The Amazon is burning. This is what the end of the world looks like. Oh, and there’ll be more forests burned, more forests felled by chainsaws, more wetlands drained, more rivers dammed, more grasslands plowed, oceans further toxified and emptied of fish.
And each of these is what the end of the world looks like.
The end of the world looks like factory trawlers pulling in net after net full to bursting with fish — the fish’s eyes popping out from the pressure of all those bodies squeezed together. It looks like puffins starving to death. It looks like emaciated polar bears. It looks like whales washing up on shore and walruses not finding ice on which to rest.
The end of the world looks like plows digging into grasslands, turning over soil and killing all who live there, even down to bacteria. It looks like rows of monocrops, as far as the eye can see.
The end of the world looks like humans staring at screens, clucking their tongues at the destruction of forests far away, never noticing that they themselves — whether they’re in London, New York, Paris, Rome, Athens, Beirut, Beijing or Baghdad — are standing in clear-cuts.
The end of the world looks like cities, with most of their residents never giving a thought to who and what was killed to build that city, never giving a thought to who and what was killed to mine, manufacture and move everything they consider necessary to their lives, and never thinking about what is necessary to life and what is not.
The end of the world looks like humans turning the planet to human use. Or rather attempting to, because it’s not possible to turn this wild and fecund Earth totally to human use, and this attempting is itself what is causing the end of the world.
From the beginning of this culture, it has been so. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s what it was like, prior to the beginning of this culture. The first written myth of Western civilization is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city.
Have you heard of Mesopotamian elephants? Most of us haven’t. They were exterminated to make way for this culture. And when you think of the Arabian Peninsula, do you think of oak savannas? These forests were cut for export to fuel the economy, to build cities.
The Near East was heavily forested. We’ve all heard of the cedars of Lebanon. They still have one on their flag. The great forests of North Africa were felled to make the Phoenician and Egyptian navies. Greece was heavily forested. So was Italy. So was France. The great forests of Britain came down to make the navy that allowed the sun never to set on the British Empire.
This is what this culture does. Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.
The end of the world was not written into human existence. For most of our species’ time on Earth, we’ve lived sustainably. The Tolowa Indians lived where I live now for at least 12,500 years, and when the dominant culture arrived, salmon still ran so thick they turned entire rivers “black and roiling” with their bodies. There was no such thing as “ancient redwood forests.” There was only “home” — a home filled with trees thousands of years old, a home filled with nonhumans in abundance most of us literally cannot conceptualize.
Can you imagine — and this moves us across the continent — flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darken the sky for days at a time, flying 60 miles per hour and sounding like rolling thunder? Can you imagine so many whales that the air looks foggy, just from their breath? Can you imagine fish in such abundance that they slow the passage of ships? Can you imagine entire islands so full of great auks that one European explorer said they could load every ship in France and it would not make a dent? Well, they did, and it did, and the last great auk was killed in the 19th century.
How did the world get to be so full of life in the first place? By each creature making the world richer by living and dying. Salmon make forests stronger by their lives and deaths. Redwood trees do the same. Buffalo make grasslands stronger by their lives and deaths. Wolves do the same. And humans can do the same. But not living the way we do.
The Tolowa were not alone in their sustainability. There have been sustainable cultures the world over. The San of southern Africa, for example, evolved in place. They have lived there, in human terms, forever.
And how have humans lived sustainably in place? Simple. By not destroying the places where they lived, and by not destroying other places either. By improving the habitat on its own terms by their presence. The Tolowa made land-use decisions, just as all other beings on the land do, and just as we make land-use decisions. But the Tolowa made these land-use decisions on the assumption they would be living in a place for the next 500 years. That assumption changes everything about how you make decisions and how you live. It is the difference between life and death, between sustainability and the end of the world.
The end of the world was not written into human existence. It was, however, written into the story of Gilgamesh. The end of the world is written into this way of life of converting the Earth solely to human use. It was written into existence with the plow, and with the cities the plow makes possible.
The logic is simple and inescapable. If you convert the land that previously grew bushes and trees that fed elephants into wheat that feeds humans, you can grow more humans per hectare. Many of these humans can become a standing army. And you can use those trees you cut down to build ships of war. You now have a competitive military advantage over those who live sustainably, over those who do not destroy their land base. Further, because you’ve degraded your own land base, you must expand into other land bases. But fortunately for you, you’ve got a standing military.
This is the last 6,000 years of history. This is the story of the end of the world.
More than 90% of forests on the planet have been destroyed. The same is true for wetlands, grasslands, seagrass beds, large schools of fish, wildlife populations in general.
This culture is killing the planet. It doesn’t have to be this way. Not every culture has lived this way. Not every culture has killed the planet.
Recently, more and more people are talking about the possibility of human extinction. That possibility has entered our consciousness enough that, in December 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed asking whether it would be better for the Earth if humans went extinct.
As the Amazon burns, here’s the thing that haunts me. How is it that this culture can contemplate the end of the Amazon rainforest, contemplate the end of elephants, great apes, insects, fish in the oceans? How is it that it can blithely destroy life on Earth? How is it that it can with not much horror contemplate human extinction, but cannot contemplate stopping this way of life?
If aliens came from outer space and did to Earth what this culture is doing — change the climate; burn the Amazon; deforest the planet; vacuum the oceans and put dioxin in every mother’s breastmilk; and bathe the world in plastics, endocrine disrupters and neurotoxin — we would know exactly what to do. We would resist. We would fight as though our lives depend on it. We would destroy the aliens’ infrastructure that allows them to wage war on the planet that is our only home.
Or, put another way, if the Amazon could take on human manifestation, what would it do? If salmon could take on human manifestation, how long would dams stand? If humans from the future could come to our time, how would they act?
As the writer Lierre Keith often says, “If there are any humans left 100 years from now, they are going to ask what the fuck was wrong with us that we didn’t fight like hell when the world was going down.”
