Forests are our friends. They provide clean air and water, homes for thousands of different species of animals, and materials for us to build our own homes. Some of us find spiritual solitude among them, while others look to them for recreation and a way to deal with mental health.
And they are great at keeping us cool and climate change under control.
But increasingly, forests are under threat. Over the last decade, the United States has lost 2 million hectares of natural forest. That’s about 3.7 million football fields worth. Deforestation, illegal logging, wildfires and climate change are some of the biggest issues facing our precious forests, and the situation is not improving.
Reckon spoke with Brian Kittler, the vice president of forest restoration at American Forests, a nearly 150-year-old Washington D.C.-based non-profit dedicated to protecting and restoring healthy forest ecosystems.
Reckon: Brian, your title speaks for itself, but can you tell us a little about what your organization does?
Kittler: We tend to focus on forest ecosystems that are important for wildlife habitat, how they provide water to human communities, carbon storage, and for biodiversity values. Much of what we do is focused on recovering and helping forests that have experienced severe impacts from wildfires and other disturbances.
As well as forests throughout the country, we also work in places like Mauna Kea in Hawaii and down along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, where there’s been historical deforestation, forests converted into agriculture, or into developed landscapes. My program is focused on forming partnerships with landowners and public land management agencies and bringing private and public resources together to do climate-adapted reforestation.
R: Forests have faced many challenges in the last few decades and I’m sure those challenges are becoming more and more extreme. Has that been the case and what challenges have you faced in recent years?
K: It’s been far more intense. I’ve been in this field for about 20 years. We’ve known and documented for quite some time that many of our forests, particularly in the western U.S., are susceptible to wildfires, droughts, and insect and disease epidemics. These are often a natural part of the forest ecosystem, but we are seeing an increase in both the extent and severity of those disturbances. I live in Western Oregon and 2020 changed everything for me regarding forest health. About a million acres in this state burned in about 72 hours.
And California was experiencing very similar fires. And fire doesn’t know boundaries. So, we see it affecting private lands — for timber production and family forests, national forests, national parks, and tribal lands. It’s been a challenging thing to observe. And it’s been a challenging thing for us to sort of get our heads around about how we’re going to respond.
R: You said 2020 changed everything for you. That sounds quite existential. What did you mean by that?
K: For me, it was being able to literally stand up on the hill near my home and see much of the Cascades burning. Smoke filled the air from where I live down to the Mexico border for weeks on end. It was a recognition of the significance of the challenges we faced. I am no stranger to the effects of fire or the extent of degraded forests that are susceptible to drought and fire. But when you see it, breathing in that smoke, it takes on a very different form.
Some large landscapes have experienced virtually 100 percent tree mortality across tens of thousands of acres. When that happens, there is no ability for that natural system to self-regenerate, which is a foundational principle of forest ecosystems and what makes them a forest. So that has forced us to think about what to do in those landscapes that have seen such severe damage. We have to ensure that the decisions we’re making now are the right ones in a changing climate where we’re seeing new issues in forests we’ve never seen before and at such a rapid pace.
R: We hear a lot about wildfires being out of control, and there seems to be some gaps in public knowledge about what fire does to forests. Can you explain that a little?
K: I’ll speak about this from a Northwestern American forest perspective because that’s principally where I work and where I live. But obviously, these changes are happening all over the planet.
Firstly, each forest ecosystem has some capacity to adapt to climate changes. That’s always been the case; forests come and go in certain areas. But what’s alarming is the sheer pace at which we see the changes happen. In the Western U.S., humans have chosen to exclude fire within these ecosystems that have adapted to deal with fire through millennia. They’ve evolved that way to endure frequent low-severity, low-intensity fires. And that was something indigenous people in western North America used as a management tool. That has been largely lost and we are desperately trying to get the fire back onto the landscape when it is safe.
But with climate change, the window in which we have that option has shrunk down from year to year. Also, over the last 100 years, there’s been a lot of in-growth in our western forests, which has increased the density and changed the composition of these forests such that it has vastly changed the forests’ ability and resilience to accommodate things like a drought. The rapid change has really pushed the limits of those systems to be able to cope. We have to figure out ways to help the forest in those cases.
