Climate Change or Forest Management? Both Are to Blame.
While the West burns, partisans devolve into a predictable debate.

For more than a week, my home state of Oregon has been consumed by the wildfires that have eaten up large swaths of the American West. Entire towns have been reduced to embers in a matter of hours, leaving at least 33 dead with many dozens more missing. Upward of 40,000 Oregonians have fled their homes: residents in counties on the outskirts of Portland have faced a series of mandatory evacuation orders, and many others have left voluntarily due to the hazardously toxic smoke-filled air, which is currently the worst in the world. Fires around the state continue to rage unabated, overwhelming firefighters and leading to Gov. Kate Brown’s invocation of emergency powers. Local officials predict a “mass fatality incident”—the worst loss of life from fire, in Brown’s own words, in the state’s history.
Initially, my family and I felt insulated from all of this: Our 8,000-odd person town of Hood River, sitting in the mountainous Oregon farmland an hour or so east of Portland, has been somewhat removed from the chaos of 2020—rural America is used to thinking of itself as existing in an entirely different world from our cities. So the wildfires began as an abstraction for us, as most natural disasters are for most people. The apocalyptic images of ruby-red skies over California struck us as tragic, but distant.
But in the early hours of Friday morning, I woke up with the taste of fire in my mouth and found it difficult to breathe; my parents had been awake for the same reason since 1:30 a.m. The circulation in our house, a cheap one-story manufactured home, did little to protect against the heavy, hot smoke that had crept up through the Columbia River Gorge and settled on our town. By that evening, we had joined our 40,000 fellow Oregonian émigrés, the three of us and our dog—my little brother was fortuitously absent, having left for his freshman year of college a week before; I’m taking my senior fall semester online—packing up the Subaru Outback and setting out for Idaho.
It’s unclear when exactly we’ll be able to go home, but we count ourselves lucky; it’s highly unlikely that our house will burn, in contrast to towns to the south which have disappeared altogether. We’re safe, as are our friends and family still in Oregon; we work jobs that are easily done via laptops and Zoom calls; and we’re financially well-off enough to leave town and stay in a hotel for a week. (Although far too cheap to shell out for more than one room, meaning that all of us have been relegated to the same confined space for days now—a serious test of our collective familial bond.)
The burning itself continues, accompanied by the predictable partisan commentary. As it pertains to the wildfires, the political controversy du jour is climate change—specifically, to what degree warming global temperatures are to blame for the disastrous recent destruction, and how indicative ongoing events are of an impending climate apocalypse. Like with most issues, the truth of the matter is complicated—and the state of our contemporary discourse often lacks the nuance to fully discuss it.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, to take a prominent example, has been one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change is the main culprit for the wildfires, linking the ongoing chaos in his own state to the “climate damn emergency” and even getting into a face-to-face tiff with the president about the issue at a joint press conference on Monday. Newsom’s rhetoric has been echoed by other Democratic politicians and the legacy media for weeks—the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times featured an imposing photograph of a masked man standing amidst the remains of a destroyed house, with the bold-font title: “California’s climate apocalypse.” (The subhed reads “Fires, heat, air pollution: The calamity is no longer in the future—it’s here, now”).
Partisans on the right have largely responded by mocking the left’s alarmist tone, arguing that badly designed regulatory environments and decades of badly designed forest policies are responsible for the fires. The Wall Street Journal editorial board ran an op-ed titled “Biden of the Climate Apocalypse,” deriding the former vice president for giving a speech depicting the wildfires as the manifestation of “the fury of climate change everywhere” without once mentioning the problem of forest mismanagement. The Journal accused Biden of giving “a speech that claims to revere science but is utterly detached from it,” writing that “on the wildfires, Mr. Biden’s failure to mention the need to clear dry and diseased fallen trees defies what has gradually been recognized as a necessity even on the environmental left.”
It’s difficult to parse the two variables—climate change and forest management—apart from one another when diagnosing root causes, but the size and ferocity of the fires appears to be unavoidably tied to the decades of ill-fated environmental policies at the hands of state and federal agencies. To his credit, Gov. Newsom admitted as much, telling President Trump in the Monday conference that “there’s no question” that “we have not done justice on our forest management,” though he still maintained that climate change was fundamentally the root cause of the issue. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, too, gave a speech on the Senate floor earlier this week saying that the fires were “debt coming due” on decades of “lousy” forest policy. But others, like Biden and Gov. Brown, have been more reticent to admit that anything but climate change is responsible for the disaster.
