulp mills built in the United States are in the South. Trees grow faster there, and unlike the Western United States, the can reach harvestable age in a decade or two. To the timber industry, the longer you have to wait to cut trees, the higher the risk. Your trees might die in a forest fire, a beetle outbreak or some other natural event. So locating your mills in places where you can grow a tree to merchantable size quickly is a smart business practice.

Furthermore, most of the Southern timberlands are flat and accessible year-round. In the steep mountains of the West, road construction costs are far greater, and snow limits seasonal access.

So that’s the picture: The decline of the Western wood products industry – like that in Maine – occurred because of economic realities that favor other regions of the globe. Blaming environmentalists, endangered species protection, or environmental regulations is easy. But blame fails to explain a changing world, or help us understand its nuances.

Unlike Maine, the West has an alternative. Its abundant public lands – in particular its wilderness areas, national parks and monuments – provides the foundation for another future for the region. While not all the changes that come with the “new” economy are welcome – take sprawl and increased impacts from recreational users – they can be managed if we make intelligent choices.

Notice I didn’t lob an implied insult in your direction, too.

APRIL 19, 2016
The Myth That Logging Prevents Forest Fires
by GEORGE WUERTHNER

The Forest Service solution to large wildfires is more logging, but this prescription ignores the growing body of scientific research that suggests that logging/thinning/prescribed burning does not work under severe fire conditions.

Why is this important?

Because the vast majority of all fires self-extinguish whether we do anything or not. However, all large fires — the ones that are a threat to communities — burn under what are termed “severe fire weather.” These are fires burning under conditions of low humidity, high temperatures, persistent drought and, most importantly, high winds.

If you get these conditions in the same place as an ignition source, you cannot stop the fire until the weather conditions change. Blazes under such conditions regularly burn through fuel treatments — even clearcuts.

In fact, fuel treatments can even make fire spread quicker by opening the forest to greater drying and wind penetration.

Here’s a small sample of conclusions that cast doubt upon Forest Service policies.

“Finally by current standards, even our best fuel reduction do not appear to be adequate to provide much assistance in the control of high intensity wind-driven fires. If fuel treatment is the answer, it will need to be done on a level that is far more extensive (area) and intensive (fuel reduction) than we are now accomplishing — even on our best fuel breaks.” Source: Wildfire Cast Management

“fuel treatments … cannot realistically be expected to eliminate large area burned in severe fire weather years.” Source: Gedalof, Z., D.L. Peterson and N.J. Mantua (2005). Atmospheric, climatic and ecological controls on extreme wildfire years in the northwestern United States. Ecological Applications 15: 154-174.

“Extreme environmental conditions … overwhelmed most fuel treatment effects…. This included almost all treatment methods including prescribed burning and thinning…. Suppression efforts had little benefit from fuel modifications.”

“It may not be necessary or effective to treat fuels in adjacent areas in order to suppress fires before they reach homes; rather, it is the treatment of the fuels immediately proximate to the residences, and the degree to which the residential structures themselves can ignite that determine if the residences are vulnerable.”

“The majority of acreage burned by wildfire in the US occurs in a very few wildfires under extreme conditions (Strauss et al., 1989; Brookings Institution, 2005). Under these extreme conditions suppression efforts are largely ineffective.”

Source: Objectives and considerations for wildland fuel treatment in forested ecosystems of the interior western United States Elizabeth D. Reinhardt *, Robert E. Keane, David E. Calkin, Jack D. Cohen.


We cannot halt large fires through fuel treatments. The best way to save homes is not by logging more of the forest, but by implementing fire-wise policies in communities that reduces the flammability of homes.

I suspect many in the Forest Service, and especially firefighters, know this, but the agency is continuously under attack from politicians, rural communities, and the timber industry to increase the amount of subsidized timber from federal lands. Fire prevention is the excuse used to justify these sales.

Plus, logging/thinning gives the agency reasonable deniability. When a fire overwhelms firefighting efforts, the Forest Service can always say we did what we could to protect the community.

It is easier to log the forest than face the wrath and accusations from ill-informed community members that if only the FS had logged more, than the “disaster” could have been avoided.

The truth is that the responsibility for avoiding disasters lies not with the Forest Service, but with individual private landowners, and county commissioners who continuously approve new subdivisions in the Wildlands Urban interface.

Summer of 1986 my Salt Lake City friend Wally came up to Idaho to go fishing and adventuring with me. We drove into the middle of deepest Idaho and reached the small stream that was my secret fishing objective by early evening. Yes! It was the legendary E. Fork of No Tellum Creek. After an hour or so of fishing, it was getting late and it was time to go find a camp spot. The sun had set a while earlier & mountain temperatures were rapidly dropping.

As we were loading our fishing gear into my truck, I noticed a pile of logging slash near the road. I explained to Wally that we should gather some of that wood for a campfire, since it was unlikely that our roadside camp, farther down-canyon, would have any firewood. Since it was almost dark and a little cold, I put on Levis, a heavy canvas shirt, and work gloves, before gathering firewood.

I then climbed onto the pile of slash and started pulling out pieces and tossing them to Wally.

Shortly thereafter, something small flew near my face.

I experienced a sudden chill up my back and a premonition of evil. I then looked down to see what might be happening.

I was black from the belly down with incensed, but cold, hornets that were crawling up me with malice & hate in their demonical little minds, since I had disturbed their nest in the slash pile.

“HORNETS!!” I screamed, as I leaped off the slash pile and started running towards the road (and Wally) while peeling off my shirt and flailing at my torso & pants. About that time the first hornets started stinging me through the shirt and on my head. I blew by the slightly stunned & immobile Wally and started running up the road at just below light speed. (The truck was not an option, since I was still covered with hornets.)

Meanwhile Wally, who didn’t comprehend my startled scream of HORNETS, was standing there in the dark, trying to figure out what was going on. He later told me that the only thing he could think was: at long last, Fritz had finally gone insane.

About that time the first hornet stung him.

Wally rapidly caught up with me and we both ran about 100 yards up the road in the dark, slapping and getting stung, cursing and screaming: until we felt safe again.

The sting toll was surprisingly low. I had been stung about a dozen times on my head and back. Wally had about half that many stings. It had been too cold for the hornets to be a killing threat to us.

I do have a mild allergy to bee-stings. I worried the abundance of stings might set off an allergic reaction that could be deadly to me, but the closest medical clinic was over 2 hours away on mostly gravel roads. Instead of panicking, I ate a couple Benadryl tablets to hopefully quell any allergic reaction.

We drove to camp, cooked some steaks, drank a lot of red wine, and felt much better. And, I didn’t wake up choking for breath, or dead.

It wasn’t funny at the time.