Is Colorado cutting down too many trees to fight wildfires? These environmentalists think so.
Advocates are raising the alarm about the dangers of fighting wildfires by thinning out forests. But officials say the science is on their side.
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CONIFER
One unseasonably warm morning in December, Democratic state Rep. Tammy Story stood on the edge of a trail winding through the Flying J Ranch open space park in Jefferson County staring into a chunk of forest where downed trees were scattered like matchsticks.
Story is an avid hiker. She wore sturdy shoes and carried a yellow daypack. She’d been cruising along the trail pointing out this bird on that branch, those deer in the shadows, when she came to the part of the forest with the toppled trees.
It sat next to an area that had been clear cut as part of Jefferson County’s 2022 Open Space Forest Health Plan to reduce tree density and fuel sources in areas the county had identified as having severe risk for wildfire. So far, 1,000 of the 25,000 acres the county manages between Evergreen and Conifer had been treated to create fuel breaks the county says can slow fire spread and save homes. The plan calls for 800,000 trees to be cut down.
The spindly lodgepole pines Story pointed to were the collateral damage of thinning.
“See them?” she asked. “They’re skinny and tall with most of their vegetation on top. So they don’t have great root systems — they’re like dog hairs. We had a big storms come through last January and April with 80-mile-per-hour winds and gusts as high as 100. When trees grow close together they become this wall, protecting each other.”
But the trees on the edge of the cleared area were susceptible to the strong winds and didn’t benefit from trees around them, she said. “The fire mitigation, in the form of clear cutting, paved the way for the large number of blown down trees, above and beyond the thousands of clear cut trees harvested.”
As Story spoke, her intensity grew, along with her decibel level. That’s because she is part of a contingent of people who think Colorado is ruining wildlife habitat, stealing shade, fouling rivers and putting its forests — and communities — at risk through what they call destructive management practices and unnecessary logging contracts. And they are running headlong into residents who don’t want their houses burned down and officials who are trying to protect homes and forest health.
The contingent bucking the trend on tree cutting — saying it causes more fires, rather than fewer — is being led by a small but vocal group called Eco-Integrity Alliance and its unofficial spokesperson, Josh Schlossberg. Schlossberg lives in the woods around Nederland and is a novelist and environmental activist who has written several guest opinion pieces about fire mitigation for The Colorado Sun and other publications.
Schlossberg pores over studies on tree thinning — logging, he says — and can point to countless independent, peer-reviewed studies that show state and federal agencies are wasting billions of dollars on “‘fuel reduction’ that is literally endangering my life and that of my neighbors” in Colorado, he wrote in an email.
He espouses this often and with conviction. And sometimes, he brings in pieces and parts of maps, photographs and studies that he manipulates to create his proof of argument, some officials and scientists from the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and The Nature Conservancy say.
Schlossberg’s claim that fuel reduction is endangering his life, for instance, “is a case of misrepresenting the science and/or using selective science whereby you point to a handful of studies that might not show effectiveness of treatments while ignoring the overwhelming body of science and publications that do,” said Rob Addington, director of The Nature Conservancy’s forest and fire program.
But Schlossberg’s message, flaws and all, should be taken to heart, said Chad Hanson, a scientist, activist and author of the 2021 book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.” Hanson is co-founder of the John Muir Project, which, among other things, acts as a watchdog on logging projects on national forests, exposes the harm they cause and advocates for ending timber sales on public land.
Maybe parts of it, some fire officials say, but they add that other parts of Schlossberg’s narrative and some of Hanson’s are spreading misinformation about practices hundreds of firefighting agencies in Colorado rely on, which is forcing them to spend critical time trying to counter those claims instead of doing their primary job: finding, refining and using the best wildfire-mitigation and firefighting practices.
Schlossberg says these criticisms undermine the work he and independent scientists are trying to do to counter taxpayer funded government agencies that “cherry pick” their own science and “falsify the scientific record”to justify wildfire mitigation that involves cutting down trees.
And suddenly, strangely, the anti-thinning contingent may have found their moment to gain traction, what with the new Trump administration and its stated goals of rolling back key protections for public lands, the president’s executive order for the immediate expansion of timber production, and a new U.S. Forest Service chief with deep ties to the logging industry all ramping up the threat to forests in Colorado and the West.
