With hot and dry conditions across much of the West, the Fourth of July weekend carries the risk of an explosive start to wildfire season, experts warn.
From Lake Tahoe to Castle Rock, Colorado, some officials are extinguishing traditional firework shows in favor of drone light displays to celebrate Independence Day. But other communities in California, Nevada and Arizona are citing wet winters and spring months for the return of live fireworks shows.
Another wave ofwildfire smokehas drifted into the US, dimming blue summer skies and igniting troubling concerns regarding the increasing frequency of fires, and what they have to do withclimate change.
More than 100 million people are under air quality alerts from Wisconsin to Vermont and down to North Carolina as smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to waft south, though conditions areexpected to improve slowly into the holiday weekend.
Afew weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma. The smoke felt much like these past years of extreme weather in the South have—heavy, muddling, inescapable.
This week, more wildfire smoke washed over Charlottesville and much of the South. Meanwhile, communities wilted under a heat wave, rattled from thunder, and flooded with rain. Towns in central Arkansas hit by severe thunderstorms last weekend were facing excessive heat advisories and worse-than-normal air quality by the end of this week. Last Monday, I watched hail batter my car. Within an hour, the sun was back out and I was picking peaches in my friends’ garden, pulling off my sweatshirt because the heat had become so fierce.
Friends in Texas who were facing deadly cold earlier this year are now seeking respite from temperatures that threaten to hit 115 degrees. In some Texas cities, the heat index has surpassed 125 degrees, dangerously high for the elderly, the unhoused, and people who have conditions like asthma. Several people have died from the heat, including Tina Perritt, a woman in Louisiana who spent days without power.
Southern summers have always been hot and humid. But the swings from one extreme to the next—drought to torrential rain, record-breaking cold to sweltering heat, storm to sun—have lately begun to feel apocalyptic. Summer is our season, the South at its best. But this new reality has taken the best parts of southern summers and made them unbearable.
The extremities feed into one another: The heat breeds severe thunderstorms in some parts of the country, and lights forests on fire in others; homes and cars are damaged, power is knocked out, and people are stranded. Power has become a particular issue in Texas, where the grid has been stretched past its limits by cold snaps over the past several winters as well as the current heat wave; right now, the saving grace is additional solar power from the beating sun, aided by wind power. And when the lights go out or the pipes burst, families are left to deal with the continued and increasing heat with no air conditioner, perhaps no water.
Related video: Heat And Humidity To Make For Dangerous Weekend In South (The Weather Channel)
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Heat And Humidity To Make For Dangerous Weekend In SouthUnmute
Growing up in Arkansas, I came to expect power outages during specific seasons: winter ice storms, March tornado warnings. These days, the disasters—because what else can they be called?—feel more frequent, less familiar. A tornado hit my parents’ house in October a few years ago. Earlier this week, some friends and I tried to escape the heat by floating the Rivanna River, and spent three hours drifting through wildfire haze, trying not to acknowledge that in escaping one hazard we’d exposed ourselves to another.
Climate change amplifies these disasters, and economic precarity exacerbates their impacts for many, especially the unhoused, the elderly, the incarcerated. Connie Edmonson, a 78-year-old woman in rural Everton, Arkansas, recently missed an electricity payment for her mobile home because she was paying medical bills for her heart and breathing problems. The heat had put her in danger before—she’s had several heat strokes, and earlier this year, she passed out while she was mowing her lawn. A neighbor had to help her up and back inside (and finish the mowing). If it hadn’t been for Legal Aid and her doctor working together to persuade her electricity provider to turn the power back on before temperatures escalated again this week, she said, “I don’t think I would have made it.”
The South is a region rutted with inequities, and every time the pendulum of climate change swings from extreme heat to extreme cold, it deepens the grooves. Laborers are especially vulnerable. The South’s agricultural economy, propped up for centuries by enslaved Black workers, now relies on farmworkers—and because of lobbying by segregationist southern lawmakers, those workers are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act. No federal regulations protect farmworkers—who are mostly noncitizen immigrants from Latin America, commonly live under the poverty line, and have few legal rights—from extreme heat. Farmworkers die from heat-related injuries at 20 times the rate of other laborers. A 2020 study estimated that the number of days farmworkers labor in extreme heat will double by mid-century. The state of Texas just rescinded rules requiring water breaks for construction workers, exposing them to greater risk of dehydration and heat stroke.
