Stop Thinning Forests is a community compilation, sponsored by Deep Green Resistance, of research and voices that speak in defense of our forests against the atrocities that are being committed on those communities in the name of “fire mitigation” and “forest health.”
The Forest Service, in partnership with the timber industry, uses propaganda to promote the idea that thinning helps lessen fire severity while improving forest health. The research on the benefits of forest thinning is financially backed by the timber industry, and congressional passing of bills that promote thinning are backed by the lobbying efforts of the industry. The main goal for thinning forests is to increase revenue by allowing the timber industry to get into forests that were previously protected by environmental laws. Recent legislation has allowed the industry to bypass those laws and profit from forest products in the name of “forest health and restoration.” The Forest Service has consistently worked with the timber industry as a result of financial incentives and has been responsible for creating the infrastructure through use of federal tax dollars in the form of subsidies that enable the industry to “get the cut out.”
Individual land owners have recently been encouraged by the Forest Service to thin their lands with available grant monies under the guise of protecting their homes from fire and to improve the health of the forests. The available grant money filters down to the Forest Service from federal legislation that allows industry to get into our treasured, and last remaining, intact forests. Thinning private lands is offered as another incentive that generates money for the Forest Service while creating the appearance that the Forest Service is promoting a policy of “fire mitigation” and “forest restoration,” extending to the wildland/urban interface. Private land owners have the power to become informed and make rational decisions to protect their homes from fire that will not devastate the forest community. It is essential that individuals making these decisions become informed about federal forest policies and the history of the Forest Service before making decisions that will disrupt and harm the forest communities where we live.
Here is a recent on-the-ground report back from Deanna Meyer, a Deep Green Resistance organizer in Colorado:
I went up to check on my neighboring forest who is being destroyed as I write with heavy equipment. These photos show some of the results. Pictures could never show the true devastation, and this place, which is very important to me, is now unrecognizable.
This is at a church in Sedalia, Colorado and this tax exempt church accepted hundreds of thousands of tax payers’ dollars to destroy this forest. All of this is in the name of “fire prevention.” Research analyzing millions of acres throughout the West where fires have occurred shows otherwise.
Here in Colorado, all we need to do is look at the 3 largest fires in our history, all occurring this year, and pay attention to all of the acres that were “thinned” just like this. They did NOT fare any better than the untouched forests and in many areas they burnt even faster and hotter because of wind breaks and dried out soil.
All of this is horrific and heartbreaking, but the soil stands out the most to me. It takes thousands of years to create healthy soil and mycelial networks. This land now is a barren dustbowl with some wood chips thrown on top. The mycelium, grasses, sedges, forbs, and trees who were there and holding the soil together are now completely obliterated from the heavy equipment, mulching and utter destruction of at least a foot of soil who used to be sinking carbon and healing the land.
Every time our forests start to heal themselves from the decades of colonizing destruction, the Forest DISservice and private land owners come in and log it again. When you look at the forests that have not been touched for decades, they are healing and thinning themselves out. Just because they look “messy” to colonizers who can’t stand the idea of not having control over every living biome that exists does not alter the fact that the forests know best what to do with themselves and our meddling with them is biocide.
by Mojtaba Sadegh (Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University), Ata Akbari Asanjan (Research Scientist, Ames Research Center, NASA), and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh (Ph.D. Student, McGill University) / The Conversation
Two wildfires erupted on the outskirts of cities near Los Angeles, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes Monday as powerful Santa Ana winds swept the flames through dry grasses and brush. With strong winds and extremely low humidity, large parts of California were under red flag warnings.
High fire risk days have been common this year as the 2020 wildfire season shatters records across the West.
What caused the 2020 fire season to become so extreme?
Fires thrive on three elements: heat, dryness and wind. The 2020 season was dry, but the Western U.S. has seen worse droughts in the recent decade. It had several record-breaking heat waves, but the fires did not necessarily follow the locations with the highest temperatures.
What 2020 did have was heat and dryness hitting simultaneously. When even a moderate drought and heat wave hit a region at the same time, along with wind to fan the flames, it becomes a powerful force that can fuel megafires.
That’s what we’ve been seeing in California, Colorado and Oregon this year. Research shows it’s happening more often with higher intensity, and affecting ever-increasing areas.
Climate change intensified dry-hot extremes
We are scientistsandengineers who study climate extremes, including wildfires. Our research shows that the probability of a drought and heat wave occurring at the same time in the U.S. has increased significantly over the past century.
The kind of dry and hot conditions that would have been expected to occur only once every 25 years on average have occurred five to 10 times in several regions of the U.S. over the past quarter-century. Even more alarming, we found that extreme dry-hot conditions that would have been expected only once every 75 years have occurred three to six times in many areas over the same period.