A school of thought on thinning
The anti-thinning faction’s main argument is that tree thinning as a means of fire mitigation isn’t working.
But every agency participating in the Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program uses it “to support wildfire risk reduction efforts in Colorado to protect life, property and infrastructure.”
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The program was created through bipartisan legislation after the 2020 fire season, when 665,454 acres burned in three of the largest fires in state history. It was permanently funded in 2023. And it supports many moving parts, including community engagement, home hardening, creating defensible space and the big issue: fuel management, which involves reducing flammable vegetation, thinning forests and removing dead wood and debris, followed when possible by strategically planned controlled burning.
“There’s also broadcast burning, which is just lighting a given unit and letting the fire move through it,” Addington said. “It really consumes a lot of the surface fuels and is an important ecological process the understory vegetation responds to. So while burning serves that role of reducing the fuels that are there for future wildfires, it’s done in the spirit of meeting multiple values. There’s wildfire risk mitigation, wildlife habitat enhancement, overall forest health and carbon sequestration — all things we care about.”
How these methods are deployed differs depending on the type of forest you’re in, said Dan Gibbs, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and a wildland firefighter. “For example, I live in Summit County. We have lodgepole pine fuel densities of about 1,000 stems per acre. That’s very different from piñon pine-juniper forests, in which the vegetation is more spread out.”
Colorado also contends with a patchwork quilt of ownership boundaries, Gibbs said, where municipalities, county governments and local forest collaboratives work together, and Good Neighbor Authority agreements among the agencies, counties, tribes and private landowners also address mitigation. And fire mitigation is expensive: Gov. Jared Polis has committed $145 million in state funds to it since the strategic action plan was formulated, and in February it announced $8.4 million for 14 workforce development grants and five landscape resilience investments for the work.
One thing Colorado’s firefighting establishment agrees on is that thinning the state’s forests, and then doing prescribed burning, is the best way to mimic natural processes that have been suppressed in the Western U.S. since the 1890s. That, in turn, makes them less prone to burn at the scale of the East Troublesome or Cameron Peak fires, and easier to contain.
“You’re less likely to have a crown fire after forest management, because you just don’t have the continuous canopy and the continuous fuels moving through the canopy,” said Addington, from The Nature Conservancy. “So one of the key distinctions is, without treatment you’re more likely to have a big, raging crown fire coming into a community and there are very few options you have in that situation beyond just getting people and resources out of the way. Whereas when you do fuel treatments and forest management, you increase the decision space exponentially.”
Gibbs said we need an all-encompassing approach to wildfire mitigation, including home hardening – building with fire-resistant materials, removing leaves, needles and other debris from around the home and doing fire-resistant landscaping – and defensible space – clearing flammable vegetation from the surrounding area. “But we also need to create fuel breaks for firefighters like myself that create an environment where it’s safe enough, or there’s an anchor point I can go to where I’m not gonna risk my life because the density is so thick around your house.”
Story agrees Colorado needs sensible wildfire mitigation that focuses mostly on home hardening and defensible space. But she says clear cutting and extreme thinning, with “big industrial machinery,” are disruptive to wildlife, cause erosion, destroy watersheds and mature, fire-resistant trees and could also allow a fire to rage through treated areas, destroying homes and communities.
“You know, Evergreen has a volunteer fire department,” said Gibbs, “and you have homes in really dense forest in that area. In many cases, you’re going from U.S. Forest Service land right up to private land, and right there, the winds are going from west to east where we could have a large-scale fire. So if a fire starts on Forest Service land, it’s coming east towards many of the houses in that area. Doing proactive fire breaks in those areas will protect life, property and infrastructure, period.”
But Schlossberg, Hanson and others say thinning doesn’t work and should be done away with before it helps one more fire sweep through a community.
“An absolute, proven failure”
Hanson says Americans “are wasting billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money” on failed policies at the state and federal level, and points to the U.S. Forest Service’s 2021 Budget Justification as proof.