Many of us who know history might have fantasies of how we would have acted were we alive under German occupation in World War II or under British colonial rule. Right now, we are facing the end of the world. We have the opportunity and the honor to protect the planet that gave us our lives.
The time is now. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Life on this planet needs you.
In 1997, forest fires in Indonesia grew so large that they accounted for 40% of global emissions during that period. The Borneo rainforest is the most ancient in the world, having taken 120 million years to evolve into its current state of rich diversity. Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropic peat bogs, deep and vast stockpiles of carbon which have formed over millennia. When these peat bogs ignite they are almost impossible to extinguish because they burn deeply into the Earth and smoulder for weeks or even months, and they can also release millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere very suddenly. Although seasonal fires are common in the Borneo, climate collapse has made the rainforest more susceptible, and the magnitude of this year’s fires are already unfathomable.
Many of the fires we’re seeing right now are caused by exploitative agriculturalists who are burning the rainforest to open land up for human crops and livestock. In doing so, they are destroying 120 million years of evolution and rapidly annihilating one of the Earth’s most diverse and ancient living ecosystems. Although Indonesia claims to be doing “everything in their power” to extinguish the fires, they are not doing nearly enough to prevent them from happening in the first place. Only about 200 suspects have been arrested in relation to the arsons, and it is likely that many of them will be released without charges or consequences. It is understandable that individual farmers may be tempted by the prospect of opening more land for profitable exploitation, but the act of burning such an ancient ecosystem is among the worst crimes a human can commit; it not only endangers the rest of the planet’s climate, it destroys one of the most ancient living systems on this planet.
Most of the fires were started by palm oil plantations, which are often owned by large corporations. Officials estimate that about 80% of the fires were set intentionally and they now number in the thousands, with 2,900 especially bad hot spots. In all, only about two dozen palm oil plantations have been temporarily shut down in connection to arsons, they are primarily owned by Malaysian and Singaporean companies. These companies are unlikely to face significant charges or repercussions, and will likely return to increasingly profitable business after paying fines.
by Dahr Jamail / Truthout – reprinted with permission / Image: NSIDC
We’ve never experienced anything like this: We are living with the full knowledge of our collapsing biosphere and watching huge portions of it vanishing before our very eyes. Meanwhile, the industrial growth society (as eco-philosopher, author and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy calls it) continues to grind on, and this veneer of normalcy persists one more day.
Yet simultaneously, a great awakening is occurring. Millions of people around the world are rising to protect what remains, working to mitigate the damage and to adapt to the drastically changing world. They are working to hold space for that which, despite seemingly overwhelming odds, may continue in the wake of this great collapse.
I have been giving a lot of lectures lately about the climate catastrophe that is upon us, and have increasingly been led to discuss grief. My own experience has shown me that only by facing what is happening head on, and allowing my heart to break, can I begin to respond accordingly.
I find myself led back to one of my teachers, the aforementioned Joanna Macy.
“Refusing to feel pain, and becoming incapable of feeling the pain, which is actually the root meaning of apathy, refusal to suffer, that makes us stupid, and half alive,” Macy told me in an interview. She described how that refusal to feel pain doesn’t mute the sense that there is something wrong — so people simply take that sense and project anxieties elsewhere, usually onto marginalized communities.
“Not feeling the pain is extremely costly,” Macy said.
Look out into the world, right now, the proof of what she said is surrounding us — starting in the White House, and filtering down throughout the dominant colonialist society.
Macy created a framework for personal and social change called the Work That Reconnects, and gives workshops on how to apply the framework. In these workshops and in our conversations, Macy has repeated this to me: “The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world.”
And so, over the years, I’ve aimed to be fully present, and I’ve had my heart broken, and I’ve now had enough practice at this that I have seen, repeatedly, the transformational qualities of despair and grief. In the face of our overwhelming climate and political crises, that grief is transformed into a new clarity of vision, and a depth of passion for action that was previously inaccessible.
“It brings a new way of seeing the world as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on earth,” Macy has told me of this experience.
So, dear reader, I urge you to find your own work that reconnects — or to find another way to ground yourself, as you read on, and as we each travel through another crises-ridden day into an increasingly bleak future.
That future is perhaps most visible at the poles. Greenland is melting much faster than previously understood, as melting has increased six-fold in recent decades, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We wanted to get a long precise record of mass balance in Greenland that included the transition when the climate of the planet started to drift off natural variability, which occurred in the 1980s,” study co-author Eric Rignottold CNN. “The study places the recent (20 years) evolution in a broader context to illustrate how dramatically the mass loss has been increasing in Greenland in response to climate warming.” Rignot added, “As glaciers will continue to speed up and ice/snow melt from the top, we can foresee a continuous increase in the rate of mass loss, and a contribution to sea level rise that will continue to increase more rapidly every year.”
The study also shows how sea level rise is accelerating, and will continue to do so with each passing year, as the effects compound upon themselves.
Permafrost in the Arctic is now thawing so fast that scientists are literally losing their measuring equipment. This is due to the fact that instead of there being just a few centimeters of thawing each year, now several meters of soil can become destabilized in a matter of days.
Adding insult to injury, another study revealed that this permafrost collapse is further accelerating the release of carbon into the atmosphere, possibly even doubling the amount of warming coming from greenhouse gases released from the tundra.
The recent U.N. report showing that one million species are now in danger of going extinct has grave implications for the future of humanity. Human society is under urgent threat because the global ecosystem upon which we depend is, quite literally, under threat of unraveling.
“The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide,” Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told The Guardian.
Earth
Disconcertingly, since 2001 forests in Canada have released more carbon than they have sequestered. This is due largely to climate disruption-fueled drought, higher temperatures and wildfires. To give you an idea of what this means: In 2015 Canada’s forests emitted the equivalent of 231 million metric tons of CO2. By comparison, the total population of the city of Calgary emitted 18.3 million metric tons of CO2, merely a fraction of the amount released by the forests, largely via drought and wildfires.
