Forests Don’t Hold Still
Call your senators & tell them to strip these amendments, SA 5890 & 6039 to S. 4784, 202-224-3121. Instead they can support S 3609, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act.
Rep. Tom McClintock doesn’t have one number, he has several, and none of them agree with each other. In House Natural Resources hearings the historical baseline has been 20 to 100 trees per acre against 266 today. In other remarks it’s 60 historically against 300 today. The specifics move depending on the Congress and the hearing, but the conclusion never does: nature got overcrowded and unstable, so it needs to be corrected back to order. Both the Save Our Sequoias Act and the Fix Our Forests Act, the two logging bills built on that exact premise, passed the House this Congress with McClintock’s committee behind them. They’ve been sitting in the Senate since. This week, reportedly, Sen. Padilla is trying to move them anyway, as a rider on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
That’s a strange vehicle to choose, and not just because forest policy doesn’t belong in a defense bill. Padilla is also using this same NDAA to propose a demonstration program letting the Pentagon and National Science Foundation build a mock town on a military test range and ignite it repeatedly to study wildfire behavior. But the work’s already been done. Veteran U.S. Forest Service wildfire scientist, Dr. Jack Cohen, ran this experiment decades ago, igniting forest blocks next to test structures at measured distances and documenting exactly how homes ignite in wildfire. That research became the home ignition zone concept and the entire basis for Firewise and defensible space standards still in use today to create fire-safe communities. Padilla already has his own bill sitting in committee since January, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, that funds the actual answer Cohen’s work already gave us: home hardening, defensible space, community-level planning. Instead, the Senate Energy Committee is pushing toward building something specifically to destroy it, under Pentagon control, to re-derive a finding that’s been settled science since the 1990s. It’s the same instinct that produced McClintock’s numbers in the first place: treat fire as an enemy to be studied, contained, and defeated, never as a process already doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Two bills resting on a number that won’t hold still is its own problem. Forests are supposed to shift, expand, thin, and burn on their own terms, across the Sierra and everywhere else vegetation grows, at different intensities depending on climate, terrain, region, and species. That’s not disorder. That’s the system functioning. McClintock’s number is the one drifting to fit whatever case he’s making that day.
Whichever figure lands in a given hearing comes from a narrow and scientifically discredited set of reconstructions built off a single historical window. Treated as a target, it assumes forests have one correct density that exists outside of time. They don’t, anywhere. Fire history research shows density and fire frequency varying enormously by slope, soil, elevation, and species, a patchwork that never held constant across any region, let alone across centuries. Indigenous communities also burned within and around their own territories for subsistence and cultural purposes, tending specific plants, game, and travel corridors rather than running a landscape-scale management program. The record this whole “historical forest” narrative rests on is missing the pattern it would need to be complete. There was never one number, anywhere it’s been studied. Treating one as historical isn’t restoration. It’s a preference with a footnote attached. It’s worth noting that independent peer-reviewed research has found that McClintock’s historical forest density figures were found to have been falsified, and were based on profound cherry-picking of historical forest surveys by scientists funded by the U.S. Forest Service who omitted most of the trees, and denser forests, in the historical forest survey records. When all of the omitted historical data were included by other scientists, it was found that historical mixed-conifer forests were 7 times denser than the Forest Service claimed, in terms of trees per acre, and historical ponderosa pine forests were 17 times denser than the Forest Service falsely claimed.
The same substitution happens with wildfire severity. Low and moderate severity burns get called healthy. High severity gets held up as evidence something’s gone wrong. But high severity fire is precisely what black-backed woodpeckers, conifers with serotinous cones, and montane chaparral require, among hundreds of other native plant and animal species. It isn’t a deviation from a “good” system. It’s part of the system. The carbon accounting doesn’t support the framing either. Even the most extreme fires consume less than 2 percent of live tree biomass on average (Harmon et al. 2022). Logging, meanwhile, emits roughly ten times more carbon than fire and native bark beetle mortality combined (Harris et al. 2016). Whatever is driving that gap, it isn’t the forest.
None of this resolves into a simple story where restoring one practice fixes the forest, because forests don’t need fixing. What it points to instead is a different question entirely. Instead of asking what configuration a forest should be held to, ask whether the forest has standing to determine its own course. Rights of nature answer that directly. No historical density number and no severity threshold gets imposed from outside. The land isn’t failing to match somebody’s management plan.
I’ve been reading Robert Moor’s On Trails this month, which makes the case that science advances the way life does, through the death of old ideas as much as the birth of new ones, and that the bigger the finding under attack, the more likely it matters. It’s why this whole thing clicked into place for me the morning I read about Padilla’s amendments, more shock at the audacity than surprise at the pattern. The forest as density target paradigm is overdue for that death.
The climate crisis doesn’t need us managing nature into whatever shape best serves the interest currently holding the microphone. Two House-passed logging bills built on a number that keeps changing, now riding shotgun on a defense bill that’s also funding a town built specifically to be burned down, are what it looks like when a bad idea runs out of every other place to hide.
Next month we’re headed back to the sequoia groves to keep monitoring, documenting, and holding agencies accountable to the weak protections already on the books, while pushing to make them stronger. That fieldwork costs real money, including travel expenses, lodging, food, field equipment, people power, and time on the ground in remote, rugged country. Meanwhile here in DC, we’re still getting to the Hill by bike, so even coffee and hydration packet money helps keep that side running too. Every contribution this summer helps cover the work that makes both of these possible, and comes with something in the mail, a small thank-you we think you’ll want to hold onto.
For those of you who’ve already kindly donated, thank you, we’re hoping to have your something special in the mail by the end of the month.