That year, the budget for wildfire mitigation was $2.4 billion, up $58.8 million from 2020. In 2023, those appropriations rose to $2.7 billion with an operational increase of $751 million from 2022. And the budget request for wildland fire management in 2025 is $2.6 billion, up $433.5 million from fiscal year 2024.
The 2025 budget justification cites increasing complexity and duration of wildfires, complicated by a changing climate and other factors, that are expected to continue to challenge forest service administrators and fire managers through the year.
It also says the Forest Service responds to between 5,000 and 7,000 fires on national forest system lands each year, and in addition to the responsibility to protect life, property, infrastructure and natural resources there, the agency responds to wildland fire incidents on other federal lands and on an additional 20 million acres of non-federal lands under interagency and intergovernmental agreements. “Wildland fire risk management is an urgent priority for the Forest Service and aligns with USDA’s strategic goal to mitigate wildfire risk,” it says.
Yet, “fires are burning right through thinned areas or areas where dead trees have been removed through what they call salvage logging, and these logging projects are removing vast amounts of carbon from the forest into the atmosphere,” Hanson added.
Living trees do store massive amounts of carbon. That makes them a critical piece of the battle against climate change, a priority in Colorado. Researchers from Colorado State University recently released the results of a decades-long study showing how much carbon the state’s forests store, and the results will inform “statewide policymaking to regional forest management planning, as well as local climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives,” the carbon inventory report says.
Hanson says most forest thinning projects are done indiscriminately, leading to large trees, which sequester the most carbon, being cut as often as small trees. But Steve Murdock, interim manager of natural resource stewardship for JeffCo Open Space, says in his experience that is not true.
Prior to starting a thinning project, JeffCo conducts “a forest stand inventory, which collects all kinds of detailed information on the current composition of the forest (including tree species, height and diameter) before entering the data into a forest growth modeling system,” he said. This allows them to simulate different tree removal scenarios under various wildfire conditions before determining an approach that effectively reduces wildfire severity while maintaining forest health.
They then develop management prescriptions for foresters to use in the field when marking trees for removal, he added. “In some cases, this means removing certain large trees to protect the others we are trying to preserve. But these decisions are not easy to make, and our foresters walk through an area multiple times before deciding which trees to mark for removal.”
Hanson argues — and multiple studies report — that thinning reduces a forest’s canopy, which can lead to more sunlight reaching and heating the forest floor. There’s also an enormous amount of science, he says, that shows the more trees you remove from the forest, the more you reduce wind resistance, which allows winds to sweep flames more rapidly toward towns, giving people less time to evacuate safely.
And there is no need to do thinning in heavily forested backcountry areas, he says, because even though forests that have been largely untouched have greater biomass to burn, that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen, because their mass creates cool microclimates where the air holds more moisture and lack of sunlight means less undergrowth beneath the canopy.
“So all things being equal, what most of the research shows is that denser stands tend to burn less intensely,” Hanson said. It’s when you remove trees under the rubric of thinning that fires burn through more rapidly, he added.
But that’s not what happened with the Cameron Peak fire, which started Aug. 13, 2020, and burned for nearly four months across 208,913 acres of state, federal and private lands.
It started on the ground and moved quickly into the forest canopy, according to James White, a fuels management specialist in the U.S. Forest Service with over 25 years of experience in fire management. He said in a story about the fire that he watched intense flames race across the landscape, leaving mostly scorched earth in its wake.
But he also saw “how areas that had been treated by federal, state and private land managers served as a buffer to dampen the intensity of the fire” as it spread toward the Drala Mountain Center near Red Feather Lakes and the center’s 108-foot-tall Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, one of the most significant examples of sacred Buddhist architecture in North America.
When the fire crossed into an area of land nearly a mile wide where the forest had been treated to remove excess vegetation in 2018, it lost its intensity and became manageable to the point that firefighters could get in front and get it under control, he said. “It’s hard to know how much further the fire would have spread, if not for that treated area. But what is clear, by making sure that burnable materials are scarce we can mitigate these fires’ level of intensity,” White was quoted as saying.
Cut a tree to save a tree?
By now, arguments about whether tree thinning exacerbates fires have been around for years. Schlossberg and Hanson’s camp say it does; fire professionals contacted for this story say it doesn’t.
