Be a Forest Hero! People depend on healthy forests to supply water and address climate change. Salmon and wildlife that inhabit California forests depend on us to stop extreme forms of logging.
Forests capture, filter, and later release water. The longer and larger trees grow, the more carbon they store. Older trees are also more resistant to wildfire. California redwoods can live for thousands of years, but the timber industry harvests them after 40 years when their life and their ecological value to people is just beginning. Allowing trees to grow to a hundred years would bring greater benefits.
Frantic efforts by government agencies to make people safer from wildfire overemphasize forest thinning. Fuel reduction beyond 100 feet from homes and structures is not helpful unless it is associated with maintaining evacuation routes. In order to reduce fire risk to houses, we must make the houses themselves less vulnerable to fire by using fire resistant building materials.
Fuel reduction may reduce risk to the forests themselves if done properly. However, the end result must be a diverse resilient forest with extensive forest canopy and older trees that retain moisture and block surface winds that drive wildfires. Prescribed burns increase the effectiveness of thinning.
Instead of massive thinning, emphasis should be placed on establishing forest management practices that result in healthy diverse forests. Timber harvesting methods must balance the trees removed with the health of the remaining forest and eliminate aggressive harvesting methods such as clearcutting. Alternatively, selecting only some trees to harvest and leaving the rest retains the forest’s benefits forever.
California forests are already experiencing catastrophic losses from climate change, drought, beetles, thinning, logging, logging roads, and wildfire. Excessive fuel reduction and deforestation from clearcutting increase the stress on forests causing loss of valuable ecosystem services such pure water and climate regulation necessary to reverse the climate crisis.
Watch this campaign for specific actions you can take to be a Forest Hero.