YOSEMITE NP, California – The towering trees of Yosemite National Park have long held a treasured place in the American psyche, whether it’s the ancient and majestic Sequoias, the Ponderosa pines and the snake-shaped bark, or dark oak trees full of acorns, the lifeblood of many Native American cultures.
Because of this legacy, last week two top Yosemite park officials walked through a collection of tree stumps and explained to a visitor why they ordered chainsaws to cut down hundreds of trees.
As she trudged through the ruins of a cut cedar, Cicely Muldoon, the park’s director, admitted that the concept of felling trees in Yosemite was difficult to explain to the public. “It hurts people’s hearts,” she said. “But we must use every tool at our disposal to save forests, save parks, and restore a healthy ecosystem and keep everyone safe.”
With more than 140 million trees killed in California from drought and beetle outbreaks over the past decade – 2.4 million of them in Yosemite alone – forestry experts describe the state’s forests as injured and extremely vulnerable places. Now, as the state suffers another severe drought, Yosemite seems perennially beset by fire and smoke.
In the past month alone, the Oak and Washburn fires have raged near and in the park, prompting residents to evacuate, closing entrances and threatening the sequoias’ largest stands, including the highly rated Mariposa Grove.
Ms Muldoon says more drastic steps need to be taken than before to make Yosemite’s forests more resilient. But first she and the park management will have to win the case in court.
A judge this month temporarily halted the park’s biomass removal efforts, as tree felling is understandably known, in response to a lawsuit filed by an environmental group based in Berkeley, California , argued that the park had not properly considered the impacts. The thinning project covers less than 1% of Yosemite’s forest area.
Whether the lawsuit succeeds or not, it resonates beyond the park’s boundaries by raising bigger questions about how to manage forests in an age of climate change.
Increasingly, leading forestry experts are taking a stance that doesn’t sit well with a public accustomed to the idea of preserving the country’s unspoiled lands: Sometimes you have to cut down a tree to save it. And Burn the forest to save the forestthey say.
The polarization in the Trump administration between climate scientists and a president that has downplayed rising temperatures and emphasized the need for better forest management, or “scratch” as former President Donald J. Trump once called it, has passed until now. What many experts say is a consensus among scientists and political leaders about the need for more proactive cutting and burning of forests.
“Most of us are completely convinced that this is not only a good thing but a necessity,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at the University of California, Berkeley and a scientific adviser to California Wildfire. Forest Restoration Task Force.
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In this year’s budget, Congress designated nearly $6 billion for wasteland wildfire management programs, in addition to $5 billion for hazardous fuel reduction and related programs. to another fire in the infrastructure law signed last year. Last month, lawmakers introduced Save our Sequoias Act, which will expedite the necessary environmental assessments for thinning projects. Although the bill is bipartisan, it has draw objections from a coalition of environmental groups.
About a century ago, the National Parks Service, which administers Yosemite, made a promise to the American people that it would keep valuable sites looking “more or less as they always have,” Nate said. Stephenson, a renowned scientist in the field of forest ecology said. United States Geological Survey. The Congressional Act establishing the National Parks Authority in 1916 called for parks to remain “unaffected for the enjoyment of future generations.”
However, Dr. Stephenson added, “in an age of rapid and violent environmental change, that promise is fading.”
Central to the thinking of scientists seeking to protect forests is research showing that the “natural state” of the wilds of the United States has been in the millennia of human influence.
Decades of research have shown that the wilderness prized by early European settlers, as well as 19th-century naturalists like John Muir, is often a highly managed landscape. Core samples from beneath a pond in Yosemite, taken in such a way that scientists can dig deep into a glacier, reveal centuries of layers of pollen and ash. The detect hints at a long history of frequent fires in Yosemite and reinforces the oral histories of Native American tribes, who have long viewed fire as a tool.
Other studies have shown how biodiversity evolves after moderately hot fires, how grasslands come to life with dozens of species of flowers. Fire can reduce plant competition, increase water flow, and kill insect pests. Some species, such as the giant sequoia, rely on the heat of the fire to dry and crack their cones to release seeds throughout the forest floor. But experts distinguish between a fire that benefits the landscape and a fire that is so hot that it devastates it.
“Not all trees are good, and not all fire,” said Britta Dyer, a forest regeneration expert at American Forest, a nonprofit that promotes the use of forests to slow climate change. are all bad.
In the iconic Yosemite Valley, with its glacier-carved granite walls, green waterfalls and flower meadows, Garrett Dickman, a forest ecologist at the park, is leading the restoration effort. the area looks like it was more than a century ago, when it was sculpted by native burning.