For workers, the growing heat is impossible to ignore. Carlos Herrera Fabian is a 22-year-old who grew up in a farmworker family that moved up and down the East Coast, from Florida to Maine, picking seasonal crops. “Back then, you could say that the heat was tolerable,” he said. “Now it’s just scorching. You can feel your eyes burning from the sweat dripping down.” Fabian’s 72-year-old grandfather, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, still works in the Florida fields, and comes home looking like he’s just taken a shower, with sweat streaming down his body. Farmworkers generally wear long-sleeve shirts and pants to protect themselves from sun and pesticides, exacerbating the effects of the heat. And they don’t get paid when extreme thunderstorms keep people out of the fields, or drought ruins crops.
Federal—and state—labor laws would help protect against these conditions. So would better infrastructure: power grids, tree canopies, cooling shelters, readily available water. The inequities manifest in cities too. Low-income, redlined neighborhoods have more concrete and fewer trees—and, as a result, summer temperatures up to 20 degrees higher—than wealthier, whiter ones.
This is how it’s going to be. Things will get hotter, storms will get worse, wildfire smoke will get more common, cold snaps will persist. All the while, the ruts of inequity will be worn deeper, the same people time and time again placed on the front lines of catastrophe. Power grids will continue to fail, especially in states where the government is reticent to fund infrastructure even for the wealthy and white, let alone for the poor, the rural, the people of color. The layering haze-on-hail-on-heat sometimes weighs so heavy that it can feel hopeless, like southern summers will never be southern summers again. And they won’t. But together we will try to stymie the damage.
A man has been disqualified from keeping dogs and chickens for a year after being convicted of an animal welfare offence.
Sonny-Joe Barney, aged 20, pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to a chicken by releasing dogs on it.
As reported, police investigating hare coursing were shown evidence of a dog being set on a chicken. The chicken was killed in the incident, Dorset Police’s rural crime team said.
This incident took place in a field on July 7 last year.
Barney, whose address was given as Summer Fields, Verwood, appeared before Poole Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, June 27, to be sentenced.
The defendant received a disqualification order for 12 months, which stated he must not transport or arrange transport, own, keep or take part in keeping dogs or chickens.
He also received a 12-month community order which included a requirement to take part…
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Agencies to test more mammals for spread of avian influenza
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Although it primarily affects birds, Alaska has already had several confirmed cases of the highly pathogenic strain of avian flu in mammals.
The contaminated animals include a black bear cub in Glacier Bay National Park, a brown bear cub in Kodiak and three red foxes in various parts of the state.
Department of Fish and Game Veterinarian Kimberlee Beckmen said even though the animals came from different areas, they all had something in common — they likely ate infected birds.
“We started looking at red foxes right after there was that first report of some fox kits out east that it had been detected in,” Beckmen said. “And we realized that we really should be looking at mammals that scavenge birds, and as soon as we started looking, we found it.”
Beckmen said Fish and Game plans to do a lot more testing for the virus on live animals like bears and wolves this summer while biologists are in the field.
Health officials say there has been no evidence of mammal-to-mammal transmission, but there is concern the virus could be changing — possibly becoming a threat to humans.
Mandy Keogh of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration is Alaska’s Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator.
“We have a concern for it in marine mammals — in any mammal — because they are more closely related to us,” Keogh said. “So any time you have a pathogen that goes from one species to a mammal, there’s a potential that it could carry over into humans or other mammals.”
Keogh said there have been no confirmed cases of marine mammals in Alaska with the highly pathogenic virus, but large die-offs of sea lions in South America as well as infected seals on America’s Atlantic Coast are prompting more testing here. She said it’s especially important to try and conserve Alaska’s marine mammal populations.
“Because it is an important subsistence source for various communities and Native Alaskans throughout the state,” Keogh said. “So that’s added concern that we don’t necessarily have in other parts of the country.”
