By NICK SMITH
Under the guise of protecting mature and old growth forests, some groups are pressuring the Biden Administration and U.S. Forest Service to impose new regulations further restricting timber harvesting and other management activities on overstocked and fire-prone national forests in Montana and throughout the West.
Such a policy would be disastrous as our forests, communities and wildlife continue to be devastated by wildfires and smoke. Limiting the ability of federal agencies to mitigate these risks would only lead to less old growth on our public lands and more carbon emissions.
President Biden’s Executive Order on old-growth forests cites severe wildfires, insect infestations and disease as the greatest threats to these large trees, not logging. Researchers have also determined many national forests are unnaturally dense and need to be thinned to reduce wildfire dangers. One study found tree densities should be reduced by as much as 80 percent for some overstocked fire-prone forests to be healthy and resilient.
Calls to further restrict logging typically don’t acknowledge that most lands managed by the federal government are already off-limits to timber harvesting or have restrictions that make active forest management infeasible. On lands available for active forest management, Forest Service projects to thin fire-prone forests and protect communities are often delayed or abandoned and can take years to implement.
The groups that are agitating to “protect” forests often sue the agency to stop projects that reduce wildfire risks and improve conditions for mature and old growth forests. They envision additional regulations similar to the Roadless Area Conservation Rule approved during the Clinton Administration. More than 37 million acres of National Forests have burned since the Clinton-era Roadless Rule was adopted, an acreage more than seven times larger than the acres where thinning and timber harvest has actually occurred during this time.
The need to manage our forests during this era of climate change is urgent. Forests are dynamic ecosystems where disturbance events can reset 100- to 200-year-old forests to zero in a single day. Fires are burning so hot some forests are failing to regenerate naturally, and are releasing heavy amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
According to a new report from the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition, wildfires directly release carbon dioxide in quantities that can impact efforts to use forests to offset carbon emissions. In 2021, wildfires in the Western U.S. released 130 million tons of CO2, based on data published by the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service.
It is difficult to see how we reverse these trends by further restricting forest management that helps make our forests more resilient to wildfires and other threats after all, healthy, growing trees remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Responsibly managed forests help increase net carbon dioxide absorption by reducing the risk of mortality caused by catastrophic fire, disease and insects that increase carbon-emissions. A range of effective active forest management tools, including timber harvesting, thinning and controlled burns, can also be used to help forests better adapt to changing climate conditions.
Forest management also provides natural wood products that store carbon and serve as sustainable alternatives to more energy-intensive materials. When timber is sustainably harvested, much of that carbon stays in the wood, lumber and other timber products indefinitely. With a vibrant forest sector, Montana can play a key role in providing wood that is already being used to build the green cities of the future.
Across the product lifecycle, wood products achieve negative carbon emissions — lower than any other building material — and also requires very little non-renewable energy for their manufacture. With global demand for building materials and other natural resources projected to double by 2060, a recent United Nations report has called for a large increase in the use of wood products to meet this demand.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most trusted voice on climate change, says "sustainable forest management aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.” By comparison, further limiting forest management will only lead to more wildfires, more carbon emissions, and more losses of mature and old growth forests.
