Don't let state manage park forest to death
The proposed “forest health and wildfire resilience project” in Tomales Bay State Park is ironically named — because it will do the opposite. It will denude and desiccate a dense, healthy forest, and increase wildfire ignition risk.
A growing number of environmental and animal advocacy groups, including In Defense of Animals, for whom I consult, are signing on to a detailed, sciencebased comment letter by Western Watersheds Project excoriating this deforestation project.
The California State Parks organization has yet to estimate how many trees will be felled over the 2,000 acres. We fear the number will be in the hundreds, plus hundreds more small plants are in line to be shredded by masticating machines. The plan is a massive, decadelong mechanized assault, including poisoning soil with herbicides, to supposedly “restore” old bishop pine stands.
The plan is speculative and lacks proof the pines will regenerate in the next 50 years. Cal Parks should treat a small demonstration area as proof of concept.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is involved, with its statewide “vegetation treatment program.” The plan kills wild plants over thousands of acres. The California Chaparral Institute's website explains the impacts.
Fallen trees at Tomales
Bay State Park, like dead and downed trees everywhere, serve vital functions in forests, decaying slowly and keeping the forest floor wet and fungi-friendly — thus fire-resistant. Removing those trees, as this project will, makes a forest drier — thus more flammable.
Herbicides can poison soil, beneficial insects, birds, mammals and further increase wildfire danger by desiccating plants. They are persistent poisons that should never be used.
Marin County and federal fire protection agencies don't include thinning practices for forests in their wildfire risk reduction programs. Both Marin's FireSafe program and the National Fire Prevention Assocation's Firewise program focus on home-hardening techniques and creating defensible space from houses-out, primarily to 20 to 30 feet, to a maximum 100 feet.
U.S. Forest Service fire scientist Jack Cohen also endorses simple, inexpensive, effective house preparations like removing flammable leaf litter and debris on and around houses — not thinning. It's explained in an NPFA video on YouTube titled “Your Home Can Survive a Wildfire.”
Why does this project claim its industrial treatments will reduce wildfire risk? Cynically, I must answer like this: It qualifies the project for funding.
The climate crisis should be teaching us to value and protect dense forests more than ever, for their unrivaled carbon-storing and cooling services, not to demonize and attack forests.
For decades, the logging industry and, sadly, the U.S. Forest Service have successfully popularized a false narrative to justify logging (aka “thinning”), using fear of wildfire to advance their agenda.
To say that long term fire suppression has created a dangerous buildup of fuel loads, which creates an elevated threat of catastrophic wildfires that destroy forests, pushes a widespread myth to mislead concerned residents. When did forests become threats to be feared and assaulted with management?
Scientist Chad Hanson, who is an ecologist and director of Earth Island Institute's John Muir Project, debunks the forest-thinning narrative in his book, “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.”
Hanson's extensive research reveals that, in reality, thinned forests can ignite more readily and burn faster because they are sunnier, hotter, drier and windier.
Yes, the park's bishop pines are aging. But they could live another hundred years or more — if left undisturbed. Or a lightning strike might ignite a natural, regenerative forest fire in the decades ahead. Pine stand replacement may come on its own, natural timetable — not one artificially imposed by bureaucracies.
Officials at Cal Parks and CalFire have institutional incentives to aggressively manage millions of acres of California wildlands with chainsaws, masticators and herbicides. But in our era of climate crisis, forestdiminishing projects like this one release huge amounts of stored forest carbon. It will emit still more carbon from petroleum-powered machinery.
Don't be fooled into supporting the destruction of more of our most precious global cooling commodity: wild, unmanaged forests. We've been assaulting forests for decades. They won't be restored with more of the same.
The real problem lies not in our forests, but in our psyche. Separated from Mother Nature, we now fear her, strive to control her and manage her to death.