But there’s a second narrative Hanson likes to discuss, which is “well, maybe we’ll kill some trees through thinning, but that will save more trees in the end.”
“That’s what we’re being told. We see this again and again,” he said. “And the studies really do say that. The problem is, they are misleading to a massive degree because they are saying that the goal is to have more live trees on the landscape, but they don’t take into account the trees killed through thinning.”
Mulched and chainsawed remains of fire mitigation are visible on stumps and undergrowth in parts of Flying J Ranch Park in Jefferson County, near Conifer. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Hanson also keeps close tabs on published research and public comments by the people doing the work. This was the case with the study the Colorado State Forest Service did about carbon storage in Colorado forests.
In addition to showing the forests store a massive amount of carbon, the study says collectively they’re now emitting more carbon than they’re storing.
The study, authored by Tony Vorster, a research scientist with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University, also showed wood used in things like furniture construction retains its carbon capacity in those creations, while wood rotting on the forest floor releases carbon.
Hanson wrote a critique of the study that said a mathematical error led to the researchers “profoundly underreporting the amount of carbon stored in downed logs, leading to the false conclusion that Colorado’s forests are a net carbon source.”
He also said “some comments” by Vorster and co-author Ashley Prentice in a dispatch posted at Phys.org “seem to promote thinning, and also logging ostensibly, as a means to store carbon in wood products while creating jobs.”
When The Sun showed Vorster Hanson’s critique of his study, Vorster said he had never seen it. But he did take time to respond to it, writing in a long email that “we’ve put some thought into these critiques … after reviewing (them), we maintain that this inventory represents an accurate use of the best forest carbon monitoring dataset available.”
“It’s making the most of the data available without reducing the quality of the other estimates,” he wrote. “This is not a mathematical error as the critique suggests.”
And he had told The Sun in an interview about the study in February that “the focus of this report was to conduct the inventory/accounting of Colorado’s forest carbon, not to identify policy implications or management recommendations. Now that we have this information, we will see how policymakers move forward. The next phase of this work is that the Colorado State Forest Service is now developing a ‘forest carbon co-benefits framework,’ which will identify forest management practice recommendations through the lens of forest carbon.”
What about that executive order on timber?
What is far more likely to influence an increase in forest thinning is Trump’s executive order “addressing the threat to national security from the imports of timber and lumber” and his call for an immediate expansion of timber production in the name of national defense and wildfire mitigation.
Ironically, Trump is also likely to cut the Forest Service budget, leading to less money for fuel thinning even as he promotes logging by timber interests.
Megan Maxwell, executive director of the Colorado Timber Industry Association, addressed this, saying, “the executive order made it clear that there are two goals — to address the fire hazard issue as well as increase production.”
She said she expects a push to increase the targets based on the sustainable yield identified in forest plans, and that Colorado’s “small but mighty timber industry” will have the capacity to increase pace and scale under the current administration.
However Gibbs said “the reality is that the saw mills around the state of Colorado are going out of business. We used to have 50 around the state, but I believe we now have about 30.”
Randi Spivak, public lands policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Trump, through the timber production order, “literally will unleash the chain saws and bulldozers on our national forests and exploit them for timber production. It’s going to have devastating effects on our national forests, on recreation, on drinking water and species and maybe more importantly, it’s actually an increased wildfire risk.”
LEFT: A fallen, freshly cut tree exhibiting the telltale blue stain of fungus and pine beetle infestation. RIGHT: A hiker and a dog traverse snowy forested trails of Flying J Ranch Park. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Trump also named his new chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Tom Schultz, who was previously the vice president of resources and government affairs at Idaho Forest Group, and worked for state agencies in Idaho and Montana managing public trust lands.
“So in that kind of drive to kick out board feet” — a unit of measurement for commercial lumber — “the agencies are basically going to be looking to clear cut and just basically log extremely and intensively, and that includes going after the larger, older, more fire resistant trees,” Spivak said.
She’s also worried about the Fix Our Forests Act, a legislative package introduced to the House with bipartisan support Jan. 25, that establishes new requirements for wildfire mitigation on federal lands using categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act.
