The BulleTin • Sunday, auguST 21, 2022 A7
Sequoias
Continued from A1
Now when he visits, he sees
something that, scientists say,
has no precedent in thousands
of years of history: vast acres
of dead sequoias, killed by fire.
The Sugarbowl, an amphi-
theater of solemn and enor-
mous trees, part of the Red-
wood Mountain grove, one of
the largest collections of giant
sequoia on Earth, has become
a graveyard. Trees that have
lived since the Roman empire
stand as fire-blackened match-
sticks, their once bushy green
crowns shriveled into charred
fists. When the KNP Complex
fire roared through last Octo-
ber, it burned so hot in some
places that Caprio expects few
seedlings to rise from the ash.
“These are all dead,” said
Caprio, the fire ecologist for
Sequoia and Kings Canyon
National Parks, wandering
among the grove now closed to
the public. “So what’s going to
be the long term prognosis for
an area like this? Is it going to
come back as a shrub field?”
Summer wildfires, in the
era of climate change, mean
something different now for
giant sequoias. These trees
evolved with fire, and need it
to reproduce, but the scale of
recent megafires — burning in
hotter, dryer conditions across
far greater areas — have over-
whelmed many of the groves
tucked high in the California
mountains. Six of the seven
largest wildfires in California
history have occurred in the
past two years, and in that pe-
riod, up to nearly one fifth of
all naturally-occurring large
giant sequoias on Earth have
been killed.
“What is new and shock-
ing is these large areas, one
hundred acres or more, where
every single sequoia is killed,”
said Nate Stephenson, an
emeritus scientist in forest
ecology at the U.S. Geological
Survey. “There is no evidence
anything like that has hap-
pened in the past one thou-
sand years, probably many
thousands of years.”
“We’re in a whole new ball-
game,” he said.
And in this new game, the
rules are in dispute.
The question of how to pro-
tect the remaining sequoias,
and more broadly how to
manage America’s remain-
ing forests in an era of cli-
mate-magnified megafires,
has divided scientists and the
public. The two wildfires that
burned in and around Yosem-
ite National Park this sum-
mer — including among the
famous Mariposa Grove of
sequoias — rekindled the de-
bate about what humans can
or should do to protect these
iconic trees.
Across the parched West,
the Biden administration and
its public land managers want
to dramatically ramp up con-
trolled fires and logging as a
way to thin out fuel-packed
forests and avoid deadly wild-
fires. Earlier this year, the
Biden administration an-
nounced a decade-long, $50
billion plan to use logging and
prescribed fire across 50 mil-
lion acres in 11 Western states
to manage wildfire.
Late last month, the U.S.
Forest Service said it would
take emergency action, in-
cluding setting fires and cut-
ting down trees, to try to pro-
tect a dozen sequoia groves
over more than 13,000 acres.
Legislation proposed in June,
called the Save Our Sequoias
Act, would fast-track environ-
mental reviews for these types
of logging-and-fire work in
the name of fire prevention.
The scale of what some
foresters and researchers are
calling for in places such as
the Sierra Nevada amounts
to a wholesale re-engineer-
ing of the forest. They say the
land management policy that
prevailed during much of the
20th century — of putting
out most wildfires — has led
to overgrown forests. During
the past two decades, as cli-
mate change has intensified,
drought in the West has killed
many of those trees, leaving
downed logs and dead snags
— the “fuels” that firefighters
say create hotter and more de-
structive wildfires.
Before colonists settled the
West, forest fires caused by
lightning, and set routinely by
Native Americans, helped thin
Ryan Christopher Jones/for The Washington Post
In front of El Capitan, a patch of forest in Yosemite National Park re-
cently underwent a prescribed burn and logging, intended to restore
a historic view.
out forests. Back then, it was
typical to have about 50 trees
per hectare in the Sierra Ne-
vada and southern Cascades,
whereas now some forests
have 300 to 400 trees per hect-
are, according to Alexis Ber-
nal, a researcher with the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley
who studies giant sequoias.
Extensive logging is needed
to reverse that, she said, cou-
pled with more fire.
“We want to get a forest
back to what a fire resilient
landscape would look like,”
she said. “You would have to
take out a lot of these trees to
do that.”
Caprio said roughly 30,000
acres per year used to burn
naturally in Sequoia and
Kings Canyon, while the park
only accomplishes about 3,000
acres in prescribed burning
each year. “That gives you an
idea of the deficit,” he said.
But some environmental-
ists and residents are wary of
escalating forest management,
and doubt that human inter-
vention can contain wildfire
on the scale and intensity it
now rages. They worry about
prescribed fires escaping their
boundaries and logging proj-
ects that offer little resistance
to flames fanned by a hotter
and drier world.
