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Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate

av Chad T. Hanson

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygDiskussioner
822,148,081 (4.25)Ingen/inga
"Smokescreen cuts through years of misunderstanding and misdirection to make an impassioned, evidence-based argument for a new era of forest management for the sake of the planet and the human race. Natural fires are as essential as sun and rain in fire-adapted forests, but as humans encroach on wild spaces, fear, arrogance, and greed have shaped the way that people view these regenerative events and have given rise to misinformation. The peril that these myths pose to forests is profound-affecting whole habitats and the wildlife that depend on them-and mismanagement of these carbon dioxide-absorbing ecosystems threatens humanity's chances of overcoming the climate crisis. Scientist and activist Chad T. Hanson explains how natural alarm over wildfire has been marshaled to advance corporate and political agendas, notably those of the logging industry. He also shows that, in stark contrast to the fear-driven narrative around these events, contemporary research has demonstrated that forests in the United States, North America, and around the world have a significant deficit of fire. Forest fires, including the largest ones, can create extraordinarily important and rich wildlife habitats as long as they are not subjected to postfire logging. Throughout the book, Hanson points out how words have been weaponized in public conversations about wildland fires and underscores the need to create a new vocabulary for these events. Smokescreen confronts the devastating cost of current policies and practices head-on and ultimately offers a hopeful vision and practical suggestions for the future-one in which both communities and the climate are protected and fires are understood as a natural and necessary force"--… (mer)
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A terrifying but important read. ( )
  lemontwist | Jul 31, 2022 |
The US Forest Service seems to see the solution to any issue with forests as ”the business end of a chainsaw.” That’s from Chad Hanson, in his fairly terrifying book Smokescreen. It doesn’t matter if the issue is serious, trivial or even positive. The Forest Service (FS) is all about logging federal woods. The excuses it comes up with are comically classic evil. But the result is disastrously real for numerous species, while making piles of money for the FS and its friendly neighborhood loggers.

Hanson has been living this nightmare all his life. He is a forest aficionado, become expert. He and his brother once hiked the entire mountain range of the west coast from Mexico to Canada over a five month period, and he still spends all his time in them. Only now it is to document the disaster left by the Forest Service. Especially now that they are using the fashionable California wildfires to excuse more logging than ever.

Recent years have seen reports of many more wildfires, more severe and costly. The media has a whole glossary of terms to describe how bad they are for people and the planet. Pretty much everybody knows that global warming is responsible, and that the answer is to cut down the trees before the fires do. The more the FS thins the forests, the healthier they will be. More resilient. It is just common sense and common knowledge. That’s what we have a Forest Service for, right?

Only none of that is true.

The position of the Forest Service amounts to the Earth not knowing what is good for it, that all fires are bad, and that the solution is to cut down more and more trees, both before and after fires. Basically, they believe there are no ecological benefits to wildfires. It is nature’s unfortunate mistake, endlessly repeated.

But the planet doesn’t work that way. Nothing happens without a reason, and nothing goes to waste. A devastating forest fire is massively beneficial to innumerable native species of insect, bird, mammal and fish. Many plants absolutely require fires to replenish their numbers. It has worked well for millions of years. The Forest Service wants to stop it. Hanson says “Excluding fire from these ecosystems is like trying to keep rain out of a rainforest.” It is supposed to be this way, and it doesn’t work without it.

Hanson shows categorically that there are eight major lies coming out the wildfire situation, and he methodically destroys each of them in turn, with facts, direct experience, scientific research and photos.

I won’t list all the major lies here, but suffice it to say fires are not the cause of deforestation on Earth. Forests grow back, remarkably quickly, and healthier than ever. Deforestation occurs when Man removes all the wood repeatedly, leaving bare soil unable to reforest itself.

Fires are not merely natural, but necessary, especially to fire-adapted ecosystems. Numerous species depend on them for survival. The world-famous giant Sequoia trees need fire to open their cones and spread their seeds. The seeds only germinate and thrive in the mineral-rich ash from fires. The trees themselves are all but fireproof. Scarring their lower trunks means nothing as long as the crown – 200 feet higher up – continues to live.