These exclusions free the federal government from having to do detailed environmental analysis when an action it proposes “normally does not have a significant effect on the human environment.”
The Property and Environment Research Center, which advocates for conservation solutions through markets and incentives, applauds the act, saying it removes red tape, litigation and capacity challenges inhibiting forest restoration efforts like mechanical thinning and prescribed burning.
But Spivak says it “ain’t fixing nothing,” because the categorical exclusions it would allow will speed up logging projects and increase the area they can treat without a NEPA review from 3,000 acres to 10,000 acres. That, she said, basically gives them carte blanche “to log the hell out of this place.”
Misinformation and consensus
Hanson said the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Government, are essentially in bed with the logging industry because the forest service “gets congressional appropriations to do planned timber sales, and when it does these logging projects, it’s selling public trees to private logging companies, and it keeps the revenue from the logging.”
Maxwell says Colorado logging companies do have contracts with the forest service, but that most are for stewardship to assist the agency with maintaining forest health.
An audit-in-progress of Forest Service timber sales between 2014 and 2023 conducted by the Government Accountability Office through congressional request suggests the agency is thoughtful about what timber contracts it awards as it works to balance its mission of managing the National Forest System for multiple uses.
Part two of the audit is forthcoming. A spokesperson for the accountability office wrote in an email, “Generally, there is coordination between USFS and the logging industry given the nature of timber sale. We are in the midst of our field work and unable to comment further on this until our analysis is complete.”
The study also showed the agency failed to meet its U.S. timber harvest goals every year from 2014 through 2023.
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But an issue bigger than who does the thinning is that the research being provided by groups like Eco-Integrity Alliance is being taken out of context and could undermine the findings of numerous scientific studies that confirm the benefits of fuels reduction work, said Reid Armstrong, spokesperson for the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest.
She shared a press release written by Schlossberg, titled “Evidence from U.S. Forest Service Study: Local Forest ‘Thinned’ for ‘Fuel Reduction’ Burned SEVERELY in Wildfire, Adjacent Unlogged Forest DIDN’T BURN AT ALL,” that had been forwarded to her by a television reporter.
The release said evidence in a study funded by the U.S. Forest Service, and co-authored by Colorado Forest Resources Institute and the Colorado Field Office for The Nature Conservancy, shows that 122 acres of public forest outside Nederland “thinned” in 2015 in the name of “wildfire fuel reduction” burned at “high severity” in 2016 during the Cold Springs fire that destroyed five homes, while the unlogged forest feet away didn’t burn.
In making the case that fuels reduction projects by Boulder and Jefferson counties, Denver Mountain Parks and the Forest Service may be increasing the danger and impacts of fire, Schlossberg included two photos. One was one of an area thinned by the Boulder Ranger District in 2015 “that had not recovered,” and one was of adjacent unlogged forest on private land, which had remained “ lush, green and completely intact.” He also included a map with an outline of a “logged, severely burned forest” next to an “unlogged, unburned private forest.”
After reviewing the release, Armstrong was alarmed.
The Forest Service was concerned, she said in a message to the reporter, that Schlossberg’s statement took information from a study out of context, and “undermin(ed) the findings of numerous scientific studies that confirm the benefits of fuels reduction work.”
The study mentioned in the release didn’t consider the topics of fire effects or burn severity, Armstrong wrote, but focused on factors “meant to inform post-fire planting strategies.”
And any claim that the study omitted evidence that refuted the pro-logging narrative misrepresented the scope, objectives and intent of the research, she wrote.
Addington said The Nature Conservancy spends a lot of time and energy addressing similar misinformation. He said it is unfortunate because the work Schlossberg aims to refute “is so important, and we need to be doing everything we can to accelerate it given the current wildfire crisis.”
And Murdock, who’s been leading the mitigation work on JeffCo Open Space, said, “there are numerous studies that exist that demonstrate both the effect and lack of effectiveness of these forest thinning projects on altering fire behavior. But as land managers, we have to go with the consensus of the scientific community. We can’t sit around and wait for the perfect solution that everyone agrees on. That’s never going to happen.”
“Our bar is, what is the consensus of the scientific community, not what’s the unanimous opinion,” he added. “Because that just doesn’t exist.”