Following ongoing protests and pressure from the activist organization Extinction Rebellion, the Welsh Government recently declared a “climate emergency,” noting that Wales’s health, economy, infrastructure and natural environment are all under threat from the impacts of human-caused climate disruption.
Around the same time, the Republic of Ireland also declared a climate and biodiversity emergency. Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told the BBC that “declaring an emergency means absolutely nothing unless there is action to back it up. That means the Government having to do things they don’t want to do.”
In Canada, the Ottawa city council has declared a climate emergency, joining several other Canadian municipalities in announcing the declaration. The vote freed up a quarter of a million dollars to be used to accelerate studies around moving the city onto renewable energy and meeting greenhouse gas emission targets.
The town of Old Crow, Yukon, also declared a climate state of emergency as well. “It’s going to be the blink of an eye before my great grandchild is living in a completely different territory, and if that’s not an emergency, I don’t know what is,” Dana Tizya-Tramm, chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the CBC following a ceremony marking Old Crow’s declaration of the state of emergency. “Everything is changing right in front of our eyes.”
In the U.S., Mike Rosmann, a clinical psychologist working with farmers, wrote a heartbreaking article for The New Republic about depression among farmers in the wake of historic flooding that ravaged the Midwest. Rosmann detailed the psychological and personal pain he is experiencing while working with suicidal farmers, as the direct human toll of climate disruption becomes more apparent in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the refugee crisis from rising seas and extreme weather events continues apace in Bangladesh. Already one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to sea level rise, it is now estimated that more than 10 million people there are estimated to lose their livelihoods in the next decade. The larger cities are already overwhelmed with the number of people streaming into them from the submerging coastal areas.
Water
Climate disruption-amplified, flood-inducing extreme weather events continue to make their mark around the planet.
Cyclone Kenneth, the largest storm to ever strike Mozambique, left 38 people dead. That storm had followed Cyclone Idai, which struck a few weeks prior, killing 600.
In Canada, experts warned that climate disruption will continue to exacerbate extreme flooding across parts of the country. Thousands of people across Eastern Canada were forced to evacuate their homes due to flooding as the second of two “100-year-floods” struck Quebec in the last three years.
In the U.S., things are no better. After a $14 billion dollar upgrade in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s levees are sinking, due to sea level rise and ground subsidence, and will be rendered “inadequate” within four years.
Just after the U.S. wrapped up its wettest 12 months on record, storms dumped enormous rainfalls across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Scientists warned that the extreme weather Houston is currently experiencing is no anomaly — it is what the area can expect regularly from now on.
Record-breaking spring high temperatures across the Pacific Northwest has people in the Seattle region worried about drought as intense heat in May has caused the snowpack (at only 58 percent of normal anyway) across Washington state to melt away far more rapidly than normal. “When you look at some of the snow packs in some of the basins, it looks like they are doing a swan dive off a cliff,” Jeff Marti, a state Ecology Department official, told The Seattle Times. Washington Governor Jay Inslee has already issued drought-emergency declarations in the Okanogan, Methow and upper Yakima watersheds, due to the low snow pack in the mountains.
Experts recently warned that the Hawaiian Islands are under severe threat from rising sea levels. The iconic Waikiki Beach and other well-known areas of the islands will experience chronic flooding and could disappear underwater forever within the next 15-20 years.
Scientists also recently announced that global sea levels could reach a two-meter rise by 2100 — the warning effectively doubles the previous worst-case scenario provided by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2013. This new warning means that large portions of numerous major coastal cities will be completely submerged, according to Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol. “If we see something like that in the next 80 years we are looking at social breakdown on scales that are pretty unimaginable,” Bamber told The New Scientist.
In the icy realms of Earth, things continue to deteriorate rapidly.
Scientists recently announced that a major breeding ground for emperor penguins has gone barren since 2016. This means that virtually nothing has hatched in the area, which is the second largest breeding ground for the penguins in the Antarctic, and things are looking just as bleak for this year.
Scientists have also found what they call “extraordinary thinning” of ice sheets deep within Antarctica. The affected areas are losing ice five times faster than they did during the 1990s, with some areas having lost 100 meters of thickness. A quarter of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is now considered unstable. The Northwest section of the Ross Ice Shelf, which bounds the WAIS and is the size of France, is melting 10 times faster than the global average. According to one 2016 study, if all of the WAIS melts, 17 feet of global sea level rise is projected to be the result.
Up in the Arctic, things are just as bad. April saw a new record low in Arctic sea ice extent.
Another report revealed how thawing permafrost across the Arctic will amount to a $70 trillion impact. Methane and CO2 released from the thawing will accelerate global warming by amplifying it nearly 5 percent.
Additionally, yet another recent permafrost study has revealed widespread degradation of it across the high Arctic terrain, to an extent worse than previously understood.
On the other side of the water spectrum, drought has impaired shipping through the Panama Canal, whose waters have precipitously lowered. The canal level is not connected to sea levels, hence drought conditions are impacting the functionality of the critical shipping lane. Panama’s canal authority recently had to impose draft limits on ships using the canal. This means that heavily laden cargo ships, namely from the U.S. and China, had to pass through with less of their cargo.
Fire
Just four months into 2019, the U.K. had already had more large wildfires than it had during the entirety of 2018. Rescue personnel stated that the scale and duration of the fires had already been a huge draw on fire and rescue service resources.
In Germany, the risk of wildfires has spiked amidst ongoing drought and high temperatures across most of the country.
Back in the U.S., the wildfires that ravaged California last year were the most expensive in the state’s history, totaling $12 billion in damages. More than 80 people were killed in the fires, in addition to them leaving large areas of toxic waste that needs to now be remediated.
Air
A recent report shows how much warmer cities across the U.S. will be within one generation (by 2050).
“Every season in every city and town in America will shift, subtly or drastically, as average temperatures creep up, along with highs and lows,” reported Vox, which released the report. “Some of those changes — like summers in the Southwest warming by 4°F on average — will mean stretches of days where it’s so hot, it’ll be dangerous to go outside. Heat waves around the country could last up to a month.”