Keogh said people who see dead, stranded or entangled marine mammals should call a 24-hour hotline at 877-925-7773. People who see sick or dead birds are encouraged to the Sick or Dead Bird Hotline at 866-527-3358.
A growing body of research highlights the devastating effects of animal agriculture on human health and the environment. Undercover investigator Joe Fassler wrote in the Guardian about how the beef industry is pushing back with far-reaching and misleading campaigns to protect its image and bottom line.
After enrolling in an online training program dubbed the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA), Fassler shared his evidence of how the industry has used influencers as advocates to change the narrative with deceptive marketing tactics, including the use of “misleading — but scientific-sounding — narratives” about the beef industry’s alleged sustainability.
What is happening?
Created by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, an industry lobby group, the MBA program teaches beef advocates how to engage online and offline with consumers using industry-friendly talking points on the role of beef in a “healthy” diet and how farmers and ranchers raise beef “sustainably,” wrote Fassler.
Beef industry advocates rely on headline-grabbing statements, cherry-picked facts, and industry-funded research to alter the narrative, according to the article.
Such claims “read more like advertising than science,” wrote Vasile Stănescu, a Mercer University professor who wrote a peer-reviewed book chapter on such disinformation campaigns.
Much of the messaging contradicts the beliefs of most experts, and some include myths and unfounded arguments against reducing meat consumption and investing in alternative proteins, as Fassler covered in another article.
Why are these tactics concerning?
In 2006, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization published Livestock’s Long Shadow, a report that outlined animal agriculture’s significant contribution to creating planet-warming gases, putting the meat industry firmly in the spotlight.
The beef industry has mounted a counteroffensive, attempting to kill the negative press with blog posts, videos, ads, social media campaigns, and trained influencers.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor of environmental studies at NYU, explained, “The industry has been borrowing tactics from the fossil fuel playbook … companies have been downplaying the industry’s environmental footprint and undermining climate policy.”
Jacquet also noted the common practice of pressuring lawmakers to stop necessary regulations and attempting to soften the desire for change among consumers.
What’s being done about this misinformation campaign?
Commercial production of livestock and dairy is one of the largest contributors of heat-trapping gases, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Unsustainable meat production decreases the quality of our soil, water, and air, while forests are cleared to make room for more pasture.
In addition to supporting and advocating for positive changes in legislation and beef production practices, paying critical attention to messaging and its sources can help determine what is true and what is a load of bull.
Join our free newsletter for cool news and actionable info that makes it easy to help yourself while helping the planet.
NOAA released a reward poster seeking information about a possible federal crime committed against herds of California sea lions near Hayden Island in April.NOAA
Federal authorities are stillseeking information about the boatercapturedon videorepeatedly aiming a fishing vessel toward large groups of sea lions in the Columbia River in April.
Michael Milstein, public affairs officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said there was “no progress to report as of yet” in the case, which shocked onlookers because of the brazen targeting of the protected sea lions.
“We hope that the public can help by sharing theReward posteras widely as possible,” Milstein said. The agency isoffering up to $20,000for information.
Sea lion populations have increased, leading to tensions between the protected mammals and people who fish…
Joe Biden46th and current president of the United States
On Earth Day last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting and restoring mature and old-growth forests on federal lands across the country — one that many environmentaliststook as a sign that the administration could move to halt logging of ancient trees that help slow the effects of climate change.
The order acknowledged the “irreplaceable role” forests play in sequestering planet-warming greenhouse gasses and tasked the nation’s two largest federal land managers, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, with inventorying the nation’s remaining carbon-rich forests and then crafting rules to better conserve them in the face of mounting climate change impacts.
“Old-growth” forests, sometimes referred to as primary forests, are typically defined as those at least 150 years old and largely undisturbed by human activity, whereas “mature” forests are decades old but haven’t reached the old-growth stage. Together, these ecosystems form a key natural climate solution.
Early in his tenure, Biden found himself on shakyground with green groups over the administration’s lack of commitment to protect these carbon hotspots. The executive order reinvigorated environmentalists and forest advocates.
