Question: How do logging companies justify increasing logging operations in our climate crisis (which is created by logging)?
Answer: Yell, “WILDFIRE DANGER!” and break out the chainsaws.
Right now, when we need more trees more than ever, the timber industry is expanding its logging operations — by exploiting the public’s very real (and understandable) fear of wildfire.
Lobbying with this message in effect, “If we don’t “thin” and “treat” forests near you, they will catch fire, destroy your home and kill you!
And if the forest isn’t near you, like our world-reknowned, treasured Sequoia National Park likely isn’t, then the scare tactic is modified to, “We must “manage” forests or else they will be “destroyed” in “catastrophic” wildfires.
Because, y’know, forests can’t survive without the industrious, industrialized human “help” of chainsaws, chippers, masticating machinery, and herbicides. Never mind that forests thrived for literally millions of years before any human “management.” Tragically, too many well-meaning people believe this industry public relations non-science.
Put even more bluntly, the timber industry — along with government agencies corrupted by its money, which includes the U.S. Forest Service and CalFire — wants to chainsaw down millions more trees by scaring the crap out of you. Fear is a simple, proven technique, and the forest-felling corporations are sophisticated enough to back it up with bogus, pseudo-scientific terminology like “fuel loads” and “treatments” and “catastrophic wildfires.” You see, forests are no longer complex, living, moisture-retaining wild habitats to do what they’ve done long before humans arrived; forests are dangerous fire traps.
Which can kill us all. Or, in the latest wrinkle, “chainsaw management” of forests is now needed because of the climate crisis. We screwed things up by suppressing wildfires, so now we HAVE to ramp up bulldozering forests to fix the problem we created. If we don’t “thin” forests and “clean them up,” the forests now might kill itself with a so-called “catastrophic” fire. But either way, industrialized, mechanized forest “management” with heavy machinery is the solution! Trust us, we’re the timber industry! And if you don’t trust us, listen to our servants, the U.S. Forest Service. (I know, I know, this sounds awfully cynical, but it’s true. I wish it weren’t.)
If you think the redwoods forest work in the photo below is a “restoration” project as claimed, I’d like to sell you a bridge. After I blow it up.
Adding insult to forest injury, even Native American practices are invoked, with talk of “prescribed” fire and “habitat restoration.” Because, y’know, industrial chainsaws, chippers, masticating machines and herbicides are exactly how Native Americans managed forests! Before Europeans arrived to slaughter this land’s native peoples, raze their forests, and of course destroy the New World with Old World cattle grazing. (Don’t let me get me started on the holocaustic effect of Holsteins on America’s prairies, streams and air (i.e., atmospheric greenhouse gases from millions of cows raised for meat and milk.)
These latest logger’s terror tactics are amplified by the media, always keen on a good scare story. Got Maui? READ Guardian article, “Non-native grass species [incl. from the cattle industry] blamed for ferocity of Hawaii wildfires.” Read how Westerner’s industrial crops — and industrial cattle — are responsible for the devastation in Hawaii by destroying the native, lush, tropical habitat and making the island far more flammable.
The timber industry wants to “convert” remaining wild forests, meaning industrialize complex ecosystems; replace them, acre by acre, with for-profit tree plantations where they decide what species and what trees live and die. Because, y’know, lumber companies are so much wiser about forests than Mother Nature…
Millions of acres of remaining U.S. wild forests are on now on the chopping, bulldozing block — including in beloved Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (SEKI). TAKE ACTION with Earth Island Institute’s “John Muir Project” letter.
IF YOU RETAIN JUST ONE MESSAGE FROM THIS BLOGPOST, it’s this:
Forest “thinning” and forest “management” is timber industry Newspeak for logging. And logging increases wildfire danger by increasing forest aridity, temperatures and winds. So instead of assaulting forests, protect your house by “hardening” it to make it “ignition resistant.” And create defensible space around it. Mostly 10-to-30 ft. out, and no more than 100 ft. That’s it. READ MORE.
Know that even cutting down an entire forest won’t protect you from wildland fire; it just turns forest fire danger into grassland fire danger. Which is the hazard of the slash and more flammable vegetation, what industry leaves in its devastating wake.
As our planet heats up, in large measure from industrial deforestation, our society’s profit-driven War on Trees is expanding. An educated public — this means you — is essential to reversing this destructive, nay, suicidal trend.
This goes for ALL the forest “managing” and “thinning” and “restoration” projects being proposed:
• In Marin County CA’s Tomales Bay State Park bogus “forest health initiative.”
• In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
• And in Plumas County, CA‘s so-called “Community Protection [DESTRUCTION] Project” where the U.S. Forest Service wants to open over 200,000 acres of public forest to timber industry chainsaws. READ Feather River Action’s Aug 2, 2023 BLOGPOST.
If you’ve made it this far in this lengthy post, congratulations, you’re over 25! You may even have read a New Yorker feature, which makes this post seem like a TikTok video. Mother Earth needs people like you! So please share this post, or its perspective, with your friends and family. On social media, if you do such things. Together we can still protect and cherish our Mother, Nature. We must; she deserves this much, and much more. And our actions will save some of our sorry human arses too.