When fire tears through a forest, it leaves behind standing dead trees and fallen logs that insects flock to to lay their eggs. Birds gorge themselves on the insects. One bird in particular, the black-backed woodpecker, has an unusual mating ritual. The male drills large holes into these dead vertical “snags”, and the female he is courting picks one for their new home together. Other (non-drilling) birds and flying squirrels quickly take up residence in the never-used apartments, providing homes for several times the population of woodpeckers alone.

The Forest Service, for its part, claims these snag forests not only have no ecological role to play, but they are a danger for more fires. The FS claims nothing can grow in these charred woods; they are useless. So they absolutely must be logged and the wood sold for easy profit to both the contractor and the FS.

And that’s only the beginning. The FS goes on to claim that cutting down all the trees is an environmental service that reduces carbon dioxide in the air, because the wood becomes lumber and there are fewer trees left to burn in a wildfire. Unfortunately, the loggers also burn all the limbs, branches and twigs, filling the air with CO2. Also, the percentage of wood that ends up as boards is tiny compared to all the waste that gets incinerated as biomass. The forest does not get to serve its role of snag forest, depriving species of necessary conditions to survive. And when the loggers are through with it, nothing will grow there, removing an important CO2 sink from the global ecosystem. The FS, in its twisted way, claims the snag forest is a CO2 source, with no potential as a sink. It actually declares whole patches of forest as dead and ready for logging because nothing will ever grow there again. Yet when people visit the areas in question, they are always amazed how lush and verdant and alive with wildlife they are – far more than untouched forests. Until the loggers show up.

“Logging-related soil compaction alone can reduce forest carbon sequestration by 30 percent, and reductions of 50 to 75 percent sometimes occur…Typically only 1 to 4 percent of tree carbon is actually consumed in forest fires,” Hanson explains. Looking at it the other way, wildfires leave 95% of the forest standing. Wildfires are nothing like clear cuts and thinning that simply annihilate everything.

Logging produces ten times more emissions than the amount of wood that fire consumes. It is the Forest Service that is the source of the CO2 – not the forest.

Another protected bird is the spotted owl, now so rare it is famous for stopping construction projects by its mere presence. They also flock to snag forests, and far more of them nest there than in unburnt forests. Because the hunting is far better in the rejuvenating snag forest. Taking away the snag forests means removing their habitat. It’s no wonder they become rarer and rarer even though they are endangered.

Counter-intuitively, fires don’t so much attack homes as embers do. Hanson has aerial photos showing neighborhoods in the now-famously burnt town of Paradise, CA where every home is gone, yet the trees come right up to the edge of the development. He says making homes more fireproof would go a very long way to reducing the damage. (By comparison, the standard response is to cut down forests and keep them away from developments and individual houses.) Simple vent covers and finer screens would prevent live embers being sucked into wooden attics where the super dry framework welcomes them. They go up like Notre Dame Cathedral did - in no time flat, right before your eyes.

Also counter-intuitively, forest fires stop. They seem to burn in patches, sometimes huge, but often not. The surrounding forests send their flora and fauna in to reforest the patch’s ecosystem almost immediately, assuming there is something to work with, like rotting wood and rich ash.

Even more counter-intuitively, dense forests burn less than sparse ones. Dense forests are more lush and humid, their trees more mature and more fire resistant, and the winds can’t scream through them like they do in the open space of clear cut or thinned forests. The thinner the forest, the worse the fire. That is science that takes some getting used to because everyone has been brainwashed for so long to think the very opposite.

Thinning is another FS scam. The service claims American forests are overcrowded, overgrown. This supposedly unhealthy situation is somehow bad for trees, and makes fires far more intense than they used to be, they say. This is due in part to fire suppressions, thanks in part to the FS mascot, Smokey the Bear. In other words, Man himself is the cause of apparently dangerously overgrown forests needing chainsaws, because he prevents forest fires. Again, Hanson hits the books to show this is all untrue.

Historically, forests are not denser today, and fires are not more intense. And they don’t spread faster than deer can run, as the FS preposterously claims. The FS is big on the lie that over a billion animals died in Australia’s fires last year, because the fire spread so fast they couldn’t get out of the way. This has become common knowledge globally. Hanson says if that were true, fires would consume millions of acres in days, instead of hundreds of thousands, spreading over periods of weeks as they very visibly do.

