This post and video were inspired by a Facebook post from our local congressman, Doug LaMalfa, in regards to the Forest Service reforming the 2001 ‘Roadless Rule’, which placed large contiguous areas which were still unroaded in 1979 into a protected status which prevents future roadbuilding in these areas.
My reply:
Rep. LaMalfa claims “The result (of the 2001 Roadless Rule) was more overgrown forests, more catastrophic wildfires, and fewer jobs in rural counties that rely on active forest work to sustain their economies.” Most of these claims are difficult to substantiate.
Most of the areas in Northern California which are classified as ‘Roadless’ are that way for a reason. Most of them were too steep, lacked large timber, or were otherwise not worth the cost and effort it would have taken to develop access to them during the heyday of big logging in the 1950s-1980s.
There is no proof that a lack of roads has made these places more susceptible to high-severity fires. Active forest management CAN reduce fire hazards, but in general, heavily managed lands have burned as (or more) severely than unmanaged lands during the past decade of megafires (see this article from UC, Davis fire researcher, Brandon Collins).
Take a look at the ROADED areas of our Northern California forests. Did a history of road building and active management reduce the catastrophic impacts on timberlands around Chester during the Dixie Fire? No.
And during the Bear Fire, the roadless areas of the Middle Fork Feather River actually fared much better than the industrial timberlands on the ridges above.
The Cub Creek Roadless Area, in Deer Creek, in Tehama, County, California, burned in a lightning-caused wildfire in 2008. The fire had a mixed severity. Areas which had been logged around the periphery of the roadless area in the previous 20 years, and then replanted as tree farms, had higher burn severities than the areas which had not been managed at all.
I’m not saying that roadless areas shouldn’t be managed. They should be. But in a lot of cases, that management should be done with fire, not with machines and logging.
We don’t need new haul roads, landings, and skid trails to re-introduce fire into these areas. Prescribed fire creates jobs, too.
Logging or thinning steep ground is difficult, expensive, and not guaranteed to change the outcomes when large fires burn. It is really difficult to remove trees from a thick, neglected forest without damaging and killing a lot of the trees you want to leave behind. And absent using fire, cleaning up slash on steep ground (or even relatively flat ground) is expensive, and can cause a lot of ground disturbance. In general, using logging to reduce fire hazards is only doing half the job. Unless we use fire to reduce slash after logging, and start reintroducing fire to maintain low fuels in thinned areas, we’ll continue to see major fire losses in both logged and unlogged forests.
And when it comes to the practicality of taking care of more roads, the Forest Service has a multi-billion dollar backlog for basic maintenance of their existing road systems. They can’t even accomplish the basics of clearing down logs off of the existing roads, or clearing culverts before or during storms.
In my opinion, creating new roads in the most rugged portions of our public lands should not be a priority, especially not in the name of fire management. We don’t need roads to put fire back into many of these areas on purpose.
Conversations about land management really need to be rooted in a specific place. In that spirit, here are some map of the areas in question.
Northern California.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/edit?mid=1lDiT8LXCNG5FnqKdmP-GKk5KFOGGz0o&usp=sharing
Southern California.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1FjIJycyA9Hpd-TqWI1KlodTLUl0MNH0&usp=sharing