Modern foresters insist they are “tending the forest” just like Native Americans did.

First things first: the so-called ‘foresters’ of the so-called ‘forestry’ industry should more accurately be called ‘de-foresters’ in a ‘de-forestry.’  This isn’t meant to be snide as much as factual.  Despite the lay public having the impression foresters are stewards of forests, especially in the United States, they primarily reduce the amount of the country’s forest cover.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS), for example, primarily reduces the amount of trees and forests which the public entrusts them with “managing.”  The USFS, to be specific and damning, has a quasi-partnership with the timber industry; funding their agency in large part by selling trees owned by the public to private companies — at fire sale prices.

Increasingly working in corporate-government partnerships, as does the USFS, the U.S. is still rapidly reducing the amount of precious, climate-cooling forest cover.  And not just for timber/lumber extraction as the public thinks.

Wild forests, completely different ecologically from “managed” forests are irreplaceable — despite often being cut, or “harvested” as an allegedly “sustainable” or “renewable” “resource.  The list of ecological “services” beyond regulating the planet’s temperature, includes many you know: producing oxygen, sequestering carbon, filtering and cleansing fresh water, creating and maintaining healthy soil upon which countless life forms depend, including providing homes to 70% of the world’s land animals.  Y’know, little stuff like that.

But nowhere in this typically dry, scientific accounting of wild forest “value” is there a reckoning of the emotional and spiritual value to humans.  Fellow treehuggers may know what I mean, but too  many don’t.  Especially as we retreat further and further from spending time in forests, retreating into our addictive electronic screens.

But all of the appreciation of what habitats of trees do and are get tossed aside when the fear of wildfire is stoked.  Also fuhgettabout forests having any innate value beyond their utility as a source of material to be extracted.  Native peoples knew their worth far better than we modern, ‘civilized’ humans do. We only pay lip service to forests, while continuing to cut them all down — even during our climate crisis, caused in large part by deforestation.

“Hey, we’re just doing what Indians did — but with chainsaws & herbicides.”

To fuel the diesel and gasoline-powered work of today’s de-foresters, corporations and government agencies now routinely assert a popularized fallacy, which media outlets repeat and magnify.  It goes like this…

Pre-conquest native Americans sometimes ‘managed’ forests by setting small fires to alter habitat, to grow food, to attract deer or other animals to hunt them.  So, too, today’s de-foresters’ practice a modern, industrialized wildlands management — with chainsaws, masticating machines, toxic chemical poisons (herbicides) and artificial, even out-of-season small ground fires. These practices are similar to ancient ones, a beneficial “tending the land,” much like native Americans did.

Numerous de-foresting agencies are jumping on this propaganda bandwagon, routinely claiming that their modern, industrial assaults on wildlands and wild forests are similar, and even necessary “treatments” and “practices” which “help” and “restore” and “steward” the land, the trees, and the environment.

What’s more, these same chainsaws, masticators, and chemical poisons serve a dual purpose.  They prevent wildfires, it is claimed, being a form of practical wildfire suppression, just as first nations peoples did for thousands of years.

These assertions are all false, of course, to the point of offensiveness. This is “redwashing.”

To repeat a critical point: these 3 claims are all false:

1) These treatments are not necessary;

2) These treatments do not reduce wildfire danger; they actually do they opposite, they increase wildfire danger;

3) They only damage forests, harming their health, in no way benefitting them as the de-foresters claim.

argument is false to the point of offensiveness. THIS is “redwashing.” because this is only the latest in a parade of insulting, exploitative and misleading comparisons — “cultural appropriation” being the contemporary term for it.

Modern, industrialized humans reference Native American culture and their traditional practices — and then take what we, the white man, wants, for extraction and for profit — and tosses all the rest, especially all the spiritual and sacred elements of native practices which made them what they are. But while offensively paying reverential lip service to them.

With our corporations and captured agencies, we leave hundreds of thousands of acres of “thinned,” denuded forest in our mechanized, chemically poisoned wake.  And in just a few decades.  People lived on Earth for thousands of years without destroying nature to the extent we humans do today.  Even if only because their populations were much smaller, and they lacked the industrial tools to the wreak the ecological havoc we do today.