In the Northwestern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean, a temperature of 84°F was recently registered — 30°F higher than normal for this time of year.
Meanwhile, Earth’s CO2 levels, for the first time in human history, reached 415 parts per million. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, global average temperatures averaged between 4°C to 10°C warmer than they are today, depending on the location around the planet.
Denial and Reality
The U.S. is now one of the world’s leaders when it comes to climate change denial. A recent polling of the 23 largest countries in the world found that 13 percent of Americans believe the climate is being disrupted but that humans are not the cause, in addition to another 5 percent of Americans who believe the climate is not changing at all. The only other countries that are more anti-science than the U.S. are Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, according to the survey.
This information shouldn’t be a total shock, given the ongoing denialist machinations of the Trump administration, which recently objected to having “climate change” even referenced in a U.S. statement for the Arctic Council. Additionally, Trump’s EPA head was recently asked to back up his absurdly anti-science claim that climate disruption is still “50 to 75 years out.”
Adding fuel to the denial fire, Trump’s interior secretary recently told lawmakers that he hasn’t “lost sleep” over the record CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It’s worth remembering that the U.S. is responsible for emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere than any other country on Earth.
On the other hand, nearly half of younger Americans (between the ages of 18 to 29 years) believe human-caused climate disruption is a “crisis” and demand “urgent action,” according to a recent poll.
Another poll found that more than 80 percent of parents in the U.S. want climate disruption taught in the schools of their children. Among all parents, two-thirds of Republicans and nine out of every 10 Democrats agreed the subject should be taught in school.
With the ongoing acceleration of the climate crisis, it is clear that even if we believe the best-case scenarios, governments are not reacting according to the gravity of the situation at hand. Each one of us, knowing what we now know, must take full responsibility for preparing ourselves for the adaptation required to live on this increasingly warming, melting world as civilizations and societies continue to disintegrate.
Editor’s note: The following is the testimony of Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala, Chief Scientist of Geos Institute, Ashland, Oregon, before the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, “Exploring Solutions to Reduce Risks of Catastrophic Wildfire and Improve Resilience of National Forests,” on September 27, 2017.
Chairman Westerman, Ranking member Hanabusa, and subcommittee members, thank you for the opportunity to discuss wildfires on national forests. I am the Chief Scientist of the nonprofit organization, Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon. Geos Institute works with agencies, landowners, and decision makers in applying the best science to climate change planning and forest management. As a scientist, I have published in peer-reviewed journals on fire ecology and climate change, I am on the editorial board of several leading journals and encyclopedias, and I have been on the faculty of Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University. A recent book I co-authored with 28 other scientists outlined the ecological importance of mixed-severity fires in maintaining fire-resilient ecosystems, including ways to coexist with wildfire (DellaSala and Hanson 2015).
Wildfires are necessary natural disturbance processes that forests need to rejuvenate. Most wildfires in pine and mixed-conifer forests of the West burn in mixed fire intensities at the landscape scale that produce large and small patches of low to high tree mortality. This tapestry of burned patches is associated with extraordinary plant and wildlife diversity, including habitat for many big game and bird species that thrive in the newly established forests. From an ecosystem perspective, natural disturbances like wildfires are not an ecological catastrophe. However, given there are now 46 million homes in naturally fire-prone areas (Rasker 2015), and no end in sight for new development, we must find ways to coexist with natural disturbance processes as they are increasing in places due to climate change.
In my testimony today, I will discuss how proposals that call for increased logging and decreased environmental review in response to wildfires and insect outbreaks are not science driven, in many cases may make problems worse, and will not stem rising wildfire suppression costs. I will also discuss what we know about forest fires and beetle outbreaks in relation to climate change, limitations of thinning and other forms of logging in relation to wildfire and insect management, and I will conclude with recommendations for moving forward based on best available science.
I. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT RECENT FOREST FIRE INCREASES
Recent increases in acres burned of forests are mainly due to a changing climate – Scientists have known for sometime that fire activity tracks regional weather patterns, which in turn, are governed by global climatic forces such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO – a recurring long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability– see chart 1). For instance, the very active fire seasons of the 1910-1930s, occurred during prolonged drought cycles determined by the PDO that resulted in much larger areas burning historically than today (Powell et al. 1994; Interagency Federal Wildland Fire Policy Review Working Group 2001; Egan 2010) (chart 1). In fact, compared to the historic warm PDO phase of the early 1900s, most of the West is actually experiencing a fire deficit (Littell et al. 2009, Parks et al. 2012). However, with warming temperatures, early spring snowmelt, and longer fire seasons over the past few decades more acres are burning each year (Westerling et al. 2006; Littell et al. 2009) (chart 1).
For instance, wildfire season in the West has lengthened from an average of five to seven months, and the number of large wildfires (>1,000 acres) has increased since the 1980s (Dennison et al. 2014) from 140 to 250 per year (UCS 2017). This is occurring as average annual temperature in the West has risen by nearly 2 degrees F since 1970s and winter snow pack has declined (UCS 2017). If measures are not taken to stem greenhouse gas emissions, wildfire acres are projected to increase further in dry areas as annual temperatures are expected to rise another 2.5 to 6.5 degrees F by mid century (UCS 2017). Some researchers estimate more than half of the increase in acres burned over the past several decades is related to climate change (Abatzoglou and Williams 2016). This increase is expected to continue with additional warming leading to even greater suppression costs if the agencies continue to suppress fires across the landscape (Schoennagel et al. 2017).