But a little more than a year later, some of those same forest experts have soured. They say the Forest Service ― an agency within the Department of Agriculture established in 1905 primarily to ensure a steady supply of timber — isn’t taking the matter seriously enough, leaving the door open for the timber industry to keep chopping down mature and old-growth forests.
Steve Pedery, conservation director at environmental organization Oregon Wild, said Biden’s order was a big deal and challenged the Forest Service to reinvent itself — from an agency that largely prioritizes timber production to one that manages forested lands for carbon storage, wildlife and clean water, with timber as a byproduct. But he says it is clear the Forest Service is dragging its feet on proposing a rule, nevermind one that confronts the ongoing threat of logging to older forests. He compared what the agency has done so far to a child being told to clean their room and instead stuffing all their belongings in a drawer and folding their arms.
“We are trying desperately to make sure the White House stays involved,” he said. “I think if this gets delegated down in a time where it’s perfectly reasonable the administration has its focus on a lot of other things, we’ll see the Forest Service either run out the clock on it or come up with something that says, ‘Logging is the answer. What was the question?’”
It is the latest example of what Pedery and others see as an entrenched, pro-logging mindset within the Forest Service — and the Biden administration’s hesitance to push the agency to abandon its old ways, despite publicly proclaiming its support for protecting mature and old-growth forests. Part of the problem, they argue, is the agency’s position that logging such forests is key to protecting them from wildfires, which are growing increasingly devastating as climate change fuels heat waves and drought.
After decades of intensive logging, few primary forests remain in the continental United States. Those that do are almost exclusively on federal lands, mostly in the West. The recent federal inventory, mandated by Biden’s executive order and released in April, found there are approximately 32.7 million acres of old-growth and 80.1 million acres of mature forest across the federal estate — a combined area slightly larger than California. About 92 million of those are on Forest Service land.
More than 130 scientists, including Mike Dombeck, chief of the Forest Service in Bill Clinton’s administration, have called on Biden to end old-growth logging on public lands.
“Older forests provide the most above-ground carbon storage potential on Earth, with mature forests and larger trees driving most accumulation of forest carbon in the critical next few decades,” they wrote in a letter to Biden the day before he signed the executive order. “Left vulnerable to logging, though, they cannot fulfill these vital functions.”
‘Loath To Mention The Word Logging’
In recent months, BLM and the Forest Service each took a step toward fulfilling the White House directive — actions that green groups widely celebrated as long-overdue moves toward balancing conservation with drilling, mining, logging and other developmenton public lands.
In March, the BLM unveiled a draft rule that seeks to place conservation “on equal footing” with energy development and other traditional uses, including through issuing “conservation leases” to promote land protection and ecosystem restoration. In announcing the agency’s action, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that “for too long, land management planning has been dominated by extractive industries.”
The Forest Service took a more modest action, publishing an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, or ANPR, in April that seeks public input on how the agency should “adapt current policies to protect, conserve, and manage national forests and grasslands for climate resilience.” An ANPR is a preliminary step before an agency decides whether to move forward with a proposed rule.
That notice stresses the importance of mature and old-growth trees, including their resilience to climate change and their “role in contributing to nature-based climate solutions by storing large amounts of carbon and increasing biodiversity.” It also softly confronts past agency missteps, including “non-climate informed timber harvest” and decades of aggressive fire suppression that left many forests choked with excessive fuels.
But it stopped short of recognizing logging as an ongoing threat to primary forests or proposing to safeguard ancient trees from harvest. Instead, the document focuses on other threats to forest ecosystems, including wildfire and disease outbreaks, and promotes timber harvesting as a tool to “improve stand health and resilience” amid climate effects and other stressors.
“Logging” does not appear once in the agency’s ANPR. Similarly, the only mention of logging in Biden’s executive order is a section on halting deforestation abroad. It also does not specifically call for protecting old trees from being felled at home.
Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service in the Clinton administration, has closely monitored the agency’s actions in the wake of Biden’s executive order on protecting mature and old-growth forests. He has grown increasingly disappointed with its resistance to change.
