Play the blame game | Columns

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The 19th century French historian Chateaubriand once wrote that forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them. Looking today at the smoke that covers half the country and the mudslides that buried major highways, we should ask ourselves if we really want this to be the legacy of this generation of Americans. It doesn’t have to be. We know how to manage forests to maintain their yield, beauty and health, forever. We are failing miserably.

For 25 years, Americans stood idly by and watched more than 100 million acres of national forests burn to the ground, including the largest fires ever in California, Colorado and several other states, sparking utter devastation in beloved places like Glacier and Rocky Mountain National. Parks. The Forest Service says at least an additional 100 million acres are still at risk of catastrophic forest fires, such is their unhealthy and overgrown state. We hardly do anything about it.

In fact, this generation has all but stopped professional management of our public forests, and we are witnessing the disease, death, rotting, collapse and burning of billions of trees covering millions of acres of forest land before. healthy. Some of these iconic landscapes will not return to their former beauty in our lifetime, and some will never provide the same habitat for wildlife, or the same quality of water supply as before.

This week, smoke from giant wildfires in the West not only blanketed the West, but prompted Code Red and Orange air quality alerts from Philadelphia to Toronto and spread a toxic haze throughout the West. in the north Pole. In New York City, fine particle pollution topped 170 on the Air Quality Index, a level considered harmful even to healthy people, while NASA’s Earth Observatory has shown black carbon soot covering almost all of Kentucky and Minnesota.

Land managers, politicians, lobbyists and environmentalists continue to discuss rather than act. The tragic irony is that most of the time we discuss the cause of the crisis, not the solution to it.

The prestigious Yale School of Forestry published a study in the journal Nature estimating that the global number of trees has declined by about 46% since the beginning of human civilization. He said 15 billion trees are felled each year and the average age of forests has declined dramatically over the past few thousand years. In other words, logging is to blame.

Rather, most environmental organizations and government agencies blame climate change.

Others blame particular activists, like the Montana judge who blocked a forest health project that took eight years of collaborative planning and 2,600 pages of analysis and while his injunction was in effect, lightning struck and the resulting fire burned 9,000 acres of forest. He criticized the Forest Service for failing to prove that the delay increased the risk of fire.

Many public land activists, including myself, have criticized mismanagement for allowing the abnormal proliferation of forests which turns them into powder magazines, which erase landscapes when they are set on fire. It bothers me, especially when unprecedented lumber prices drive up housing costs and when we see the avoidable loss of the most beautiful places in the Americas.

However, this crisis has reached such proportions that we have to take a step back and realize that we have the wrong argument. Who or whatever caused the forest health catastrophe, shouldn’t we at least discuss the solutions? Whatever the cause, what’s the answer? That should be the debate.

It is clear that postponing this discussion is a death sentence for nature. National forests produce eight times more new growth than managers remove each year. If the amount cultivated and the amount taken are not the same, the situation worsens continuously. Just look out the window. So blame him for mismanagement, blame him for global warming, blame him for whatever you want, what are we going to do about it?

Every year we spend billions on fire suppression, losing quality watersheds and wildlife habitat. Each year, we sacrifice the lives of several firefighters and hundreds of homes. Whatever the cause, it would be far more effective to clear up the overload and restore healthy trees than to put out fires and deal with the dead landscapes left in their wake.

Like all living things, trees live, grow and die, so forests cannot be preserved forever in their current state. We are therefore faced with a clear and simple choice. Forests must be managed, or allowed to die and burn. When there are no more forests, only deserts, are we still going to argue over who to blame?

Greg Walcher is president of the Natural Resources Group and author of Smoking Them Out: The Theft of the Environment and How to Take it Back. He is a native of the western slope.

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