Mr. Dickman used some of the earliest photographs and drawings of the valley to guide him in deciding if trees needed to be cut.
Photos of Carleton Watkins in the 1860s were viewed by Abraham Lincoln and helped convince the president of the need to declare Yosemite a place of public trust, a prelude to it becoming a national park. . Mr. Dickman uses similar photographs today.
“I’ll literally take pictures and look at what I think is the line of sight and mark the trees that I think need to be removed to restore the view,” Mr Dickman said.
Mr. Dickman said live trees more than 20 inches thick were never cut down. He calculated that if he couldn’t wrap his arms around a tree it was usually too big to qualify for chopping.
Along the road that links the Wawona community to the park’s south entrance, teams cleared 9,156 tons of trees and brooms. Mr. Dickman calculates that of the roughly 350 trucks carrying logs and brooms, only half a dozen are sent to a sawmill. The rest go to wood-burning plants to generate electricity.
Mr. Dickman said: “Getting $60 for 25 tonnes of ingredients. “But we pay $1,200 to $1,400 in shipping per load.”
The lawsuit against the park is intended to prevent much of the felling and pruning of trees. It was launched by the Earth Island Institute, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that has sued to stop other tree-cutting projects. The lawsuit alleges that the park management failed to follow the review procedures set forth by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
Chad Hanson, director and principal ecologist of the John Muir Project, a branch of the Earth Island Institute, said in an interview that the National Parks Agency was dishonest about cutting down trees, saying added that he was among more than 200 experts. yes signed a letter with President Biden and Congress expressing concern that commercial logging could be “conducted under the guise of ‘thinning’.”
Most of the experts involved in the debate say that the issue is not whether thinning of the forest should be allowed but how much needs to be done.
Dr. Hanson, who is well known in conservation and logging circles for the frequency of his lawsuits, takes a more cautious view.
One of his main arguments was that a dense forest would be more susceptible to fire, not less, because of the reduced canopy shade, as well as the ability to block the wind. Other experts say that in theory, cutting down trees could create drier and windier conditions, but forests in the West have been very dry for most of the fire season. They also say that even when wind speed increases, it is rarely enough to outweigh the benefits of reducing the amount of vegetation that can burn.
Dr. Hanson agrees that within 100 feet of houses, selective thinning of seedlings and young trees, and even excision of lower limbs on mature trees, is essential to create “protectable space”. However, he argues that instead of cutting down large trees, forest managers should let wildland fires happen more naturally.
“Natural processes are considered the main approach,” says Dr. Hanson, “Not chainsaws and bulldozers and obvious cuts”.
However, several environmental groups protest that they favor careful thinning of the forest, including Save the Redwoods League, a group that advocates for the conservation of redwoods and giant Sequoia forests, and Nature Conservancy, an environmental non-profit organization.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nature Conservancy, said it was “tiring” to face Dr. Hanson’s barrage of arguments and litigation. He added, “What a waste of time.” Other experts have published methodological critique of Dr. Hanson.
Dr. Hanson’s latest lawsuit has also angered some local political leaders, including Tom Wheeler, a Madera County supervisor who represents the Yosemite area and who at a meeting in City hall recently released a series of explicit descriptions of Dr. Hanson.
A former logger and race car driver, Mr. Wheeler’s voice was full of urgency as he pointed to the many forests in the Sierra Nevada that are resistant to wildfires because the wood has been selectively removed and cleared. . Mr Wheeler opposes deforestation but says some forests have become so overgrown they are ready to burn.
“Look at it and tell me how it will burn,” Mr. Wheeler said as he stood next to a dense clump of conifers, many of which had denied the needle. “It’s going to be so hot, you won’t be able to stand here right away.”
Huge wildfires have raged around Yosemite in recent years that visitors driving into all four entrances see remnants of burned forests. Ms Muldoon, director of Yosemite, said fires are often so hot that firefighters compare it to battling hellish storms.
“We don’t send people out to weather the storm and that’s how firefighters feel,” she said.
She said, it is the thickening of the forest over the generations that have been extinguished by fires that now have to cut down thousands of trees.
And what about leaving the park “unpaired” for future generations?
“It’s a difficult word,” she said. In the park’s early years, Ms Muldoon said, being free of damage meant “just leave it as it is, don’t touch anything”.
“But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that we’ve been touching these lands forever – humanity has – and doing nothing is really doing something.”