“I have found it unsettling but not surprising that the Forest Service has been loath to mention the word ‘logging,’” said Furnish, who has become an outspoken critic of his former agency’s management approach since retiring in 2002. “Forest Service logging is one of the acknowledged threats to mature and old-growth forest on national lands. We’ve challenged them several times about being more forthcoming and candid, and they just brush it off. They just will not do it.”
“The Forest Service has kind of blithely allowed local national forest units to just keep on cutting mature and old-growth forests as if the executive order did not exist,” he added.
There are many actions the Forest Service could have taken in the year since Biden’s executive order to show it was serious about protecting these forests from a threat it has the most control over, Furnish said, from suspending all timber sales that propose harvesting mature and old-growth trees to stipulating that all such projects must be reviewed and approved by Forest Service Chief Randy Moore.
“They’ve done nothing of the kind,” he said.
One exception is the so-called “Flat Country” project, in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, which would have allowed for about 2,000 acres of mature and old-growth Douglas fir and western hemlock to be cut down. In January, the Forest Service withdrew its decision to greenlight the controversial project, noting at the time that “some parts of it may be incongruent with recent directives and climate-related plans concerning conservation of mature and old-growth forests and carbon stewardship.” The withdrawal came on the heels of a pressure campaign from environmental groups that included protesters occupying the forest in an attempt to block the project from moving ahead.
The Biden administration also reversed a Trump-era rule that lifted Clinton-era logging restrictions across 9 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.
Meanwhile, many other mature and old-growth logging projects and timber sales have moved forward under Biden’s watch.
Some forest ecologists and conservationists view the situation not so much as a disconnect between the White House and the Forest Service, but between the administration and the growing body of science showing old-growth forests’ resistance to fire and their capacity for storing massive amounts of carbon in trees and soil.
“The Forest Service deserves the criticism. Let’s be clear, they don’t have to propose these giant logging projects,” said Chad Hanson, forest ecologist at the John Muir Project’s Earth Island Institute. “But the Biden administration has the ultimate responsibility to tell the Forest Service to shift direction, to shift away from 20th century logging policies and move into a 21st century approach to our national forests, which would emphasize biodiversity, forest carbon storage, recreation and recreation jobs.”
To date, there is no sign that the White House has made that demand.
“That’s the problem,” Hanson said. “Don’t tell me mature and old-growth forests are important and now let’s do a lot more logging in them.”
Furnish agrees the White House must do more to force the Forest Service’s hand.
“Is the White House … going to tell the Forest Service what to do? Or are they simply going to ask the Forest Service what to do?” Furnish said. “Everything I’ve seen to date implies they are simply asking the Forest Service what to do. And given the Forest Service’s track record, particularly during the Trump administration, it is not surprising that they’re kind of continuing as if nothing has changed, until and unless some subsequent action is taken.”
Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish tours a recent logging project in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021.
Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish tours a recent logging project in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021.
Furnish still talks to current Forest Service officials, and he told HuffPost that he’s heard directly from Chris Swanston, the Forest Service climate adviser and acting director of the agency’s Office of Sustainability and Climate, that the agency’s leadership is less enthusiastic than the White House about the need for a climate resilience rulemaking — and that there is no guarantee the Forest Service will follow through on proposing one.
The Forest Service did not make Swanston available for an interview. In an email statement, USDA spokesperson Larry Moore said “it is premature to speculate on timing for any potential future regulatory actions” as federal law requires the agency to consider all comments submitted during the rulemaking process.
“The Forest Service is responding to the direction in the executive orders and Secretarial Memo with data-informed tools, strategies, policy recommendations, and systems for accountability for fire and climate resilience, climate adaptation, reforestation, ecosystem and watershed restoration, ecosystem services, mature and old growth forests, and carbon stewardship, as well as related investments in community engagement, partnerships, collaboration and equity,” Moore said.
Asked about Furnish’s account of his conversation with Swanston, Moore said it would be “inappropriate for us to comment on third-party conversations and rumors.”
Earlier this month, the Forest Service extended the public comment period on the ANPR from 60 to 90 days. The deadline is now July 20.
