Comment: In wildfire crisis, options for forests, communities

By Erica Spiritos / For The Herald

I’ll never forget how the summer of 2020 felt in the Pacific Northwest. Apocalyptic. We were told that being outdoors was the safest place to be, but the air quality was unhealthy. It smelled like death. The pandemic was raging and so were wildfires across the West. Oh, and I was a first time mother to baby twins.

This time of year, it is critical to remember what catastrophic wildfires do to our lives, our livelihoods, and our communities. While our experiences may instill us with different perspectives, there are plenty of things that we all agree on. Wildfires are becoming more frequent, and more severe. We need to reduce the magnitude of these fires to protect the forests’ and our communities’ health. Maybe most importantly, doing nothing is no longer a choice.

This year Washington state officials have already declared a drought emergency for the third year in a row in parts of the state. Due to climate change, “100-year events” like fires, floods and droughts such as we’ve seen in Los Angeles and Maui are now happening at a pace where they may need a rebrand.

What was once largely an Eastern Washington issue with drought, extreme storms, and unmanaged wildlands near population centers are a grim reminder of the escalating threat of wildfires impacting communities on the west side of the state.

These fires do not have to be next door to have negative impacts. As we’ve seen throughout the Pacific Northwest, smoke days are no longer anomalies; they have become the new normal. This stark reality demands a return to the fundamentals of forest management, prioritizing proactive measures to mitigate the devastating consequences of these increasingly frequent and sometimes catastrophic fires.

With great challenges come great opportunities if we are brave enough to embrace innovative solutions to a changing climate. In my day job I advocate for building beautiful housing, schools, libraries and workplaces with wood coming from forest health treatments that may not otherwise get to market. In fact, it’s the demand for wood that helps us fund critical forest health treatment. Mass timber can help to address many issues we have in our forests and cities, from affordable housing to using material that could otherwise go up in smoke.

Our national forests have seen decades of unmanaged growth because of political decisions that, while well-intentioned, have inadvertently contributed to the current crisis. By preventing active forest management, we’ve allowed fuel loads — deadwood, underbrush, and densely packed trees — to accumulate to dangerous levels.

Thinning operations can create defensible space around communities and improve forest health. Active management should be encouraged by the communities threatened, and for those who vacation there and do not have to live with the risk, you should understand why we are concerned.

There are multiple landscape plans and blueprints to follow, informed by and developed collaboratively with the environmental community, timber industry and tribes at the table. It’s about restoring ecological balance and creating more resilient ecosystems.

Thinning operations can generate positive impacts for rural economies and generate material for climate- friendly building materials like mass timber. Also, if you live in these areas, you know that property insurance rates are skyrocketing. Actively managing forests at risk of fire is a solution that solves more than one problem; healthier forests, rural jobs, and less potential for catastrophic wildfire.

In the Pacific Northwest we have some of the strongest, science-based forest protections in the world; the Forests & Fish Law uses science to improve forest roads and culverts, enlarge buffer zones along streams and protect unstable slopes. We manage private forestlands extremely well, harvesting captured carbon in locally sourced wood and replanting three trees for each one harvested to capture even more carbon. Where there are foresters, there is a plan to sustain healthy forests.

The consequences of inaction extend far beyond the immediate vicinity of the fire. In British Columbia and throughout the American West, we see the peril where vast amounts of unmanaged forestland have become increasingly susceptible to insect infestations, such as the mountain pine beetle. These infestations weaken trees, making them more vulnerable to fire and contributing to large-scale forest die-offs.

We need to be bold by embracing our time-proven, science-based approach to forest management, one that deemphasizes political winds and prioritizes prevention, community safety and innovative solutions like using mass timber. Working together we can help make the Pacific Northwest as climate resilient as possible.

Erica Spiritos is director of the Washington Mass Timber Accelerator, which advocates the production and use of locally manufactured mass timber in construction.