If you’ve read any of TreeSpirit’s posts in the last few years, you’ve likely noticed a broken record repetition of a few themes. One is that logging — which is deforestation by many of its trendy new (fool-the-public) names like “thinning,” “managing” and “restoring” — always degrades forests.
Whenever bureaucracies “apply” their “treatments” to allegedly “heal” or “help” forests with industrial “management” tools: chainsaws, masticators, chippers and chemical herbicides, forests are denuded and made less healthy, and also more prone to wildfire ignition. Which is the opposite result of the supposed justification for the “treatment” in the first place.
Please read these first two paragraphs again, ideally a few hundred times. So you ingrain their meaning and importance into your bones. Because repetition is what the timber industry uses and has used, for decades, to fool the public into believing forests need human “management.” Or, in the the latest effective lie, “Native Americans should resume “tending” the forests — but with today’s industrial chainsaws, masticators and herbicides. Repeating the lie makes it seem truthful to the general public.
Worse still, the so-called “biofuels” (wood pellets) industry, which cuts down trees and shrubs to burns them as wood pellets in incinerators for energy production, has joined this propaganda disinformation campaign. All while calling their forest destruction a “renewable energy.” This fuels the forestry industry’s non-science narrative, about how cutting down — called “thinning” and “managing” and “mulching” (masticating) forests is a good thing.
We’ve come to expect public relations lies from companies that profit from selling what is killed and cut down and cleared from forests. But what’s newer and expanding and more chilling is the wildly increased number of government agencies that have jumped aboard this deforestation disinformation bandwagon. Almost every imaginable reason is given to justify — again, I deploy the necessary repetition — forest “management” or “thinning” or “tending” or “stewardship” or “helping” or “restoring” or “conserving” or “salvaging” or “saving” with these destructive, forest-reducing tools and practices.
We environmentalists, activists and regular citizens need to counter these lies and repeat debunking truths again and again and again. Because the repetition of lies is what these Forest “managing” agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — and too many mainstream media outlets — use repetition of lies to hoodwink the public into allowing today’s mass deforestations to become commonplace and widespread.
One of biggest lies today is that forests today are “overgrown” and must be “managed” to prevent wildfires. As a result of this lie, in 2025, literally millions of acres of publicly owned forests in California, Oregon and Washington state are now targeted for “management” assault. Forests are also labeled “unhealthy” to justify the proposed remedy which is always the same: logging by the other, Orwellian names.
Forests need exactly the opposite: forests need to NOT be “managed” by humans. To the extent that forests are under “stress” or “unhealthy,” it’s because of global warming, which is caused in large part by deforestation.
The latest, jaw-dropping, mind-numbing justification for cutting down more trees is to “save” the endangered Northern spotted owl. Yes, you read that right. Four Ph.D. scientists write about this absurd premise and prescription in a new Revelator article. Please click into, read all or at least some of it. And support independent media outlets like this one, which still dare to publish peer-reviewed science and the truth.
CLICK TO READ ARTICLE: Logging to ‘Save’ Northern Spotted Owls From Wildfires Will Not End Well
Our forests, all forest animals, and our own lives depend on it.