The FS is in league with the loggers. Loggers fill their committees. Every time there is a fire, the loggers hit the media circuit to promote the reverse theories of thinning and clearing. The beneficent FS then blesses conscientious logging in federal forests - for a fat fee. The loggers come off like environmental saviors. It is Alice in Wonderland for real.

The FS also pays scientists to publish and promote half-truths and outright lies, giving these theories the patina of science. Hanson has dug deep to find where such scientists have cherry-picked a good looking stat, despite the context of the paper saying the exact opposite. Journalists take everything at face value, spreading the lies like, well, a forest fire. Everybody believes the “science” when it comes to wildfires, even though it is completely and demonstrably wrong. Hanson compares it to the playbook of Big Tobacco. Get more people to say it more than anyone else says the opposite, and you win.

It would be easy to assign blame for all this to the Trump administration. It clearly and repeatedly called for more logging in federal woodlands, precisely to provide additional profits to loggers. But Hanson’s research shows that every administration going back to at least Jimmy Carter has been this way and held these attitudes of contempt for federal forests. Hanson himself has been in court and has seen the dismissive ways of judges over scientific reports when it comes to logging. It doesn’t matter which president appointed them. They ignore or dismiss it, just like the FS does when presented with facts contradicting its policies.

One of the FS mandates is community reachout. Committees of FS employees, scientists, loggers and environmentalists are supposed to meet regularly, and the FS is supposed to take their positions into account. But Hanson found that the meetings were always far away, and it was almost entirely those paid by the FS who showed up: employees, friendly scientists and loggers. Worse, everyone had to sign a pledge to uphold FS policies before being allowed in (which Hanson refused to sign), so the FS could claim unanimous agreement on its methods. One way or another the FS is a closed shop, dedicated to logging national woodlands as much as possible. Like something out of Huxley, it is the very opposite of what its raison d’être is.

Sadly, more logging and clear cutting happen in the USA than in any other nation on earth – including Brazil…The United States is the world’s worst culprit in terms of carbon emissions from logging. This despite the laws on the books and efforts of the John Muirs and Theodore Roosevelts of the country.

Forests need more complexity to thrive. What the Forest Service wants is more simplicity: interrupted ecosystems in spacious areas. This makes no sense, and the results are faster moving, fiercer fires, destroyed habitat, and fatter profits for loggers and the FS. These are incompatible, and we’ve known it for a very long time. But here we are, learning it all again for the first time.

Hanson’s passion comes through in every paragraph. He is skilled at skewering the FS for its hypocrisy, thanks to his education as an environmentalist as well as his degree in law. But I suspect it mostly because he has lived this every day— for decades — and has been preparing it all in his mind for just as long. It is an excellent, organized, rational and powerful examination of how America is doing it all wrong.

David Wineberg ( )
1 rösta DavidWineberg | May 6, 2021 |
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"Smokescreen cuts through years of misunderstanding and misdirection to make an impassioned, evidence-based argument for a new era of forest management for the sake of the planet and the human race. Natural fires are as essential as sun and rain in fire-adapted forests, but as humans encroach on wild spaces, fear, arrogance, and greed have shaped the way that people view these regenerative events and have given rise to misinformation. The peril that these myths pose to forests is profound-affecting whole habitats and the wildlife that depend on them-and mismanagement of these carbon dioxide-absorbing ecosystems threatens humanity's chances of overcoming the climate crisis. Scientist and activist Chad T. Hanson explains how natural alarm over wildfire has been marshaled to advance corporate and political agendas, notably those of the logging industry. He also shows that, in stark contrast to the fear-driven narrative around these events, contemporary research has demonstrated that forests in the United States, North America, and around the world have a significant deficit of fire. Forest fires, including the largest ones, can create extraordinarily important and rich wildlife habitats as long as they are not subjected to postfire logging. Throughout the book, Hanson points out how words have been weaponized in public conversations about wildland fires and underscores the need to create a new vocabulary for these events. Smokescreen confronts the devastating cost of current policies and practices head-on and ultimately offers a hopeful vision and practical suggestions for the future-one in which both communities and the climate are protected and fires are understood as a natural and necessary force"--

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