By Chad Hanson, Ph.D.
Recently, a guest column in the Methow Valley News by Susan Prichard, a well-known promoter of logging on our national forests, took aim at me in the course of attempting to advocate for a series of large logging projects being proposed and implemented right now on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (“Setting the record straight about forest restoration,” Nov. 13, 2025).
Ms. Prichard’s column made numerous claims without referencing, or providing a link to, a single scientific study. As is often the case with advocates of the logging program on national forests, there is a lot that Ms. Prichard didn’t tell readers.
First, Ms. Prichard claimed that scientists “strongly agree” with her that logging projects, such as mechanical “thinning,” on national forests are effective as a wildfire management strategy. There are about three dozen scientists who consistently push this message, and they are funded by agencies that are financially involved in logging, like the U.S. Forest Service, as well as logging companies.
What Ms. Prichard failed to mention is that there are hundreds of scientists who conclude that the best available scientific evidence indicates that mechanical thinning tends to “alter a forest’s microclimate, and can often increase fire intensity,” while dramatically increasing overall tree mortality and carbon emissions relative to wildfire alone.
Forest Service findings
Ms. Prichard tacitly concedes that mechanical thinning often increases fire intensity, but claims it is somehow reliably effective in the eastern Cascades of Washington, citing no evidence. Ms. Prichard omitted any mention of the fact that many of the U.S. Forest Service’s own scientists are now breaking away from the agency’s economically self-serving promotion of mechanical thinning and other logging as a wildfire management approach.
In a massive 30-year study of several hundred wildfires in the Pacific Northwest — including the forests of the eastern Cascades — a team of U.S. Forest Service scientists found that lower-density forests had higher, not lower, wildfire intensity. Specifically, these scientists found that more open forests have “hotter, drier, and windier microclimates, and those conditions decrease dramatically over relatively short distances into the interior of older forests with multi-layer canopies and high tree density …”
Another study by the U.S. Forest Service’s own scientists tellingly found the following:
“Thinned forests have more open conditions, which are associated with higher temperatures, lower relative humidity, higher wind speeds, and increasing fire intensity. Furthermore, live and dead fuels in young forest or thinned stands with dense saplings or shrub understory will be drier, making ignition and high heat more likely, and the rate of spread higher because of the relative lack of wind breaks provided by closed canopies with large trees.”
Ms. Prichard states that mechanical thinning is “costly,” and uses this in an effort to justify the Forest Service selling thousands of mature trees on public lands to logging companies in the Midnight and Upper Twisp projects, supposedly to generate revenue to pay for the thinning. She claims this is not “commercial logging,” despite the fact that selling trees as commodities and keeping the revenue is quite literally the definition of commercial logging. Aside from the odd circular reasoning of Ms. Prichard’s argument here (we have to thin because we need to raise money to pay for thinning?), Ms. Prichard once again fails to mention a large body of science that contradicts her claims.
In fact, dozens of scientific studies, conducted mostly by U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service researchers over the course of half a century, clearly establish that it is easy to restore and rejuvenate forests with fire alone, without any thinning, even in the very densest stands and even in areas that have not burned in over a century. This can include managed wildfire, prescribed fire, and Indigenous cultural burning. Burning is simply done during the earlier or later part of the natural fire season, in milder fire weather, if lower-intensity fire is desired, because fire behavior is driven mainly by weather. Notably, the Forest Service itself admits that “it is known that tree removal is not required before prescribed fire can be used,” and further admits that fire alone is more effective and vastly less expensive than mechanical thinning.
Defending the system
Last, and perhaps most alarmingly, Ms. Prichard attempts to defend the current system, whereby nearly all federal wildland fire funds are being spent on backcountry logging projects on public lands, instead of helping vulnerable communities become fire-safe through proven methods like home hardening, defensible space pruning, and evacuation planning and assistance. Here, again, her view is strongly contradicted by hundreds of scientists, who warn, “We have watched as one large wildfire after another has swept through tens of thousands of acres where commercial thinning had previously occurred.” Even researchers from the Forest Service itself are recommending a move away from backcountry logging conducted under the false pretense of wildfire management, and toward a focus on creating fire-safe communities.
Because thinning increases the rate of wildfire spread, due to less wind resistance, that means fires will reach communities faster, giving people less time to safely evacuate, and giving first responders less time to arrive and help. Current research finds that the speed of fires is the main factor associated with large-scale losses of homes and lives in wildfires, and fires sweep most rapidly through more open areas that have less wind friction.
Enough with the deceptive euphemisms. Mechanical thinning is logging. It doesn’t stop wildfires. It doesn’t save trees. It doesn’t protect communities. It financially benefits the U.S. Forest Service, logging companies, politicians who get campaign contributions from the timber industry, and scientists who get lucrative grants from the U.S. Forest Service to parrot the agency’s pro-logging message. Everyone else loses.
The bottom line is that mechanical thinning is wildly expensive, ecologically damaging, completely unnecessary, and represents a dangerous distraction and diversion of limited resources away from the primary need to save homes and lives from wildfires.
Chad Hanson, based in the Sierra Nevada, is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Projectand the author of the book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.”