Increasing Human Development is Lengthening Wildfire Seasons and Adding to Fire Ignitions – The direct role of human-access via roads and development in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI) is increasing wildfire activity. Scientists recently evaluated over 1.5 million government records of wildfires nationwide from 1992 to 2012 (Balch et al. 2015). During that time, human-caused fire ignitions have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal occurrence of fire, accounting for 84 percent of all wildfire starts and 44 percent of the total area burned nationally. We now have the phenomenon of a human-caused fire season, which was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the US over this 20-year period of time. Ignitions caused by people – whether accidental or arson – have substantial economic costs. This will only worsen with continued development of the WUI adding to the 46 million homes (Rasker 2015) already in these fire-prone areas.
Thus, given expansion of homes in the WUI, the best way to limit damage to homes is to reduce fire risks by working from the home-outward instead of the wildlands-inward (Syphard et al. 2013). For instance, if a fire-brand travels miles ahead and lands on a flammable roof that home is very likely to burn compared to a home that has a fire resistant roof and cleared vegetation within a narrow defensible space of 100-200 feet immediately surrounding the home (Cohen 2000). Logging outside of this narrow zone does not change home ignition factors.
II. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FIRE AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Wilderness and other protected areas are not especially prone to forest fires – proposals to remove environmental protections to increase logging for wildfire concerns based on the assumption that unmanaged – or protected areas – burn more intensely are misplaced. For instance, scientists (Bradley et al. 2016 of which I was a co-author) recently examined the intensity of 1,500 forest fires affecting over 23 million acres during the past four decades in 11 western states. We tested the common perception that forest fires burn hottest (most intensely) in wilderness and national parks while burning cooler (less intensely) or not at all in areas where logging had occurred. What we found was the opposite – fires burned most intense in previously logged areas, while they burned in natural fire mosaic patterns in wilderness, parks, and roadless areas, thereby, maintaining resilient forests (see chart 2). Consequently, there is no reason for reducing environmental protections.
State lands are not at lower wildfire risks compared to federal lands – there is much discussion about whether state lands are being managed in a way that reduces fire occurrence and intensity. However, in a recent report of wildfire risk (that included acres likely to burn), scientists (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017) used the West Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment model, an important assessment tool of the Council of Western State Foresters and Western Forestry Leadership Coalition. They evaluated risk for western states based on historical fire data, topography, vegetation, tree cover, climate, and other factors. According to the Center for Western Priorities analysis, state (22%) and federal (23%) lands have approximately equivalent levels of fire risks in the West, and for some states, risks were higher than federal lands. Notably, allegations of higher fire risk based solely on the number of federal acres burned in a fire season are misleading as there are over 7 times as many federal lands (362 million acres) in 11 Western states as compared to state-owned lands (49 million acres) (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017).
Thinning is Ineffective in Extreme Fire Weather – thinning/logging is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity. Thinning-from-below of small diameter trees followed by prescribed fire in certain forest types can reduce fire severity (Brown et al. 2004, Kalies and Kent 2016) but only when there is not extreme fire weather (Moritz et al. 2014, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires occurring during extreme fire-weather (high winds, high temperatures, low humidity, low fuel moisture) will burn over large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and in some cases can burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days (Stephens et al. 2015, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires driven by fire weather are unstoppable and are unsafe for fire fighters to attempt putting them out, and, as discussed, are more likely under a changing climate.
Further, there is a very low probability of a thinned site actually encountering a fire during the narrow window when tree density is lowest. For example, the probability of a fire hitting an area that has been thinned is about 3-8% on average, and thinning would need to be repeated every 10-15 years (depending on site productivity) to keep fuels at a minimum (Rhodes and Baker 2008).
Thinning too much of the overstory trees in a stand, especially removal of large fire-resistant trees, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening tree canopies and letting in more wind, can damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory fuels, and impact wildlife habitat (Brown et al. 2004). Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that can degrade water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads.
Post-disturbance salvage logging reduces forest resilience and can raise fire hazards –commonly practiced after natural disturbances like fires or insect outbreaks, post-disturbance logging hinders forest resilience by compacting soils, killing natural regeneration of conifer seedlings and shrubs associated with forest renewal, increasing fine fuels from slash left on the ground that aids the spread of fire, removing the most fire-resistant large live and dead trees, and degrading fish and wildlife habitat. Further roads that increase sediment flow to streams triggering widespread water quality problems (Lindenmayer et al. 2008).
III. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT BEETLE-KILLED FORESTS AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Beetle Killed Forests are Not More Susceptible to Forest Fires – forests in the West are being affected by the largest outbreaks of bark beetles in decades, which has caused concern about forest resilience and wildfire risk and led to proposals for widespread tree removals. Such proposals stem in part from the rationale that bark beetle outbreaks increase wildfire risks due to dead trees and that logging in beetle-affected forests would therefore lower such risks. However, beetle-killed forests are not more susceptible to forest fires (Bond et al. 2009, Hart et al. 2015, Meigs et al. 2016). This is mainly because when conifers die due to drought or native bark beetles, the combustible oils in the needles quickly begin to dissipate, needles and small twigs begin to fall to the ground. Without the fine fuels that facilitate fire spread, potential crown fires are actually lowered in forests with beetle mortality (Donato et al. 2013). The beetle-killed standing dead trees (snags) are the least flammable part of the forest and act more like a large log in a campfire, rather than kindling which is what causes fire spread.
In fact, studies of beetle-killed forests in the West found that when fires occurred during or immediately after the pulse of snag recruitment from beetle kill, fire severity consistently declined in the stands with high snag densities in the following decades (Meigs et al. 2016). In pine and mixed-conifer forests of the San Bernardino National Forest (CA), fires occurred immediately after a large pulse of snag recruitment from drought and beetles. However, scientists (Bond et al. 2009) found “no evidence that pre-fire tree mortality influenced fire severity.” In studies of beetles and wildfires across the western U.S., scientists (Hart et al. 2015) stated “contrary to the expectation of increased wildfire activity in recently infested red-stage stands, we found no difference between observed area and expected area burned in red-stage or subsequent gray-stage stands during three peak years of wildfire activity, which account for 46 percent of area burned during the 2002–2013 period.” And finally, in a comprehensive review of fire-beetle relations in mixed-conifer and ponderosa pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, scientists (Meigs et al. 2016) found: “in contrast to common assumptions of positive feedbacks, we find that insects generally reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires. Specific effects vary with insect type and timing, but insects decrease the abundance of live vegetation susceptible to wildfire at multiple time lags. By dampening subsequent burn severity, native insects could buffer rather than exacerbate fire regime changes expected due to land use and climate change.”
