Stumps and slash piles in an Oregon Coast Range clearcut. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The Trump administration and some Democrats support “managing” our national forests like tree farms, not forest ecosystems, by calling for ever more logging and burning in a futile attempt to prevent wildfires. But studies show logging tends to increase, not decrease, extreme fires through drying, less snow retention, and higher wind speeds.
Dr. Jack Cohen is the retired chief scientist at Missoula’s Forest Service Fire Sciences Lab. He and other wildfire scientists have written numerous peer-reviewed studies that show we can’t fireproof forests — and that “home hardening” is the best way to protect homes from wildfires.
As Cohen told the Missoula Current recently when discussing their latest paper, Wildland-urban fire disasters aren’t actually a wildfire problem:
Fire is inevitable. But nobody’s figuring it out. We’re starting from the presumption that it’s wildfire that spreads through a community that lays it to waste. We even have the agencies responding in that fashion by being obsessed with this notion of wildfire control. So they do fuel treatments to have safe firefighting. That’s not only counter ecologically, it doesn’t work.
In the past five years, a number of incidents with more than 100 houses burning have been initiated by grass fires, which burn quickly. The grass fires pass through and are gone while the community continued to burn. What I’ve found, particularly over the past five or six years, is that extreme wildfire is not dependent on closed-canopy conifers that produce big flames. The only time these urban disasters occur is under extreme conditions. That typically means it’s very windy.
The essentials to “harden” homes are non-flammable roofs and decks, removal of nearby vegetation, and trimming trees up to 100 feet out from the home. Forest Service logging and intentional burning more than 100 feet from a home does nothing to keep houses from burning down, is a waste of money, and destroys fish and wildlife habitat.
Yet the Forest Service continues to massively log our dwindling mature and old growth forests, selling nearly 3 billion board feet of timber in 2025. Nonetheless, last year an astounding 383,807,000 board feet (enough to fill 80,000 logging trucks) received no bids because the Forest Service is trying to sell more of our National Forests than the timber industry wants to buy.
These “landscape scale” projects also destroy fish and wildlife habitat since runoff from clearcuts, burns, and logging roads fills streams with sediment, smothering fish eggs and aquatic insects leaving degraded streams. Logging secure forest elk habitat leaves behind stumps and knapweed, driving elk to seek safety on private lands, which causes problems when they eat hay the ranchers grew for cattle.
Forest Service intentional burning projects also cause enormous problems. A recent study found “prescribed burns”cause approximately 10,000 premature deaths and $100 billion in health costs every year, equaling the impacts from the wildfires the agency claims to be preventing.
The staggering cost of federal logging to taxpayers is nearly $2 billion a year. Despite these losses, the Trump administration wants to significantly increase future logging projects, plunging the nation into ever greater debt.
In 2025 the Alliance for the Wild Rockies stopped destructive Forest Service logging and burning projects on 1.7 million acres of public lands — nearly twice the size of Glacier National Park — and more than any other environmental group in the nation.
So the next time you are in or see an unlogged national forest, take a deep breath and enjoy the clean air, the sparkling streams filled with native fish, the natural forest filled with abundant wildlife — and be thankful the Forest Service has not logged or burnt it down.
Please consider helping the Alliance for the Wild Rockies protect our national forests from the Trump administration. Please also help Counterpunch keep the American people informed about what Trump is trying to do to our county and our national forests.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.