The Director of the John Muir Project, Chad Hanson, has written a paper about wildfire and its relationship to biodiversity and climate change, titled The Myth of ‘Catastrophic’ Wildfire. Here are some of his findings, as reported by New West:
• There is far less fire now in western U.S. forests than there was historically.
• Current fires are burning mostly at low intensities, and fires are not getting more intense, contrary to many assumptions about the effects of climate change. Forested areas in which fire has been excluded for decades by fire suppression are also not burning more intensely.
• Contrary to popular assumptions, high-intensity fire (commonly mislabeled as “catastrophic wildfire”) is a natural and necessary part of western U.S. forest ecosystems, and there is less high-intensity fire now than there was historically, due to fire suppression.
• Patches of high-intensity fire (where most or all trees are killed) support among the highest levels of wildlife diversity of any forest type in the western U.S., and many wildlife species depend upon such habitat. Post-fire logging and ongoing fire suppression policies are threatening these species.
• Conifer forests naturally regenerate vigorously after high-intensity fire.
• Our forests are functioning as carbon sinks (net sequestration) where logging has been reduced or halted, and wildland fire helps maintain high productivity and carbon storage.
• Even large, intense fires consume less than 3% of the biomass in live trees, and carbon emissions from forest fires is only tiny fraction of the amount resulting from fossil fuel consumption (even these emissions are balanced by carbon uptake from forest growth and regeneration).
• “Thinning” operations for lumber or biofuels do not increase carbon storage but, rather, reduce it, and thinning designed to curb fires further threatens imperiled wildlife species that depend upon post-fire habitat.
In addition to being the Director of the John Muir Project, Mr. Hanson is also a researcher at the University of California at Davis and was elected as one of the directors of the Sierra Club in 2000.
Pure pseudoscience.
The debate has been ongoing since the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
The John Muir Camp vs. the Gifford Pinchot Camp. The battle continues.
It gets pretty funny to watch/listen/read about this after over 120 years of debate.
Everyone is so entrenched in “their science” that they rarely, if ever, listen to or communicate with…. THE ACTUAL EXPERTS… the wildland fire managers, wildland firefighters, and wildland fire ecologists.
The “John Muir Project” is sponsored and funded by the “Earth Island Institute” (http://www.earthisland.org/).
The “Earth Island Institute” was an offshoot from the “Sierra Club” in the early 1980’s.
The EXPERTS within the primary federal land management agencies (USFS, NPS, BLM, FWS, & BIA) are SPONSORED and FUNDED by the U.S. Taxpayers…