Public health malpractice in Summit County
UPHE’s founder and board president, Dr. Brian Moench, had a guest editorial in the Park Record on the harm being inflicted upon Summit County residents by the Forest Service’s thinning practices. The editorial is below:
Several years ago Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment worked with Summit County Health Department to ban fireplaces in new home construction. We worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help 32 Summit County families using wood stoves to exchange them for cleaner heat sources, to the benefit of the entire community. But that achievement in cleaner air for Summit County is now being smothered by U.S. Forest Service contractors.
The Forest Service and their political allies are telling a story that Western forests are being consumed by wildfire because they are “overgrown and unhealthy.” They claim 50 million acres need “thinning therapy,” and with $1.8 billion in federal money from the Inflation Reduction Act they are unleashing that “therapy” with bulldozers, chain saws, and drip torches across eight Western states. It is public health malpractice, climate malpractice, forestry malpractice, and ineffective in preventing home fires.
What’s happening in Summit County is typical. Thousands of “slash piles” of trees and branches are being torched into bonfires, euphemistically called “prescribed” burns. Calling intentional fires “prescribed” hardly means they are therapeutic. There is no such thing as “good fire” for any of your favorite organs: heart, lungs, blood vessels, brain, liver, or kidneys. There is no safe level of air pollution, and for multiple reasons wood smoke is the most toxic type of air pollution the average person ever inhales, whether it comes from a fireplace, wildfire, or prescribed burn.
Numerous independent experts, both in this country and abroad, have exposed the Forest Service’s “overgrown, tinderbox forest” narrative as mythology. Due to decades of logging, American forests now have far less biomass than they would have if managed by mother nature. The most widely cited forest ecologist in the world, Dr. David Lindenmayer, author of 48 books on forests, says, “logged forests always burn at greater severity than intact forests.” The climate crisis is the main driver of Western forests’ new vulnerability, not tree density or “excessive fuels.” Fire frequency and intensity are directly related to drought, earlier snow melt, high temperature, and wind. In fact, dense tree stands resist fire, acting as wind breaks, retaining moisture, and decreasing forest temperatures.
Thinning the forest to “restore” forest health is no more appropriate than thinning your lungs to improve breathing. The paradigm that trees compete against each other for survival is an anachronism. Trees help each other survive stresses by sharing resources like water and nutrients through underground “mycorrhizal networks,” (mazes of communal roots, fungi, and bacteria). Thinning amputates these networks leaving remaining trees more vulnerable to disease, pest attack, and drought, shortening their life span.
Logging requires road building and skid trails, leaving lasting ecosystem damage: soil compaction, surface erosion, degraded water quality, reduced biodiversity, spread of invasive vegetation, and suppression of forest regeneration. Over 85% of forest fires are human caused, and roads increase human presence in the forest leading to more fires.
Killing trees not only releases carbon, but also sacrifices their irreplaceable role in carbon absorption long into the future. Deforestation is a key accelerant of the climate crisis whether the trees lost are in Utah, California, or the Amazon. Burning the logged biomass only makes it worse, releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere immediately. Our hope for avoiding climate catastrophe rests on the carbon equation of this decade, not decades from now when trees cut down could be replaced with regrowth.
Natural fire is usually mixed intensity and plays a role in forest health not duplicated by prescribed burns. The assumption that prescribed burns can replace intense wildfire pollution 1 for 1 is another fiction. In fact, most research shows prescribed burns merely add to the total burn pollution. The chance that a wildfire will even encounter an area within 20 years after treatment could be as low as 2%. Low intensity burns, like prescribed burns, produce three to four times the particulate pollution, and more dioxins, than an equal amount of biomass burned at high intensity. In some parts of the country prescribed burns are the largest single source of air pollution.
Prescribed burns are conducted when critical snow pack is still in Western mountains. Black carbon particles in smoke land on snow pack, reduce its albedo, warm the snow, accelerate snow pack loss, which accentuates the drought and increases stress on remaining trees. The solar energy absorption of black carbon nanoparticles is the second largest contributor to the climate crisis after CO2. Intact forests play an enormous role in global and regional terrestrial water cycles. Cutting down trees on a large scale for any reason will further decrease rain and snow fall in the West.
Dozens of regional and national environmental groups are calling out the Forest Service for sending our health, climate, and forests up in smoke. Blaming “unhealthy, overgrown forests” is like blaming victims for their own murder. Butchering and setting fire to our forests to save them is not science or common sense — it’s nonsense.