Furnish said there doesn’t appear to be any urgency on the Forest Service’s part to get a rule across the finish line, let alone to do so before the end of Biden’s term in office. Not doing so could sink the prospects of a rule ever being put in place.
“I know enough about politics to know that if the Republicans take the White House, this whole thing is going to be buried immediately,” he said.
The White House told HuffPost that federal agencies “are working swiftly ― guided by public input and science ― to restore and conserve America’s forests, including our mature and old-growth forests, and to meet our ambitious climate goals.”
“The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management recently completed two critical first steps in that work: creating a first-ever nationwide definition of what mature and old growth forests are and completing a nationwide inventory,” a spokesperson for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said via email. “The next step is gathering input from the public, Tribal Nations, states, and stakeholders on what policy and management changes should be made to better conserve and restore these forests, including harnessing their potential to help tackle the climate crisis.”
The White House did not comment on whether it has encountered resistance within the Forest Service.
A Model For Change
In the summer of 1991, the Siuslaw National Forest on Oregon’s central coast found itself backed into a corner. For decades, Forest Service managers there had allowed for intensive logging of mature and old-growth trees — vital habitat for the majestic northern spotted owl.
That year, a federal judge in Seattle banned all logging in spotted owl habitat, concluding that the scale of timber harvest under the George H.W. Bush administration threatened to drive the species to extinction. The owl came under federal protection one year earlier when it was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
The court ruling and the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1994 to help protect old-growth trees and threatened wildlife across millions of forested acres in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately brought about a seismic shift in the Siuslaw, which at the time was among the most heavily logged forests in the nation. Management that was focused squarely on the economic value of harvesting giant trees was ultimately replaced with restoration forestry and ecosystem-wide stewardship.
It was Furnish who spearheaded that shift as supervisor of the Siuslaw.
“I took the aim of trying to grow mature and old-growth timber seriously, and I felt that one of the big liabilities we had was the past 40 years of clear-cut logging,” Furnish said. “We very ambitiously set out to thin a lot of the old clear-cut units. And we did so. And they’ve been doing that for the last 30-something years.”
Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock.
Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock.
Furnish was widely ridiculed at the time; however, the benefits proved enormous. The national forest is now richer in mature and old-growth trees. Populations of at-risk species — the northern spotted owl, coho salmon and marbled murrelet — rebounded. And by focusing on thinning unnatural, monoculture tree plantations that were planted after extensive clear-cutting ― a method that involves cutting down all or most of the trees in a selected area — the forest has continued to be a source of timber.
“What we didn’t know at the time is the benefits that would redound to forest carbon and forest sequestration,” Furnish said. “We didn’t think about it, we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t consider it. It was not even in our mind.”
A 2018 report from the Oregon Global Warming Commission found that since the early 1990s, forests in Oregon have transitioned from being a likely net source of carbon to a major sink.
“It’s not surprising that when you stopped the real aggressive clear-cut logging of mature and old-growth forests in the Northwest, they started to grow. They started to grow like crazy and began laying on ton after ton after ton of carbon,” Furnish said. “It served to be a real boon to the climate change issue and illustrative of what forests can do, in a sense, when they are unleashed.”
Forest advocates see the Siuslaw as a model that can and should take hold across the Forest Service.
“Thirty years later, everyone celebrates the Siuslaw as the wonderful win-win — meets its timber quota, doesn’t log old growth, coho salmon are recovering, everyone loves it,” yet the agency has resisted imposing that example on forested land elsewhere, Pedery said.
“It’s still very much ‘we are forest managers, we get out there and engineer the kinds of forests we want.’ And now, all of the money and political direction is to engineer the forests for fire. And that’s what they’re doing,” he said. “This rulemaking, they’re doing it begrudgingly, but definitely there’s a view, I think, from agency leadership that what they’re being asked to do is at odds with that baked-in desire to get out there with some chainsaws and fix some stuff.”
In A Smoky Fog
The White House has repeatedly vowed to do more to combat deforestation and better preserve intact forests as part of its broader climate agenda. Meanwhile, federal agencies are advancing more than 20 logging projects targeting tens of thousands of acres of ancient trees — often under the umbrella of wildfire mitigation and resilience.
