Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions

Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions

SeattlePI.com

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community.

States in the U.S. West and the federal government each year thin thousands of acres of dense timber and carve broad swaths through the forest near remote communities, all designed to slow the spread of massive wildfires.

The projects aim to return overgrown forests to the way they were more than a century ago, before land managers began reflexively extinguishing every wildfire as soon as possible.

Efforts now include using fire to fight fire, with fires deliberately set in the cooler, wetter months to burn out dangerous fuels, or backfires set in the path of encroaching wildfires. Forest managers credit such burns with helping protect the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park.

While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread.

The argument is fueling an already passionate debate.

It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling scientific studies and has fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology.

The debate came to a head over this year's giant Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon.

“Not only did tens of thousands of acres of recent thinning, fuel breaks, and other forest management fail to stop or slow the fire’s rapid spread, but ... the fire often moved fastest through such areas,” Los Padres ForestWatch, a California-based nonprofit, said in an analysis, joined by...

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