Raking the Forest With Donald Trump and Mike Pence

It was a little rich having Donald Trump and Mike Pence coming in from New York and Indiana to tell California’s governor and state scientists that they need to “manage forests” to confront unprecedented wildfire. For those of us deeply involved in fire and land management on federal lands in the West, their know-it-all scolding was laughable, condescending, ignorant and mildly insulting.

President Trump has repeated his admonishment that we need to “rake” or “manage” our forests, so we won’t have such extreme fire in the West. Vice President Pence repeated this line in the vice-presidential debate. I’m certain that Donald Trump’s main experience of the outdoors (being a New York City native) comes from golfing. Golf courses are the most highly managed vegetated landscapes around, and they are raked by workers (often immigrants). Even the golfer rakes out the sand trap after they mess it up going after an errant ball.

Does the President and the Vice President really imagine that we westerners are so dumb that we just let forests go with no management? Do they think that in 2020 we need the suggestion to “rake” forests? (Question: Donald, once we rake, what do we do with the stuff we rake up?) It is hard to know where to begin with this nonsense, but their argument is now firmly implanted in the mind of millions of Americans who rely on Trump for ideas and share his implication that democratic governors are inept and need direction from the all-knowing Trump.

Forest Management

I could recount for them the long history of forest management in the West, the decades of fire suppression that started in earnest in 1910 with the US Forest Service Fire suppression had the effect of burdening millions of acres with tree thickets and drifts of slow-to-rot debris in dry climates like California. I could recall for them the commercial logging and livestock grazing that further increased the flammability of forests by radically altering native fire regimes. I could call to mind that thousands of scientists and professional fire and land managers who have been working to correct these mistakes since the 1970s on hundreds of millions of acres of public land in the West.

But perhaps I take Donald Trump too literally when he suggests we should “manage” our forests. I suspect what he really means, though he may not know what he means, is that we need to exploit our forests. We need to make money from them by logging them. Someone probably suggested to him that logging would stop big fires by depriving fires of fuels. Perhaps I give Trump too much credit, but I suspect this is what he is saying.

For Trump money is almost everything in life. So, it would make sense that logging companies must be a good thing in his mind. They have a proper relationship to the forests – making money. Scientists, and by extension fire practitioners (though he probably doesn’t know we exist), are an alien culture to him. If he knew about our profession, he would write us off just as he has dismissed the epidemiological community confronting Covid 19. Science is now a target of the right’s culture wars.

Scientists and fire managers know that commercially logged land is more susceptible to high severity wildfire than most lands that have not been logged. Loggers leave flammable slash behind and the plantations of trees planted in the aftermath of commercial logging burn like crazy when wildfire encounters them. Removing large trees opens the heavily disrupted understory to sunlight which causes brush to grow in place of native forest. Exotic plant species thrive in this mess and wildfire burns hot in these highly altered landscapes.

Thus, the idea that removing large trees will calm fires is nonsense perpetuated by those who want to justify exploiting landscapes for money.

Grazing and Fire

Ranchers perpetuate a similar myth in the dry interior forests of the West, promising us that where cattle graze grass, fire will slow. Thus, ranchers convince Trumpian thinkers that their bovines will help with the growing severity of fire in the West by removing fine fuels.

Just like the commercial logging argument above, the rancher argument is opposite of the truth. Livestock grazing damages native grasses, opening the land to colonization by highly flammable juniper and ponderosa pine over millions of middle elevation acres. Thickets of these trees carry ground fires up into the crowns. Before livestock, frequent native fires were low severity fires that controlled young tree populations and nurtured grasslands.

Cattle also spread exotic grasses and the ubiquitous overgrazing in inland forests invites highly flammable cheatgrass to colonize millions of acres of land. Cheatgrass displaces native plants of all kinds and starts a frequent fire cycle that creates more cheatgrass habitat. Tens of millions of acres of cheatgrass monoculture perpetuate frequent fire that is destroying sagebrush ecosystems, endangering thousands of plant and animal species.

Ranching and commercial logging cannot be justified as fire control techniques much as our President and his deputy would want to the public to believe. These arguments, like so many Trump era policies, are resurrections of 1950s approaches to land management. The US Forest Service has moved way beyond these old ideas in some parts of the west. They are reintroducing fire for ecological benefit over millions of acres and in many places commercial logging has faded away for economic reasons.

Ranching is more stubborn. We are stuck in the past with range policies. The livestock industry has a powerful political grip on land management agencies and the politicians in Washington. Trump has tried to reverse the few grazing policy improvements that scientists and conservationists have fought for over decades. Ranchers love their government subsidies and their conservative enablers.

Hope

We can only hope that voters chose candidates who promote and respect science and genuine adaptive land management. It would be great to have agency leaders who acknowledge the climate emergency and promote efforts to manage lands accordingly. Imagine having agency workers that listen to native people and learn from them about fire practices. It would be critical to have a president who could understand the California fires are evidence of an ominous big picture.

In the meantime, we can only hope that neither Trump nor Pence returns to the West to lecture us about land management from the wisdom of the golf course.