Help end logging of mature and old forests across the nation!

Please add your voice in calling for an end to logging of mature and old forests in National Forests across the nation!

The Biden Administration has directed the Forest Service to develop policies that prioritize protecting mature and old forests across the nation as part of a natural climate solution.

The Forest Service needs to hear from you! Let the Forest Service know that they should implement strong, durable protections that put an end to logging in mature and old forests.

You can submit your comments by Friday Feb. 2nd at 9pm PST to the Forest Service here:
https://cara.fs2c.usda.gov/Public//CommentInput?Project=65356&emci=fb1457d8-f6be-ee11-b660-002248223197&emdi=11b4c4b0-b2bf-ee11-b660-002248223197&ceid=14785095

Given the climate and biodiversity crises we are currently facing, it is urgent that we preserve the remaining mature and old forests on federal public lands nationwide. Mature and old forests store vast amounts of carbon, and are crucial in the fight against climate change. They are also important for biodiversity, clean water, and mitigating the negative effects of climate change on forest and stream ecosystems. 

Please help us send a clear message to the Forest Service that logging should be halted in mature and old forests across the nation. We are also calling for an immediate moratorium on all logging in mature and old forests, while the rule-making process goes forward. 

It is long past time for a paradigm shift away from the widespread and heavy handed resource extraction that has long been the focus of agencies managing public lands.

A deeper dive on preserving mature and old forests–  addressing fire in the age of climate change:

For too long, the Forest Service has touted logging as restoration and as necessary for public safety. It’s time for the Forest Service to distinguish rhetoric from reality: logging is not restoration. Amid the push from the timber industry and the Forest Service to increase logging, particularly logging of large trees and in mature and old forests, it is crucial for the public and decision makers to recognize the discrepancy between what the Forest Service is calling restoration and what is, all too often, actually happening on the ground. Repeatedly, BMBP and others have found very concerning and heavy logging in sales that were presented to the public as necessary for restoration and safety. You can see example photos of the Forest Service’s widespread heavy logging here. 

Halting logging of forests, especially mature and old forests, is crucial for storing carbon across our region and at a global scale. Large wildfires consume less than 2% of tree carbon (Harmon et al. 2022 ). Logging, including thinning, releases far more carbon over an equivalent area (Bartowitz et al. 2022 ). 

Logging to suppress fire is an outdated, misguided strategy. Logging in the backcountry does not keep communities safe. The most effective way to keep homes and people safe is to focus on work directly adjacent to homes. 

Protecting forests from logging and human development does not lead to increased risk or severity of fire. In fact, logging large trees makes forests more flammable. Large trees and mature and old forests are more resilient to fire, and protected forests generally burn at lower severity levels than unprotected forests (Bradley et al. 2016). 

In addition, heavily managed forests such as plantations and those that have experienced industrial logging practices tend to burn at higher severity. For example, Zald and Dunn (2018) found that intensively managed forests tended to increase fire severity in plantation stands in climate-driven severe fire events. In their study in California, Levine et al. (2022) found that the odds of high-severity fires on private industrial lands were approximately 1.8 times greater compared to public lands.

Large intense wildfires are climate-driven. Wind, drought, and heat are the primary drivers of fire severity and behavior in climate-driven fires—not previous “fuels reduction.” In addition, there is only a statistically small probability that a “treated” (logged) area will encounter a wildfire within the window of time that the “treatment” is considered effective. “Fuels treatments” are only effective within a ~20-year timeframe, before shrubs and saplings begin to grow back – and they often regrow in more dense and brushy forests than were present before logging occurred. For example, Rhodes and Baker (2008) found that: “[u]sing extensive fire records for western US Forest Service lands, we estimate fuel treatments have a mean probability of 2.0-7.9% of encountering moderate-or high-severity fire during an assumed 20-year period of reduced fuels.”

The short-term and temporary nature of the perceived fuels reduction benefits from most projects are not likely to result in meaningful changes to fire intensity, size, or severity. Furthermore, re-entering forests to repeatedly and heavily log and then burn them requires a huge road infrastructure, which is incredibly damaging to water quality and wildlife. In addition, areas with more roads are more likely to experience human-caused fire ignitions. Human-caused fire starts are the majority of fire starts in many areas.

The cumulative impacts of such large scale, repeated logging would cause untold degradation or destruction of wildlife and stream habitats, water quality, old and mature forests, carbon storage, and more. It would also create unnaturally open, dry, and hot conditions in many forests– very likely exacerbating fire risk rather than lessening it.