Most importantly, climate change is allowing more insects to survive the winter, triggering the rash of recent outbreaks (Meigs et al. 2016).
Thinning cannot limit or contain beetle outbreaks – once beetle populations reach widespread epidemic levels, thinning treatments aimed at stopping them do not reduce outbreak susceptibility as beetles over run natural forest defenses with or without thinning (Black et al. 2013).
IV. CLOSING REMARKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
In sum,
Recent increases in wildfires and insect outbreaks are a result of a changing climate coupled with human-activities including expansion of homes and roads into the WUI that will only continue to drive up fire suppression costs.
Policies should be examined that discourage continued growth in the WUI; any new development must include defensible space and construction from non-flammable materials.
The most effective way to protect homes is to create defensible space in the immediate 100 feet of a structure and use of non-flammable materials. Wildland fire policy should fund defensible space, not more logging and thinning miles away from communities.
No amount of logging can stop insect outbreaks or large fires under extreme fire weather. Logging may, in fact, increase the amount of unnatural disturbances by homogenizing landscapes with more even aged trees, residual slash left on the ground, and compounding cumulative impacts to ecosystems.
Thinning of small trees in certain forest types, maintaining canopy closure and in combination with prescribed fire can reduce fire intensity but treatment efficacy is limited in extreme fire weather, and by the small chance that a thinned site will encounter a fire during a very narrow window when fuels are lowest.
CITATIONS
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Bradley, C.M., C.T. Hanson, and D.A. DellaSala. 2016. Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent-fire forests of the western United States? Ecosphere 7:1-13.
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Meigs, G.W., H.S.J. Zald, J. L. Campbell, W.S. Keeton, and R.E. Kennedy. 2016. Do insect outbreaks reduce the severity of subsequent forest fires? Environmental Research Letters 11 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/045008.
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Parks, S.A., C. Miller, M.A. Parisien, L.M. Holsinger et al. 2012. Wildland fire deficit and surplus in the western United States, 1984-2012.
Powell, D.S., J.L. Faulkner, D.R. Darr, et al. Forest resources of the United States, 1992. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-234 (revised).
Rasker, R. 2015. Resolving the increasing risk from wildfires in the American West. www.thesolutionsjournal.org; March-April 2015 p. 55- 62.
Rhodes, J.J., and W.L. Baker. 2008. Fire probability, fuel treatment effectiveness and ecological tradeoffs in western U.S. public forests. The Open Forest Science Journal 1: 1-7.
Schoennagel, T., J.K. Balch, H. Brenkert-Smith, P.E., Dennison, et al. 2017. Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes. PNAS
114:4582-4590.
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Syphard, A. D., A. Bar Massada, V. Butsic, and J. E. Keeley. 2013. Land use planning and wildfire: development policies influence future probability of housing loss. PLoS ONE 8(8):e71708
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Featured image: The author surveying the devastation of Pinyon-Juniper deforestation (Photo: Max Wilbert)
Once I recovered from the shock I experienced witnessing the carnage produced by a Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) so-called “pinyon-juniper treatment project” just south of Spruce Mountain in Nevada, all I wanted was the destruction to stop. In order to stop the destruction, we have to ask the question: “Why are they doing this?”
BLM’s justifications [are] moving targets … Once a justification is proved to be based on bad science and incomplete research, BLM throws up a new target.
To learn the answer, I embarked on a long, strange trip through BLM documents, books on pinyon pine trees, YouTube propaganda, and countless scientific articles. I found so many justifications, my head was spinning. On a phone call with staff from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), Field Attorney Neal Clark described BLM’s justifications as “moving targets.” Once a justification is proved to be based on bad science and incomplete research, BLM throws up a new target. Meanwhile, the destruction of pinyon-juniper forests intensifies.
The BLM, Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office is proposing a vegetation treatment project in the Virginia Mountains area north of Reno and west of Pyramid Lake in Washoe County, Nevada. The Virginia Mountains Vegetation Treatment Project would destroy “approximately 30,387 acres” of pinyon-juniper forest.
The BLM’s online notice lists some of the most common excuses used for pinyon-juniper deforestation. Those excuses include: to “reduce the potential of large-scale high severity wild land fire,” “provide for public and firefighter safety and protection of property and infrastructure,” “maintain sagebrush habitat, riparian plant communities, wet meadows, and springs,” and “protect and enhance historic juniper woodland habitat.” In order to achieve these goals, the BLM’s online notice says the “proposed treatments include mechanical mastication, mechanical removal, hand cutting, chemical treatments, chaining, and seeding.”
BLM’s claims in their campaign against pinyon-juniper forests directly contradict the body of scientific literature.
Of course, the notice ends with the currently fashionable nod to protecting greater sage-grouse habitat and reads, “treatments would be designed to address threats to greater sage-grouse from invasive annual grasses, wildfires, and conifer expansion.”
When BLM claims that their proposed pinyon-juniper treatment projects will achieve the results like the ones listed in the Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office’s notice, they are making claims that are not supported by scientific research. In fact, many of BLM’s claims in their campaign against pinyon-juniper forests directly contradict the body of scientific literature.
Since I began researching pinyon-juniper forests, writing this Pinyon-Juniper Forest series, and participating in a grass-roots campaign to demand a nationwide moratorium on pinyon-juniper deforestation, I have heard BLM’s claims replicated many times. It is time their erroneous assertions are put to rest. In this essay, I will address the common justifications BLM uses for destroying pinyon-juniper forests and show how BLM is lying.