Two prescribed burns set
by the U.S. Forest Service that
grew out of control earlier this
year caused “unfathomable”
destruction in New Mexico, as
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham,
D, put it, destroying hundreds
of homes, displacing thou-
sands, and threatening water
supplies in a burn area larger
than Los Angeles.
Logging projects in the
name of thinning and fire
prevention have also been
challenged in lawsuits up and
down the West Coast. Envi-
ronmental groups are fighting
to preserve a rule that pro-
hibited cutting large trees on
public land in Oregon. Local
governments in California,
along with retailer Patago-
nia, sued the Forest Service to
block logging for fire defense
on Pine Mountain, a popular
recreation area.
Climate change has caused
hotter and drier conditions
that have pushed the peak of
U.S. wildfire season earlier
in the summer — July rather
than August in recent decades.
The season has also length-
ened and fires have burned
more total acreage. Since 1983,
when federal records began,
more than 10 million acres
have burned in only three
years; but all of them have
happened since 2015.
Just last year, wildfires de-
stroyed nearly 6,000 homes
and other buildings; one-third
of those were in California.
Yosemite and the giant se-
quoias have been a flash point
in the debate even before the
Washburn and Oak fires, the
two fires in and around Yo-
semite, ignited last month.
An effort to cut down trees
across more than 2,000 acres
inside the national park was
challenged in a lawsuit in fed-
eral court by the Earth Island
Institute, an environmental
group based in Berkeley, Calif.
Last month, a judge temporar-
ily halted what the park calls a
“biomass removal” project.
The architect of Yosemite’s
prescribed fire and thinning
projects is Garrett Dickman, a
biologist and firefighter, whose
job is to protect the park’s
famed sequoias. Forests in his
jurisdiction are often densely
packed with understory vegeta-
tion and downed trees.
“It’s logs, and then logs on
top of logs, and then logs on top
of logs,” he said. “We call them
jackpots. There’s just jackpots
everywhere.”
The drumbeat of massive
fires torching the Sierra Nevada
and killing sequoias led Yosem-
ite to devise a plan to cut down
trees along certain road corri-
dors primarily to give firefight-
ers more room to operate.
“The thinning is right
where the firefighters are go-
ing to stand,” he said. “If you
don’t do that, you can’t stand
there. It’s too hot.”
‘This is unacceptable’
Chad Hanson climbed onto
a stump that was more than
five feet across. He knelt down
and ran his hand slowly across
the tree rings. All around him
were stumps, hundreds of
freshly cut firs and pines in
the Merced Grove inside Yo-
semite. Logs by the dozen had
been stacked in piles, ready for
removal to be sold for lumber
or burned in power plants for
electricity. The churned up
earth from the treads of heavy
machinery stretched into the
distance.
“The people who did this
should not be running a na-
tional park,” Hanson said
bitterly. “They’re literally
clear-cutting large swaths of
the Merced Grove. This is un-
acceptable.”
Hanson, a 55-year-old ecol-
ogist, is co-founder of the
John Muir Project, a subsidi-
ary of the Earth Island Insti-
tute, which brought the law-
suit against Yosemite.
Hanson is primarily op-
posed to cutting trees as a
strategy to manage wildfires.
He believes “thinning” and
“fuel reduction” are euphe-
misms for commercial log-
ging — a point made in a let-
ter last year to Biden signed by
Hanson and 200 other experts
warning against these practices
in the infrastructure bill. He
also believes cutting trees does
not slow or contain fires and
can accelerate them, by open-
ing the canopy and drying out
forests, and leaving behind
flammable debris and grasses.
“This is not a fuel break,”
Hanson said as he stood in the
200-foot-wide newly logged
corridor in Yosemite. “This is
actually a place where the fire
will whip through more rap-
idly and more intensively.”
A review of the scientific
literature on key questions
about fire management tools
published last year found that
thinning, removing fuels, and
using prescribed fires, can be
effective at lessening the sever-
ity of wildfires under certain
conditions, although they’re
not appropriate in all types of
forests and if done incorrectly
can aggravate the problem.
In environmental circles,
Hanson is a controversial
figure. Other scientists have
challenged his methodology
and accused him, in their own
studies, of misusing data on
issues such as how wildfires
affect spotted owls and the
effectiveness of forest thin-
ning. One of those rebuttals
described the work of Han-
son and others as having “gar-
nered substantial attention
and fostered confusion about
the best available science.”
“I’m not in favor of any-
thing he does, or says,” said
Bernal, the Berkeley re-
searcher, who has studied se-
quoia regeneration in some
of the same groves where
Hanson has worked, calling it
“agenda-driven” and “biased.”
Hanson believes govern-
ment officials should not try
to prevent wildfires from pass-
ing through sequoia groves
— including famous tourist
attractions.
“They’re treating them as
museum pieces. These trees
are not our pets,” he said.
“What they should be doing
is embracing the ecology of
this area and telling that to
tourists. That this is part of
the natural life cycle of giant
sequoias.”