Forest management approaches promoted as “resilience,” “restoration,” “fuel reduction,” and “forest health” often degrade natural systems an
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:
Over the past few years, many decisionmakers and forest managers have increasingly called for “active management” of natural forests — human intervention via mechanical thinning and other forms of commercial logging and road building — in response to increasing wildfires, beetle outbreaks, and intense storms. Many activists oppose these methods, saying they do more harm than good. For instance, actions that seek to suppress naturally occurring wildfires may make those fires more intense when they happen.
But active management activities have scaled up in response to economic drivers, misinformation on natural disturbance processes, and more climate-driven extreme events that trigger large and fast-moving fires.
We have published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and books on the impacts of active management on natural disturbance processes in forests. As active management begins to take on an even bigger role, conservation groups frequently call upon us to submit testimony, legal declarations, and science support. Meanwhile our key findings are often neglected by well-intended researchers who promote widespread active management but do not fully acknowledge the dramatic and often cumulative ecosystem consequences.
The active management activities we are most concerned about include:
Clearcut logging of live and dead patches of trees, especially over large areas.
Mechanical thinning of large trees via commercial removal.
Too-frequent burning of forest understories, especially of logging slash in dense piles that cook soil horizons and encourage weeds.
Post-disturbance logging that removes biological legacies (e.g., large live and dead trees) and damages natural processes and soils.
Construction of major road networks that alter forest-hydrological connections, some of which are supposed to act as firebreaks.
Active management impacts depend on the intensity of removals, frequency and duration of impacts, and scale (site, landscape, ecoregion, biome) that often combine with the natural disturbance background in exceeding disturbance thresholds that degrade ecological integrity. Such practices have been widely accepted on at least three continents — North America, Australia, and Europe — where our research has been exposing severe impacts.
As we’ve shown in our recent studies, scaling up these types of activities comes with severe costs to natural ecosystems. The impacts of active management can even approach the effects of deforestation as they ramp up in application and intensity.
In the United States, this is especially apparent in relation to the recent executive orders that President Donald Trump announced under the rubric of a national timber emergency, cloaked in wildfire prevention. Even some progressive states, like California, have taken drastic measures to log vast areas with minimal environmental reviews in response to wildfires. Canada and European nations also have been driving up the active management rhetoric.
We used a series of case studies that demonstrated substantial negative and prolonged impacts of active management on a broad suite of ecological integrity indicators (including soil integrity, species richness, forest intactness, and carbon stocks) relative to more natural areas (reference sites). Active management, we found, is particularly consequential in high conservation value forests such as old-growth forests, intact watersheds, and complex early seral forests (“snag forests”) that follow severe natural disturbances but are rich in biodiversity. Such forests collectively play a pivotal role in maintaining ecological integrity while serving as natural climate solutions.