***
The first reason BLM’s Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office uses to support its proposal to clear-cut 30,387 acres of living forest is typical in the nationwide assault on pinyon-juniper forests. BLM claims their proposed project will “reduce the potential of large-scale high severity wild land fire.” According to BLM, this will “provide for public and firefighter safety and protection of property and infrastructure.”
BLM’s justification suggests that there is a serious potential for high severity, wild land fire in pinyon-juniper forests, but is that true?
William L. Baker and Douglas Shinneman wrote an article “Fire and Restoration of Piñon-Juniper Woodlands in the Western United States: A Review” (PDF) which is considered one of the leading reviews of fire incidence in pinyon-juniper forests. Baker and Shinneman argue that there simply is not enough scientific evidence for land managers to apply uniform fire and structural treatments like BLM’s proposed Virginia Mountains Treatment Project in pinyon-juniper forests.
[The BLM’s proposed] treatments have actually been found to increase pinyon-juniper forests’ potential for burning.
Not only are scientists cautioning BLM not to assume pinyon-juniper forests have a serious risk of large scale fire, mechanical treatments have actually been found to increase pinyon-juniper forests’ potential for burning. Allison Jones, Jim Catlin, and Emanuel Vazquez, working for the Wild Utah Project, wrote an essay titled “Mechanical Treatment of Piñon-Juniper and Sagebrush Systems in the Intermountain West: A Review of the Literature” (PDF). Their essay is a comprehensive review of the scientific literature surrounding pinyon-juniper forests and their review undermines many of the goals often given as the reasons for prescribed mechanical treatments of pinyon-juniper forests.
In regards to using pinyon-juniper mechanical treatment as a tool for reducing the potential of wild land fire, Jones et al. write, “There are… many studies that report when piñon-juniper is mechanically treated and if cheatgrass and/or other exotic annuals are present in the system before treatment, then cover of these species will increase post-treatment.” Cheatgrass, of course, is an invasive species that quickly outcompetes native grasses. The relevant problem with cheatgrass is that it is more flammable. When cheatgrass dominates rangelands, it speeds up the natural fire interval of those rangelands. In other words, cheatgrass makes the land it occupies more prone to wild fires.
Regardless of what BLM says, what they are actually doing is contributing to global climate change, a longer wildfire season at home, and hastening the destruction of the entire planet.
When BLM rips up pinyon-juniper forests in the interests of reducing the potential for wildfires, their destruction produces the opposite of their stated goal. Instead of providing for public and firefighter safety, BLM is actually making it easier for cheatgrass to choke out native species which in turn makes it more likely the Great Basin will burn. On the global scale, we know that deforestation speeds climate change. Trees sequester carbon and the prevalence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a leading cause of climate change. Warming climates lead to longer and more intense wildfire seasons. Wildfires burn forests releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the vicious cycle intensifies. Regardless of what BLM says, what they are actually doing is contributing to global climate change, a longer wildfire season at home, and hastening the destruction of the entire planet. “Public and firefighter safety”? Hardly.
Healthy Pinyon-Juniper forest (Photo: Max Wilbert)
The next justification BLM’s Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office lists for why it must destroy pinyon-juniper forests is to “maintain sagebrush habitat, riparian plant communities, wet meadows, and springs.” Before I address this justification, remember that BLM plans to maintain different plant habitats through processes like chaining tens of thousands of acres of living forest. Chaining, you may recall, involves stretching an anchor chain from a US Navy battleship between two trawler tractors and dragging the chain across the forest floor ripping up everything the tractors’ path. Chaining, BLM claims, improves sagebrush habitat, riparian plant communities, wet meadows, and springs.
There are two mistaken beliefs underlying BLM’s stated goal to maintain sage brush habitat, riparian plant communities, wet meadows, and springs. The first idea is rooted in BLM dogma that insists that pinyon-juniper forests are “encroaching” into lands (including sagebrush habitat) they did not previously occupy. The second idea accuses pinyon pine and juniper trees of somehow using too much water and hypothesizes that cutting these trees will lead to increased water yield. Both of these arguments have been soundly defeated in scientific literature.
The pinyon-juniper encroachment theory is a product of settler colonialism’s historical amnesia. One of the products of the white supremacy brought to the Great Basin by European settlers is a selective memory that ignores guilt-inducing facts of ecological destruction wrought on the Great Basin by European mining activities.
When BLM claims pinyon-juniper forests are encroaching, the forests are actually recovering from the shock of European development.
Pinyon pine expert Ronald Lanner described the catastrophic destruction of pinyon-juniper forests in Nevada in his book “The Piñon-Pine: A Natural and Cultural History.” Lanner explains how pinyon and juniper wood was essential for fuel for smelting operations, lumber for buildings in boom towns, and as mine supports in mine-shaft construction. Lanner says western Nevada’s Comstock mines used 18 million board feet of pinyon-juniper timber annually while Eureka, Nevada burned 17,850 bushels of pinyon-juniper charcoal daily. Lanner explains that by 1870 – a mere 11 years after the European discovery of silver in Nevada – charcoal makers had denuded forests for a 50 miles around Eureka, NV.
When BLM claims pinyon-juniper forests are encroaching, the forests are actually recovering from the shock of European development. It wasn’t just mining, either. Lanner estimates that 3 million acres of pinyon-juniper forests were destroyed to make room for cattle between 1960 and 1972 in the Great Basin and Intermountain West. Jones et al. explain that “what we see today in many cases is piñon-juniper simply recolonizing places where they were dominant but then gained in the 1940s to 1970s.” They go on to state, “what is actually natural recolonization is often mistaken for encroachment.”
A classic accusation hurled at juniper trees in particular is that they consume more water through their roots compared to other plants where junipers live. Jones et al. cite 8 recent studies to state that this simply is not the case. Jones et. al also demonstrate that mechanical treatments of pinyon-juniper forests do not produce the effects BLM wants the treatments to: “There are many indications from the literature that mechanical piñon-juniper…treatment, especially if followed by mechanical drill seeding, can fail to meet the goals of ‘ecological restoration and watershed health and productivity.” The seedings enable grazing by large herds of cattle that also disturb the soil crusts and cause flammable cheatgrass to proliferate.
