The great environmental writer, advocate, and author George Wuerthner has taught me much over the years, including on the topic of the devastating effects of the cattle industry on American land. And just how much public land is given over to this cow as a commodity-for-profit industry. And how badly cattle degrade land. And how much precious water in the American West goes to grow feed for cattle, not plant crops for humans.
While most people worry about shorter showers and replacing their thirsty imported grass lawns (which are good things to do), cattle are meanwhile drinking the west dry, since our cows evolved in the wetter climate of Europe, and before that Asia.
Wuerthner’s articles appear on many of this website’s pages, including the Eating Animals page, Regenerative Ranching page, and my Wildfire page
I also credit Wuerthner with first educating me about wildfire, in his comprehensive compendium by this same name, Wildfire. His collection instilled in me the foundational belief that wildfire is natural, unavoidable and beneficial. I’ll add an additional descriptive: wildfire is desirable.
Forests — and by extension humans and wildlife — need natural wildfire, for instance started by lightning strikes, to keep forests ecologically healthy. Forests, especially those in the western U.S. have evolved to burn periodically. This includes big wildfires that burn out of human control.
This the most compelling reason we need to protect our homes and structures from wildfire from the house-out, not by cutting into millions of acres of forests-in, back to our homes. We can do this with simple, effective, relatively inexpensive treatments like “hardening” our homes and creating “defensible space” not over 100 ft. from houses. And mostly from the house-out to only 20 or 30 feet. Cutting into and “thinning” and “managing” millions of acres of wild forests — as is the ecocideal practice being advanced today — will only create a hotter, drier climate and even more and larger wildfires. READ MORE about the necessity of WILDFIRE.
Wuerthner has recently been weighing in on a topic I like to call, The Big Logging Industry Lie: a relatively new, but already widespread industry narrative. It goes like this: we need to cut down millions of trees in order to make today’s drought and climate-stressed forests healthy, thus more resilient to wildfire, and thus “save” forests from “catastrophic” fire which destroy forests and our homes. [BULLETIN: To be clear: this is all non-science; it’s false.] Sound familiar?
The Big Logging Lie is just the latest wrinkle in the same old logging drive of felling trees for profit. Global warming be damned — to create a hotter Hell on Earth. Even federal (e.g, the National Forest Service) and state government agencies (e.g., Cal Fire) are completely coerced by the industry’s lies, by its powerful political influence and by the millions of dollars of timber and so-called “biomass” (which includes wood pellets) industries’ public relations campaigns. Washington D.C. industry lobbyists also drive this false narrative and fool the public too.
Agencies like Cal Fire (California Dept. of Forestry & Fire Prevention) need funding to justify their existence and get some of the billions of dollars now earmarked for “wildfire reduction.” They generate giant make-work deforestation projects under the guise of forest “management” and “forest resiliency” work, like the “California Vegetation Treatment Program.” And the incipient Tomales Bay State Park deforestation project described here: https://treespiritproject.com/CalFire
One real danger: repeating these logging lies often makes them seem true, or partially true for too many people. (Hence the dark artistry of lawyer Roy Cohn and his most famous pathological, star presidential pupil.) Examples of big lies, repeated, becoming perceived as truth include the fossil fuel industry’s public relations term, “clean coal,” and the chemical industry’s peddling”the safe use chemical herbicides” and Big Beef’s latest scam nostrum, “regenerative ranching.” Repeating lies until they find a receptive audience is an old, proven tactic, one used by propagandists throughout history.
Interestingly, even in these contentious times, there is consensus that today we need forests and trees more than ever. There is a popular acceptance that trees do all good things, including: sequester atmospheric carbon, producing oxygen, stabilizing hillsides, filtering groundwater, enriching soil, creating planet-cooling shade, providing precious bird and insect and mammal habit, and so on. Trees even soothe the human soul, something we need in our fast-paced, separated-from-nature, technological era more than ever, as screens and smartphones keep us inside, and even heads-down when outside, removed from the natural world which soothes and sustains us.
But in contradiction to all this good that forests do, and have always done, comes the onslaught of The Big Logging Industry Lie: that we must “manage,” meaning “thin” forests with chainsaws and gasoline-powered machines, on a giant scale or else forests will do what forests must do: burn. Because now, the false claims continue, they will burn “catastrophically” and kill us all, and kill themselves too. This is all more nonsense of course, but it’s fear-driven, and fear is powerful and can override logic and science and even rational thought.
These lies are being pushed on the public with powerful corporate public relations campaigns. And repeated and amplified by state and federal agencies whom we want to trust, and which provide some beneficial services, too. But our trust is being abused and betrayed.
The forest “thinning” mantra directly contradicts our society’s established “we need more trees” belief. Yet too many people believe this new, contradictory “chainsaw management” narrative. (Dig deep enough and you’ll find we all have contradictory beliefs. Such is the nature of beliefs.)
So which is it, A or B?:
A) Trees are precious natural resources and we need more to sequester carbon in our climate crisis?; or
B) Forests today, because of past wildfire suppression practices, are now dangerously “overgrown” and “unhealthy,” so we must cut down millions of trees to “restore” forest health and prevent “catastrophic” wildfires.
(ANTI-PROPAGANDA GUARDRAIL: it’s not B, it’s A.)
My hope is by seeing A and B together, you might question B, even though you’ve heard it in the media lately, and maybe even wondered about it. The Big Logging Lie is being sold to the public, and many sane people (on both sides) have bought in to it.
George Wuerthner addresses the Big Logging Lie in a March 3, 2023 article, “Blue Mountains Don’t Need Active Management,” (in Oregon.), published in The Wildlife News: https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2023/03/03/blue-mountains-dont-need-active-forest-management/
EXCERPTS (I hope these entice you into reading Wuerthner’s article, a quick, valuable read):
We are witnessing higher mortality from natural processes primarily due to warming temperatures and significant drought. The on-going drought across the West is the most severe in 1200 years. Extreme drought drives all other mortality factors. It makes some trees more vulnerable to insects or disease and it is absolutely the reason we are seeing large wildfires.
The continued myth that fire suppression is causing wildfires ignores the overriding role of climate/weather in wildfires.
Ironically, proponents of chainsaw medicine never count the trees they kill with machines as a problem, but if the trees die from insects or fire, that is a “loss.” But they fail to acknowledge that “healthy forest ecosystems” require dead wood, snags and other physical biomass in the forest. In essence, logging is strip-mining the forest biological legacy that sustains forest ecosystems.
It is critical to understand that natural evolutionary processes like drought, fire, insects, and other sources of mortality select the most vulnerable trees, leaving behind the individuals who are most adapted to the current climate/weather conditions.
In truth, logging reduces the natural ability to resist environmental variation. Logging creates “unhealthy” forests and degrades forest ecosystems.
READ Wuerthner’s WILDLIFE NEWS March 3, 2023 article, “Blue Mountains Don’t Need Active Management,” : https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2023/03/03/blue-mountains-dont-need-active-forest-management/
READ MORE ABOUT: wildfire.
READ MORE ABOUT: home hardening and defensible space — the effective alternative to ineffective deforestation projects like the one depicted in the illustration below, featuring Cal Fire’s “CalVTP.”