Those in the pipeline include the Bitterroot Front Project, in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, where 55,000 acres of trees, including mature and old growth, are on the chopping block. The project is billed as a “fuels reduction, vegetation management, and forest health improvement” effort.
In Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, the Black Ram project would allow for nearly 4,000 acres of western larch, ponderosa pine and western white pine, including some 500 acres of mature and old-growth trees, to be logged. In its decision to approve the project last year, the Forest Service wrote that harvesting the timber is “the most effective strategy in increasing resilience.”
The Upper Cheat River Project, in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest, targets 3,400 acres of mature forest, including stands that are more than 100 years old.
A stump-covered hillside in the Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021. In a report earlier that year, Forest Service scientists concluded that current logging practices in the Black Hills are unsustainable and that the harvest must be cut by 50% or more.
A stump-covered hillside in the Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021. In a report earlier that year, Forest Service scientists concluded that current logging practices in the Black Hills are unsustainable and that the harvest must be cut by 50% or more.
Critics charge that one of the main roadblocks to the Forest Service embracing preservation of remaining ancient trees is its narrow focus on combating wildland fire.
In January 2022, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack and Moore, head of the Forest Service, unveiled a 10-year strategy for confronting America’s wildfire crisis through increased logging, forest “thinning” and prescribed fires to reduce high fuel loads. It calls for “forest health treatments” on an additional 50 million acres of forested land, both public and private, across the nation over the next 10 years — more than double current levels.
More recently, Vilsack and Haaland issued a joint memo to federal agencies outlining goals for managing fire this year. The document highlights several drivers of extreme wildland fire, including climate change, drought, extreme heat and expanding development in areas prone to fire, but makes no mention of fire suppression.
The amount of money spent on fighting fires in the U.S. has exploded in recent decades. And with the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act ― Biden’s signature climate law ― Congress injected a combined $5 billion into reducing the risk of wildfire.
With that money now in hand, the Forest Service is under intense pressure to deliver, Furnish said.
“I almost think they are viewing the executive order as a problem that’s getting in the way of their fire response, as opposed to an opportunity to really consider recasting the future of the agency around climate change, carbon storage, mature and old-growth forests and some of those values,” he said. “I sense that the Forest Service sees these goals of fire risk reduction and responding proactively to the executive order as mutually exclusive. I disagree with that premise entirely.”
In response to HuffPost’s inquiry, which included a question about whether the Forest Service views fire as a bigger threat to mature forests than logging, Moore pointed to an NPR story about how the recent fires in California killed nearly one-fifth of remaining giant sequoias.
“The increased risk of carbon loss through natural and human-caused disturbances, such as wildfires and insect epidemics, can jeopardize carbon storage and other ecosystem services,” he said. “For this reason, the USDA Forest Service understands that wildfire and other climate-related stressors are a chief threat to old-growth and mature stands on national forests and grasslands.”
Furnish, Hanson and Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at forest advocacy group Wild Heritage, accuse the agency of cherry-picking science that supports increased logging.
The ANPR “did not go far enough in stating the irreplaceable biodiversity and carbon values of [mature and old growth], did not cite the importance of carbon accumulation rates that increase with tree sizes, nor the outsized role of large tree and older forests as carbon reservoirs that represents best available science,” DellaSala wrote in draft comments to the agency, which he shared with HuffPost.
Hanson highlighted research that shows harvesting mature trees in an effort to save them from fire actuallyemits roughly three times more carbon per acre than wildfire alone and that thinning and other fuel reduction activities can at times increasefire severity by altering a forest’s microclimate.
Pine trees remain blackened in an area of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico after a fire in April 2022.
Pine trees remain blackened in an area of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico after a fire in April 2022.
Furnish acknowledges that wildfire is a complex threat. He doesn’t see the solution as black or white. Thinning of smaller trees, especially when followed by prescribed fire, is widely embraced as a proven tool for reducing fuel loads and preventing severe wildfire. But he said prevailing Forest Service dogma is that they view any prohibition on logging primary forests as a fundamental hurdle to reducing wildfire risk.
