Coastal voices:

It's as disturbing as it is predictable that a timber industry booster like state Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley, would use the tragic deaths of firefighters to promote increased logging. It's also not surprising then that he resorts to falsehoods to promote this agenda. His "solution" to catastrophic forest fires is to promote more cutting, yet study after study has shown that catastrophic fires generally take place in areas where natural, ancient forests have been cut and replaced. The Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Final Report to Congress put it succinctly: "Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate, and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity."

This doesn't seem to matter to timber industry supporters like Aanestad. Nor does it seem to matter that when fuel reduction is necessary, the trees the timber industry wants to cut are inevitably big old commercially valuable trees, not dog-hair trees more prone to fire. A Government Accounting Office report stated that Forest Service managers "tend to (1) focus on areas with high-value commercial timber rather than on areas with high fire hazards or (2) include more large, commercially valuable trees in a timber sale than are necessary to reduce the accumulated fuels." Nor does it seem to matter that a report by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture stated, "The removal of large, merchantable trees from forests does not reduce fire risk and may, in fact, increase such risk." Nor do these words from Forest Service fire specialist Denny Truesdale seem to matter: "The majority of the material that we need to take out is not commercial timber. It is up to three and four inches in diameter. We can't sell it."

Commercial logging removes large, fire-resistant trees. What's more, removing the overstory reduces shade, drying and heating the materials below. Tree plantations are far more vulnerable to fire than natural forests, and there is a direct correlation between roads and fires. Add to this the fact that the overwhelming majority of forest fires are caused by humans (not lightning, as Aanestad improperly implies), and many of these are arson. There have already been many cases of people lighting fires specifically so they can benefit financially, whether through gaining employment as firefighters or through giving the Forest Service an excuse to offer up the dead trees as a timber sale, quite possibly in some cases to the arsonists themselves.

So far as protecting homes, the Forest Service's own fire laboratory found that the main factors determining whether buildings ignite are the materials used in the home and the amount of underbrush within 200 feet, not the proximity of merchantable timber.

Finally, study after study has shown that global warming is a major contributor to catastrophic forest fires. If Sam Aanestad really cared about stopping catastrophic forest fires, and not merely about lining the pockets of timber corporations, he would drop this propaganda and address the real causes of catastrophic forest fires.