We also found that what triggers these simultaneous extremes appears to be changing.
During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the lack of rainfall allowed the air to become hotter, and that process fueled simultaneous dry and hot conditions. Today, excess heat is a larger driver of dry-hot conditions than lack of rain.
This has important implications for the future of dry-hot extremes.
Warmer air can hold more moisture, so as global temperatures rise, evaporation can suck more water from plants and soil, leading to drier conditions. Higher temperatures and drier conditions mean vegetation is more combustible. A study in 2016 calculated that the excess heat from human-caused climate change was responsible for nearly doubling the amount of Western U.S. forest that burned between 1979 and 2015.
Worryingly, we have also found that these dry-hot wildfire-fueling conditions can feed on one another and spread downwind.
When soil moisture is low, more solar radiation will turn into sensible heat – heat you can feel. That heat evaporates more water and further dries the environment. This cycle continues until a large-scale weather pattern breaks it. The heat can also trigger the same feedback loop in a neighboring region, extending the dry-hot conditions and raising the probability of dry-hot extremes across broad stretches of the country.
All of this translates into higher wildfire risk for the Western U.S.
In Southern California, for example, we found that the number of dry-hot-windy days has increased at a greater rate than dry, hot or windy days individually over the past four decades, tripling the number of megafire danger days in the region.
2020 wasn’t normal, but what is normal?
If 2020 has proved anything, it is to expect the unexpected.
Before this year, Colorado had not recorded a fire of over 10,000 acres starting in October. This year, the East Troublesome fire grew from about 20,000 acres to over 100,000 acres in less than 24 hours on Oct. 21, and it was nearly 200,000 acres by the time a snowstorm stopped its advance. Instead of going skiing, hundreds of Coloradans evacuated their homes and nervously watched whether that fire would merge with another giant blaze.
This is not “the new normal” – it’s the new abnormal. In a warming climate, looking at what happened in the past no longer offers a sense of what to expect in the future.
There are other drivers of the rise in fire damage. More people moving into wildland areas means there are more cars and power lines and other potential ignition sources. Historical efforts to control fires have also meant more undergrowth in areas that would have naturally burned periodically in smaller fires.
The question now is how to manage this “new abnormal” in the face of a warming climate.
In the U.S., one in three houses are built in the wildland-urban interface. Development plans, construction techniques and building codes can do more to account for wildfire risks, including avoiding flammable materials and potential sources of sparks. Importantly, citizens and policymakers need to tackle the problem at its root: That includes cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.
A combination of factors—all related to the climate crisis—is believed to be behind one of the largest mass bird die-off events in recent memory in the Southwest, according to biologists. Scientists say thousands of dead migratory birds have been found across states including New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado in recent weeks as the American West faces wildfires that have burned through millions of acres in matter of days.
Dr. Martha Desmond, a biology professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU), toldThe Guardian that the die-off, which was first detected in late August, is a “national tragedy.” “I collected over a dozen in just a two-mile stretch in front of my house,” Desmond told the newspaper. “To see this and to be picking up these carcasses and realizing how widespread this is, is personally devastating.”
Allison Salas, a graduate student at NMSU, reported on Twitter that the university is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to understand the causes of the die-off, which ornithologists have linked to smoke from the wildfires as well as a drought in the Southwest.
We have been collecting dead birds (with appropriate permits) off the streets, on campus, at local golf courses, literally EVERYWHERE. (3/9) pic.twitter.com/taQynUMTwz
The birds seem to be in relatively good condition, except that they are extremely emaciated. They have no fat reserves and barely any muscle mass. Almost as if they have been flying until they just couldn’t fly anymore. (5/9) pic.twitter.com/tTPlDxwraf
We have very little data, but suspect that the west coast fires, in combination with the local cold front we experienced last week, has altered the migration patterns of many migrants. On top of that, there is little food and water available here in the Chihuahuan Desert. (7/9) pic.twitter.com/YB2Ct0ucxx
“The fact that we’re finding hundreds of these birds dying, just kind of falling out of the sky is extremely alarming,” Salas told The Guardian. “The volume of carcasses that we have found has literally given me chills.”
“It’s different this year than other years. We’ve had plenty of hot summers but very few that have had these huge-scale fires combined with heat combined with drought.” Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Researchers say the birds are mainly migratory birds—such as warblers, swallows, and flycatchers—which travel to Central and South America from Canada and Alaska each year as the weather grows colder. Resident bird species don’t appear to be affected.
Based on the large volumes of dead birds found throughout the region since August 20, when the first group was found at White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, ornithologists believe thousands of birds could already be dead. Desmond told the Las Cruces Sun News that “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of migratory birds” could be lost in the die-off.
