I must take issue with one of the assertions in Farzad Forouhar’s otherwise excellent essay “Smokey Bear: A Savior or An Agent” in the April 2022 ECONEWS. The essay gives the reasons forest fires have become more “intense and devastating” as fire exclusion and fire suppression “in combination with the impacts of climate change and the influx of population in areas that used to be wilderness.”
The essay fails to mention what is arguably the #1 reason forest fires have become more intense and devastating, that is, the conversion of older forests to vast, dense and highly flammable plantations of one species of tree.
Forouhar mentions the fire that destroyed much of the town of Paradise in November 2018. Contrary to propaganda put out by the Forest Service and Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), California’s largest timber company, that fire’s intensity was not primarily the result of fire suppression but rather a consequence of the conversion of most of the private and national forest lands surrounding the town into plantations of young trees all of the same age. That included an old fire scar which the Forest Service replanted into a sea of trees all of the same age and Sierra Pacific Industry’s clearcuts which had also been replanted into highly flammable plantations of dense, young trees.
These conditions are displayed in the Google Earth image below which shows part of Paradise before the 2018 fire at the bottom center, the replanted national forest fire area to the right of the town, and the patchwork of SPI clearcuts and plantations dominating the top center of the image.
Research and experience on-the-ground agree: clearcut-plantation forestry results in more intense and devastating forest fires, while older forests are fire resistant and tend to burn in a mosaic of intensities dominated by low intensity fire.
Older forests also store more carbon for longer periods and that carbon is less likely to be converted into CO2 by wildfire as compared to younger forests and especially to highly flammable tree plantations that are clearcut every 30 to 50 years and then replanted.
– Felice Pace
Klamath Glen, CA