“I simply don’t think they see a way through if they don’t have free and ready access to chainsaws cutting down a lot of mature and old-growth trees to reduce the density of a lot of these stands,” he said.
In 2021, Furnish toured an area of the Black Hills where loggers were allowed to conduct “overstory removal” — cutting down nearly every mature tree — across about 3,000 acres that was heavily thinned 15 years ago to mitigate an infestation of mountain pine beetles. Rob Hoelscher, district ranger for the Forest Service’s Hell Canyon District, told the Hill City Prevailer newspaper in South Dakota that harvesting the older trees was necessary to provide younger trees the space and sunshine to thrive.
Furnish called the logging project “deplorable” and condemned the Forest Service’s justification.
“To me it is patently obvious that field managers — from forest supervisors, rangers, foresters on down — they simply don’t get climate change, forest carbon, mature and old growth,” he said. “Any evidence that the Forest Service is taking that seriously on the ground is completely lacking.”
The heat wave scorching much of the U.S., along with dangerously poor air quality from wildfire smoke, is giving Americans a preview of the compound climate disasters that experts fear will become increasingly common as the planet warms.
Why it matters: Extreme heat and hazardous air quality are acute public health threats, and the heat has already proven deadly.
June is likely to be the world’s hottest such month on record by a large margin, leading into July, which tends to be the planet’s hottest month overall.
Zoom in: Since early May, the overall weather pattern across North America has been unusual, with hallmarks of a warming climate.
A large and powerful heat dome has dominated Canada’s atmosphere during that time.
A key driver of Canada’s wildfires has been sinking, drying and warming air; heat and dry weather jump-started the wildfire season in early May, even in areas usually covered in snow at that time of year.
Greg Carbin, a senior NWS meteorologist, said Canada’s weather patterns and the wildfires it has helped stoke, are the most unusual part of North America’s recent conditions.
And the stuck or “blocked” weather pattern over Canada is connected to another heat dome fanning extreme heat in Texas and Mexico, now spreading out across the South and Southwest.
Between the lines: There has been a stubborn area of low pressure aloft across the Northeast, which has pulled wildfire smoke south and eastward via its counterclockwise circulation of air.
And over Mexico and Texas, an unusually powerful heat dome is only just now weakening, after shattering all-time heat records.
For example, San Angelo, Texas broke or tied its all-time high temperature record on five separate occasions from June 19 to June 26, per NWS meteorologist Victor Murphy. The previous record had stood for 120 years.
“Climate change makes U.S. heat waves about 5°F warmer” than they would be in a preindustrial world, Michael Wehner, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told Axios via email.
The intrigue: The scale and scope of Canada’s wildfires are staggering, and they in turn are likely to worsen climate change by emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases, in what is known as a positive feedback loop.
Mike Flannigan, a veteran wildfire researcher at Thompson Rivers University, said a typical wildfire season in Canada consumes an area about the size of Massachusetts.
This year, however, has seen the most acreage burned in any wildfire season since reliable records began in 1959. That has happened prior to July, typically Canada’s most active wildfire month.
Threat level: Many of Canada’s wildfires are in the boreal forests ringing the Arctic. Peatlands are also are burning, which is worrisome, since they are a major carbon sink that becomes a climate change contributor when burned.
Flannigan said some of the blazes in these ecosystems may last through the winter by smoldering in the soils, only to emerge next spring or summer.
Such “zombie fires,” as they are called, are a hallmark of the new fire regime in the Far North.
He said his own research over the past three decades may have underestimated the pace of change, given what he is seeing this season.
The bottom line: “A warmer world means more fire for Canada,” Flannigan said. This means more smoke is ahead for the U.S., not just this season, but in the near future too.
“Fire is a multi-faceted issue that will need a multipronged approach. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no techno-fix. Drones or artificial intelligence isn’t going to make this problem go away,” Flannigan said.
CNN
Related video: Heat And Humidity To Make For Dangerous Weekend In South (The Weather Channel)
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