Part of the latter group’s unwillingness to attribute the fires to policy failures is the fact that it would require local governments in states like Oregon to take responsibility for the years of mismanagement that gave rise to the current issues. Acknowledging this would also mean an implicit admission of a more fundamental problem with left-wing environmentalist thinking, which sees preservation—cordoning off large segments of wilderness from any human interaction whatsoever—rather than conservation—responsible stewardship through engagement with the land, controlled burns, preemptive logging and deforestation, and so on—as the preferred approach to environmentalism. As Julie Parrish, a former Oregon state representative and a founding board member of the Timber Unity Association, wrote in a Saturday Washington Post op-ed:
In recent decades, political power in Oregon has accumulated in urban Portland and its surrounding suburbs. Residents of these areas—insulated from the dangers of land mismanagement—have insisted on preserving the forests as untouchable playgrounds. Since 2001, the state has over-prioritized recreation and environmentalist concerns such as ecotourism. As a result, Oregon’s forests were allowed to become overgrown, creating fire hazards. The state has screwed up so badly that, in November last year, it was ordered by a jury to pay Oregon’s rural counties $1.1 billion for failing to uphold its contractual obligations for responsible forest management.
Insofar as they admit to such policy failures, left-leaning politicians and media commentators have laid the blame at the president’s feet: As both Democratic state lawmakers and a flurry of articles and “fact checks” have rushed to point out, well over half of the burn areas in the West have occurred on federally controlled land. It stands to reason, this argument posits, that the wildfires are therefore the result of bad federal policy from the White House—not from Democratic states like Oregon and California. But the current administration can hardly be blamed for the accumulation of decades of bad policies, many of which were, in fact, encouraged and sanctioned by state governments. For all of the president’s manifest shortcomings, forest policy has not been one of them; in fact, by all accounts, his administration’s response to the ongoing fires has actually been quite good.
There are a host of other avoidable policy-related issues that have contributed to the explosive nature of the fires: Counterintuitively, for example, a patchwork of badly designed state environmental regulations forwarding “preservationist” restrictionism has made it both difficult and expensive for private citizens to clear away dead trees and brush on their own land. But all of this is not to say that climate change does not play an important role in the ongoing fires. Newsom’s claim that the wildfires are exacerbated by the fact that “the hots are getting hotter” and “the dries are getting dryer” is absolutely true—not to mention the fact that summers aren’t just hotter, but longer, creating a larger window of time within which fire risk is high. Longer and more intense heat waves cause vegetation to dry out, creating increasingly flammable conditions. To say that climate change is not the sole issue is not to say that it isn’t an issue; it clearly is.
Our ability to avoid disastrous situations like the one currently engulfing the Western United States is impeded by partisans on both sides refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the issue—one can push common-sense climate policies alongside repealing onerous government regulation. The two are far from mutually exclusive.
Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is a senior at Colorado College and a former ISI summer fellow at The Dispatch.
Photograph by Nathan Howard/Getty Images.
I will offer my two cents but will get a few points out of the way from the get go.
Background: Retired Forester for federal agency (in the west), I have prepped a lot of timber sales and have written a lot of environmental analysis documents. I have also participated in plenty of prescribed fires, although I don't particularly see that as my area of expertise.
1) I do believe that temps are warming and that "fire seasons" appear to be getting a longer in the west.
2) As others have stated there is nothing we are going to be able to do to effect climate change in the foreseeable future short of some word changing energy breakthrough. You almost need to separate climate change from forest management, because with or without climate change the forest management changes that need to take place are almost exactly the same.
3) Large wildfires are going to continue to occur.
What needs to be done? Lots more timber sales, non-commercial thinning, and prescribed burning. You can't have a big increase in prescribed burning without the cutting of lots of trees. We need to protect our fire fighters as much as possible which means providing them with safer locations to engage wildfires, and to light them in prescribed burns. How to achieve this? Specific Congressional legislation for very large (size) projects with those specific goals, and a steady stream of money to accomplish the work. Liability protection for prescribed burns. That's a simple answer, the reality unfortunately is so much more complex.
Managing the forest through "thinning" doesn't prevent or stop wildfires it just changes fire behavior
and the fire triangle by reducing fuel load. Having markets for non-commercial fuel harvested long ways from infrastructure is a real issue. If no market exists you have to burn slash in place.