R: What would be the impact on people who live on the West Coast?
K: Water is the biggest impact. When you lose your watershed, which forests help manage, that can completely change the lives of people who rely on it, whether that’s a population of 100,000 or even five million.
About 55 percent of our drinking water in this country gets filtered through forests and in the West, it’s an even higher percentage. If we lose those forested watersheds, we don’t have a lot of other options. That’s the most critical effect on humans by far. But also, the recreation side of this is huge. We just came out of COVID and more people are visiting National Forests and Parks than ever.
Those treasured areas can be really important from an economic and cultural perspective. And clearly, we will also lose wildlife and biodiversity. We often think about the human-centric values that forests have, but there’s a whole slew of species that are dependent on these ecosystems. We lose those as well.
R: What are some solutions already being brought forward or used?
K: I’m really excited about the Federal Wildfire Commission. It’s a congressionally chartered commission to help Congress determine what to do regarding wildfire. And that includes measures to increase forest health and resilience to fire and its effects. It also provides for measures to recover forests that have burned severely. And that’s really where American Forest does a lot of its work. That can look like developing tailored restoration strategies and plans that incorporate climate science. We are making the right decisions as best we can with the information we have.
That can be done by planting clusters or even leaving open areas. A big question and area that we’re really beginning to experiment more is controlled burning. It’s important to really underscore that we can’t be thinking about fires as either all good or all bad. It depends on a number of factors.
R: So, this committee that you’re on, does that have anything to do with wildland firefighters and kind of the outcomes that they experience, or is this just about the forest management?
K: There are several elements of what we are preparing in our wildfire response, including wildland firefighters — things like compensation, paid mental health and the full gamut of wildfire-related issues. So there will be a big report including several recommendations across various issues. And climate change will be a big part of that throughout.
R: Reckon recently spoke to some wildland firefighters. Many of them seem homeless and the consensus among them is that low pay is a huge problem — under $40,000 a year in most cases. But one of the things many of them claimed was that wildfires had little to do with climate change and everything to do with poor forest management. Is that something you were aware of?
K: It’s a confluence of issues, so to say it’s one or the other is inaccurate. And it’s disingenuous in some cases. I think ample evidence and public scientific research point to how climate change and forest management have contributed to where we are now. There’s certainly a management component to this. I mentioned that the most significant consequence or cause from a management perspective is the widespread suppression and exclusion of fire as a natural process within these ecosystems over the last 100 years.
We know that and accept that it was a mistake. But also, removing some of the older, fire-resilient trees within these landscapes has not helped. So there’s that legacy as well. So those two decisions have changed the composition and structure of forests.
One of our poorer legacies is that there was a lot of harvesting of the old growth. And there was a selection of large trees that had adapted to fire — thick bark and high limbs. Once removed, they allow ingrowth and more stems per acre, which is more fuel for a fire.
R: There seems to be this idea that if you cut down a tree, as long as you replace it, then we’re good. Please explain why that’s not the case and why the old-growth trees are important.
K: Old growth is important for so many reasons from an ecological and biodiversity standpoint.
Firstly, multiple species of animals depend on those old-growth trees. We also used to have far more larger diameter older trees in our fire-adapted forests that could withstand fire when it did come through. Since we’ve lost many of them, we’ve also lost those unique genetics that confer disease resistance, drought tolerance and other traits that make them more resilient to fire.
The biggest consequence from a fire behavior perspective is when you have a tree that is a really high distance to the first limb and has thick bark, that tree is likely to survive a low severity or even a moderate severity fire. And generally, those trees were widely spaced apart. And then, when you have a forest that is replaced with multiple smaller trees that have not experienced frequent, low-severity fires, you get forest fires that behave very differently and the older trees that would normally survive may not.
Even if you have those legacy old-growth trees, you have forests with many more stems per acre if you’ve had that in-growth of smaller, newer trees. And that means higher severity and faster-moving fires. And it’s tragic because those are important for ecological reasons. They’re important to Americans and Native American communities. They’re important to us for all different reasons. And, of course, those older trees hold a lot of carbon.