When migrating from Canada, bird species must stop every few days to gather food, drink water, and rest. With wildfires overwhelming the West Coast, scientists say birds may have been pushed into desert areas in New Mexico—which has been suffering from a drought—where food and water sources are scarce.
Changes in the birds’ northern habitat, caused by the heating of the planet, may also have pushed the species to begin their migration earlier than usual this year, before building up fat reserves which would have helped sustain them on the journey.
“We’re kind of coming at them from all sides,” Salas told The Guardian. “If we don’t do anything to protect their habitat we’re going to lose large numbers of the populations of several species.” Desmond told WBUR that upon arriving in the drought-stricken Southwest, “a lot of birds up north were probably caught off guard.”
Since August 20, two doctoral candidates at the University of New Mexico discovered 305 dead birds in the northern part of the state and linked the deaths to starvation. Trish Cutler, a wildlife biologist at White Sands Missile Range, told KOB, a local TV station in Albuquerque, that “a couple of hundred” dead birds were found at the weapons testing site last week, compared with the fewer than half a dozen carcasses that are found there on a weekly basis.
Dr. Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told the New York Times that extremely poor air quality in the West, caused by the wildfires, is likely a contributing factor to the die-off as well. “It’s different this year than other years,” Farnsworth told the Times. “We’ve had plenty of hot summers but very few that have had these huge-scale fires combined with heat combined with drought.” Environmental justice advocates on social media decried the “ecological disaster” detected in the Southwest.
Reported a few times last evening on the Southwest bird die-off. This is an ecological disaster on a massive scale. As a birder, I am horrified. https://t.co/b0awViDmB8
“The signs are everywhere,”tweeted consumer advocate Erin Brockovich. “Mother Nature is done with us, and who can blame her?”
You can find the original article here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/16/ecological-disaster-massive-scale-hundreds-thousands-dead-migratory-birds-southwest
In this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Will Falk. Will is a writer, lawyer, environmental activist and former collaborator of Deep Green Resistance News Service. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens to Nature.
In the fall of 2013, he began traveling to support environmental causes he felt passionate about, endeavor which took him to places such as the Unist’ot’en Camp on the unceded territories of the Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in central British Columbia, to the Big Island of Hawai’i, to pinyon-juniper forests and across the Great Basin among other points of interest.
Passionate about defending the Colorado River in all her length, he believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance and he periodically takes freelance legal and content writing work to support himself while researching and writing about environmental causes.
Here’s a little excerpt of the interview (minute 18:10):
“One interesting thing when thinking about the threats to the Colorado River is [ … ] most people assume if they stopped watering their lawns in the Colorado River Basin, if they stopped taking showers, if they controlled their use of water better, that this would have a large benefit to the Colorado River and that’s just not true because about 78% of the Colorado River’s water used for agriculture and industry it goes to corporate uses. I think about 10 or 12 percent of the Colorado River’s water is actually used by households and individual humans. That number is comparable to the amount of water that golf courses in the Colorado River Basin use. So even if every human being in the Colorado River Basin just stopped taking showers and watering their lawns forever and we did nothing about the corporations and the industry that uses this water, we still would be having this huge impact on the Colorado River and we might not be able to really alleviate the problems that the Colorado River is facing.”
You can also find some contributions by Will Falk right here on the DGR News Service. Here are a couple of links:
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Please contact us if you can help transcribe this podcast, or want to get involved.
Rights of nature is a legal and political concept that advocates for ascribing legal personhood to natural entities. Traditionally, indigenous cultures across the world have worldviews consistent with treating natural entities as persons.
Organizations like Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) have been advocating for Rights of Nature.
We are thrilled & honored to announce that Prairie Protection Colorado and Deep Green Resistance are bringing Derrick Jensen & Lierre Keith to Denver, Colorado on Sunday, Oct 6, 12:30 pm Mountain Time, 18:30 UTC.
Video will be available after the event on our YouTube page as well.
Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen is a leading voice of cultural dissent. He explores the nature of injustice, how civilizations devastate the natural world, and how human beings retreat into denial at the destruction of the planet.
Derrick has authored 27 books and counting including The Myth of Human Supremacy, Endgame Volume 1 & 2, The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words. He co-authored the book, Deep Green Resistance, inspiring people from all over the world to resist the systemic insanity of those who are killing the planet.
Lierre Keith is an acclaimed writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. Her work centers on civilization’s violence to the earth, male violence against women and the need for serious resistance to both. Her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She co-authored the book, Deep Green Resistance, inspiring people from all over the world to resist the systemic insanity of those who are killing the planet.