I see people in lots of articles throwing around prescribe burning as a magic answer to the problem. Prescribed burning is extremely difficult to achieve on the ground. First you have to prep the acres mechanically or by hand. Second you have to have a "burn window" where conditions on the ground are likely to lead to you being able to control the fire. Third that needs to line up with allowable air quality windows prescribed by the county or state. Lastly, prescribed burns take A LOT of woman and man power, not only on ignition day but also for mop-up and monitoring. The reality is that the given windows in the spring and fall are so small that is it very difficult to burn many acres. That doesn't mean we shouldn't aim to burn a lot more, just that it is very difficult and complex to do so.
States also manage a lot of forest in the west, they also need to cut more, slash more, and burn more. States and counties also set the regulations for private property which really drives so much of our wildfire response. Newsom is full of @#$%. I don't see him proactively lobbying for more harvest, or supporting any of the existing legislation that is currently being championed by other governors or congressmen. The rest of the Democratic leadership is even worse, it starts from the top, the silence from Biden and Pelosi speaks for itself. They take their cues and ideas from the large environmental groups which have caused so much of the gridlock and dishonest issue framing that has got us to this point.
I you're a private landowner in the forested west you take that risk by living there, period. Act appropriately with your property.
In summary, the biggest solution to this issue lies at the federal level. Legislation needs to occur at that level to change or amend existing legislation and regulations in order to accomplish the work that needs to be done on the ground at a scale that will make a difference.
Also, I love the west. Nothing in what I said above means I want to do away with most of our existing environmental protections. We can accomplish this work and protect our rivers, wildlife, wildflowers, etc. In fact we can improve a lot by increasing our management. Our ecosystems in the west depend on fire. Fire created what we all love about the west, more fire please!
Several observations:
With regard to forestry practices: The reference into the article of the notions of conservation vs. preservation is surely an important part of the discussion -- although not the only one with immediate implications. I spent most of my career all over the west, working for a while at a mine on the Continental Divide and wilderness backpacking all over the Rockies. One day I made some comment about the forests on the other side of the pass near Winter Park and a coworker informed me that none of the forests -- even in the particular "wildernesses" that I enjoyed were native old growth forests. In fact, only about 7% of the forests in NA are native old growth forests. In my travels all over the west, I have probably seen a billion trees and only two modest stands of native old growth forests. These should be preserved. The notion of "preserving" some of what we have already unpreserved is more emotional than rational. (BTW: the total of forested land has been steadily increasing since the middle of the 20th century and is now up to about 70% of what was in place in 1630. A significant amount of our "replacement" forests are unhealthy second or third growth stands of spindly trees spaced so closely that they are mostly fire hazards. TRUE conservation to restore unhealthy forests is surely a part of the problem.
Changing Climate: A substantial factor in today's fires is changing climate. Yes, climate does change, both in long term trends and over shorter cycles. From 1895 to, say, 1930 California was much wetter than the average up to 2020 as measured by waterfall net of evaporation. It stayed more or less steady near the average from 1930 to 1985 and has been STEADILY declining to record lows currently. In addition, the west gets most of its water in the form of snowfall that is stored and released as it melts throughout the year. While there are exceptional years (2017) more snowmelt has occurred in the winter months that have generally been warmer reducing the water that would be otherwise retained. Thus, poorly managed forests are being subjected to worse climate conditions -- plain and simple.
Land Use: California was settled in conditions that were much more benign than current condiitons. Settlement (including forest management) changed the land. With prosperity came an increasing demand to permanently settle places that have become less and less benign. Changing climate, whether man caused or otherwise, and bad forestry practices are co-conspirators in the problem exacerbated by unwise decisions to settle in fireprone places.
What to do: Yes, there are suggestions to change our forestry practice and, to the extent they would be effective would mostly be effective over decades, not years. And to the extent that reducing carbon emissions might mitigate these problems, again relief would be decades coming. This is not to suggest that these things should be ignored, but that more immediate relief will probably require more mundane measures like not rebuilding the same way in the same places and undertaking measures necessary to protect existing development -- firebreaks, clearing around structures and upgrading the fire resistance of existing structures. Like the throngs of new coastal storm "victims", some consideration should be given to the notion that some of our living choices are not compatible with the real weather and environment.