Literally millions more acres of wild forests are now being targeted today for “vegetation management” and “thinning” projects — which are forest reduction projects.

Modern forestry “management,” with industrial chemicals, just like Native Americans. 

Insisting that felling thousands of trees with chainsaws, and shredding literally tens of thousands of smaller forest plants and then spraying hundreds of gallons of cell-disrupting petrochemical poisons is just a variation on what native people did is like insisting that trimming someone’s fingernails is akin to cutting off someone’s arms.

Or, to make the analogy more accurate, cutting the arms off tens of thousands of people.  With these deforestation projects, it’s the arms and bodies of the Tall People, as some native Americans reverentially referred to the essential, self-sustaining, ancient, sentient beings we call trees.

The absurd, offensive comparison is exemplified by a quote from over 20 years ago (in 2002), by William Wade Keye, a past chair of the Northern California Society of American Foresters. His Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle (Dec. 1, 2002) asserted that, “Native peoples managed the North American landscape, cutting trees and using fire to perpetuate desirable forest conditions. There is no reason that we cannot equal or better this record of stewardship.”

But in fact there is a multitude of reasons that we cannot better or match the stewardship of native peoples. Here are just 10 of them: 

1) Native Americans lived in far greater, deeper connection to wild lands than we do today, understanding that they themselves were a part of the living land, not separate and smarter and superior;

2) Native peoples did not enter the forest behaving like an occupying and assaulting force with industrial tools that can clearcut entire forests;

3) They did not develop and maintain an unsustainable, extractive economy that depleted Earth’s resources;

4) their economy and their entire culture did not value money and the accumulation of material wealth over the value of life itself;

5) They were so intelligent they did not invent chainsaws, masticating machines and incredibly destructive machines like feller-bunchers which can cut, de-limb, and stack hundreds of mature trees like toothpicks (which they might soon become) in an afternoon;

6) They were so moral that they did not invent limited liability corporations that, with impunity, destroy nature, which is our own life support system, and that of countless other animals species we ignore in assessing the impact of our forest “management” practices;

7) They did not cut down entire forests, chop them up, compress them into wood pellets, and ship them across oceans to burn on other continents as an energy source, while lying to the public about them by calling this “renewable” “bio-fuel” and “biomass,” while ignoring the release of more planet-heating greenhouse gasses than burning coal does;

8) They knew trees and other non-human life were intelligent beings, too, with their own irreplaceable, intrinsic value. That trees are not just money-on-a-stick, a “resource” to be “harvested” endlessly for an unchecked human population growing unsustainably into billions;

9) Their spiritual beliefs did not hold humans as the most intelligent species, nor superior to all other species, nor atop a food chain, nor only in competition with non-humans animals.

10) They did not have the self-destructive combination of stunning technological power and starting lack of wisdom we have today, which has created dire ecological consequences which result from our mindset of separateness, superiority, entitlement and domination.

In summation, there is zero evidence to support de-forester Keye’s assertions that we industrialized humans can “equal or better this [native American] record of stewardship.”

But there is overwhelming evidence of the exact opposite; that our destruction, for instance, of over half of the Earth’s original forest cover is continuing today, unabated, even as we have overwhelming evidence of the environmental destruction we are wreaking on the Earth, which is leading to our own demise.

Of course don’t take my word for any of this.  Turn off your screens and go outside, into the few remaining wild forests and undeveloped places.  See for yourself this current, ongoing increase of devastation through fresh eyes and an open mind. See the destruction left in the wake of modern, industrial so-called “forest management” and “fuels reduction” and mechanical and chemical “treatments.”

Better even than seeing, feel how a wild, unmanaged, dense, impenetrable forest is teeming with life, while a forest that has been “opened up,” cut and shredded and chipped to become “more park like” is half-dead, drained of much of its animal life.

But hurry, while there are still a few wild forests and other wildlands left to see, and feel. And see agency redwashing for what it is. And speak up and take action to protect forests — before it’s too late.

–  Essay by Jack Gescheidt, environmental and animal rights activist.  He was emboldened by, and then expanded upon, an excerpt from the book, “Strangely Like War; the Global Assault on Forests” by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, 2003.

Highly recommended.