Posts by Bekah Mamola

Sierra: The Magazine of the Sierra Club
By Alexander Nazaryan

The commission is “less a conservation effort and more a political stunt,” said Jennifer Mamola, policy director of the John Muir Project, which has decried the Trump administration’s efforts to expand logging in national forests. “It repackages extractive agendas under the guise of patriotism and public service. Despite its language around stewardship, this initiative promotes deregulation, expanded industrial access, and voluntary measures that have historically failed to protect ecosystems.”

Munhwa Broadcasing Corporation in Korea
By Lee Hwi-jun

“Any practice of removing trees from a forest—whether it’s thinning or large-scale logging—ultimately tends to increase the intensity of a wildfire. Reducing the density of trees, branches, and leaves in a forest allows more sunlight into the forest, and the winds become stronger, making the forest drier. Governments around the world, including the United States, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars a year subsidizing these logging projects and paying these agencies to enforce them. But what they’re really doing is wasting enormous amounts of money on things that are making wildfires worse.”

Backpacker
By Elizabeth Miller

Like the president, former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed environmental activists for wildfires’ increased intensity. But Hanson and other fire ecologists caution that the administration has it backwards: More logging can actually make wildfires burn hotter and faster. Instead, they say, it’s well-placed, smart management that will reduce the impacts to communities from wildfires—and unchecked logging is neither.

Nevada Current
By Dana Gentry

“The Forest Service uses the term ‘thinning and fuel reduction,’ a euphemism for commercial logging,’” says Dr. Chad Hanson, an ecologist and vocal critic of traditional fire management practices at a time when climate change has increased fire severity. “What they’re really doing is selling and removing large, commercially valuable trees on a fairly significant scale. Not only does that fail to protect homes, it will actually make a fire spread faster, and often more intensely toward the homes.”