Why do these mechanical treatment projects fail to promote restoration? They fail to promote restoration because, as Jones et al. explain, mechanical treatments are extremely destructive to biological crusts. Additionally, Jones et al. point out how mechanical treatments like chaining lead to the greatest degree of soil disturbance. And, soil losses due to erosion following destructive activities like chaining can take 5,000 to 10,000 years to reform.
Wide view of Pinyon-Juniper clear-cuts (Photo: Max Wilbert)
Next, we have BLM’s claim that their Virginia Mountains Vegetation Treatment Project will “protect and enhance historic juniper woodland habitat.” Again, even without the science, it is difficult to understand how dragging a giant chain across a forest floor to rip up pinyon pine and juniper trees by their roots can protect and enhance the very juniper trees being destroyed. As you might expect, the science reveals the lunacy in BLM’s stated goal.
In addition to the way mechanical treatments of pinyon-juniper forests destroy a natural community’s biologic crust and lead to practically irreversible soil loss, Jones et al, describe how mechanical drill seeding or mechanical clearing of dead pinyon-juniper trees after a fire “can lead to significantly increased wind erosion…” They also state that, “there are many examples in the literature of cases where mechanical clearing of piñon-juniper has led to increases in erosion by both air and water.” And finally, they remind us that “any kind of land treatment that clears the existing vegetation and disturbs the soil (so all mechanical treatments but also fire and chemical treatments) can result in increases in exotic annuals, especially cheat grass, when these species are present in the system before treatment.”
It is quite clear, then, treatment projects like the proposed Virginia Mountains Vegetation Treatment Project do not protect and enhance historic juniper woodland habitat. These projects destroy historic juniper woodland habitat and seriously degrade the ecosystems they are found in.
***
Protecting greater sage-grouse habitat has become the newest justification for pinyon-juniper deforestation and BLM explains that the Virginia Mountains Treatment Project “would be designed to address threats to greater sage-grouse from invasive annual grasses, wildfires, and conifer expansion.”
These lists of threats to greater sage-grouse suggest that if BLM was truly interested in protecting the birds, they would spend their energy combating oil and gas development, conversion of land for agricultural use, and climate change.
First, we should double-check precisely what are the threats to greater sage-grouse. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, takes a slightly different perspective than BLM saying, “Unfortunately, because of oil and gas development, conversion of land for agricultural use, climate change and human development, sage grouse only inhabit half their historic range.” A similar website run by Defenders of Wildlife echoes WWF, “Remaining sagebrush habitat is fragmented and degraded by oil and gas drilling, livestock grazing, mining, unnatural fire, invasive weeds, off-road vehicles, roads, fences, pipelines and utility corridors.”
These lists of threats to greater sage-grouse suggest that if BLM was truly interested in protecting the birds, they would spend their energy combating oil and gas development, conversion of land for agricultural use, and climate change. I will play BLM’s game, though, to discover if mechanical treatments really will produce the results BLM thinks they will.
They will not, of course. Jones et al. made it clear that mechanical treatments of pinyon-juniper forests pave the way for invasive annual grasses to dominate treated areas. Invasive annual grasses choke the ground surface with continuous fuel, and burn more easily than clumped native bunchgrasses. And, as I wrote earlier, “mechanical treatments” are codespeak for deforestation. Deforestation leads to accelerated climate change which leads to more wildfires which kill greater sage-grouse.
I have already cited Lanner and Jones et al. (who cite many, many more) to explain that “conifer expansion” in most places is not really happening. This time, I want to address this argument from a psychological level. Notice how BLM is blaming conifer expansion for greater sage-grouse habitat loss while many other organizations are blaming oil and gas development, agricultural conversion, and mining. These other organizations, in other words, are blaming human expansion for greater sage-grouse habitat loss. When BLM’s rhetoric is viewed in this way, it becomes possible to analyze BLM’s words as a psychological distraction away from the role of humans in the destruction of the Great Basin. It is easier to blame trees than it is to blame humans for the deterioration of the Great Basin. Maybe this explains why so many readily accept BLM’s bogus arguments?
***
Learning that BLM is mistaken or spreading downright lies about what they’re doing to pinyon-juniper forests, the question, again, becomes, “Why?”
Why are they lying? How have they convinced themselves this is acceptable? Are they so beholden to ranching interests that their rationality has been destroyed by cattle money? Do they truly think they are doing what is best for the lands they “manage?” Or, with the amount of destruction they are wreaking on the Great Basin, do they hate pinyon-juniper forests?
I think there must be good-hearted people working for BLM who truly do care for the Great Basin. I wonder how they could have been misled in this way. I recall an article I recently read by Robert Jay Lifton, the brilliant psychologist who asked these very same questions of those involved in the rise of Nazism in his book “The Nazi Doctors.” Lifton’s article appeared in the New York Times and was called “The Climate Swerve” about the world’s deepening awareness of climate change.
Whether [the BLM staff] believe their false claims to virtue or not, is irrelevant for the thousands of acres of beautiful, ancient pinyon-juniper forests set to be destroyed by BLM. What matters is that we stop them.
In the article, Lifton explains, “Over the course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue.” I would extend his realization to the natural world and explain that BLM’s justifications stand as their claims to virtue clearing their conscience before they murder millions of trees and the beings who live in them. The only way BLM can cut 30,387 acres of pinyon-juniper forests is to claim they are “protecting the public and firefighters” or “enhancing historic juniper woodland habitat” or addressing “threats to greater sage-grouse” so they do not have to face the truth of their violence.
Whether they believe their false claims to virtue or not, is irrelevant for the thousands of acres of beautiful, ancient pinyon-juniper forests set to be destroyed by BLM. What matters is that we stop them.
