As Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed Chicago on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Windy City earned the unwelcome distinction of having the “worst air quality of any major city in the world,” according to federal Air Quality Index readings. Authorities issued warnings instructing residents to stay indoors if possible or don masks if they had to be outside. As Chicagoans looked out their windows in horror and disbelief, people in the West likely were thinking, “Welcome to the club.”
Wildfire smoke is a staple of life in the West. Most summers, our beloved mountain ranges disappear in a hazy shroud. Evenings resemble the eerie orange sunset scene from “Star Wars,” while the taste of smoke can make you feel like you’ve swallowed a campfire.
And it is getting worse. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fire season — the time of year when North America’s forests go up in flames — has extended from five months to seven months since the 1970s. Wildfires today consume twice as much land each year on average than they did in the 1990s. In the past eight years, an area the size of Colorado went up in flames, with 10 million acres burned in a single fire season for three of those years — numbers unprecedented since the federal wildland fire agencies began keeping official data in 1983.
What is happening, and what can be done? Climate change is a contributing factor and receives most of the media attention, but the issue runs much deeper. There is simply too much wood in the woods.
After a century of misguided policy that sought to suppress all wildfires, U.S. forests have been transformed into tinderboxes more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire. With an 80 million-acre forest restoration backlog, federally managed forests are in an unnatural and unhealthy state. Our forests are literally choking to death.
Forest restoration projects, which include the mechanical thinning of small-diameter trees and prescribed “good” fire, create healthier, more natural habitats. Indigenous tribes used these practices going back centuries. And today, with the exception of a few forest deniers, there is a broad scientific consensus that we need to get back to these practices.
The biggest obstacle to getting there is not money or staffing, but red tape and unnecessary litigation. Recent research from the Property and Environment Research Center finds that federal permitting and litigation delays can mean it takes anywhere from five to nine years for these needed restoration projects to begin once they are initiated. In my home state of Montana, one Forest Service project has taken more than 15 years to get off the ground due to seemingly endless litigation and permitting hurdles.
The good news is there are bipartisan solutions moving through Congress to speed up this much-needed work. Lawmakers have introduced bills that would fast-track forest permitting, fix bad judicial decisions that contribute to project delays and make it easier for states, counties and tribes to participate in restoration. These bills need not get caught up in climate or partisan politics, lest we “lose the forest for the trees.”
Make no mistake: Wildfires are a climate issue. But if we fail to take action on forest management, the impacts of climate change — drier, hotter, longer fire seasons — will only further contribute to the flammability of our overly dense forests. Fires in the Western U.S. in 2021 released 130 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly a year’s worth of pollution from 29 million cars. Climate policymakers who ignore accelerating forest management can expect a bellowing landscape pouring forth even more carbon dioxide emissions — and many more nights of Broadway in New York going dark because of smoke-filled air.
The wildfire crisis that drifted over Chicago this week is human-made, but we can fix America’s forests with better and faster forest management. To do otherwise would be to fiddle while Rome burns.
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(Brian Yablonski is CEO at the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit institute based in Bozeman, Montana, that creates innovative conservation solutions through markets and incentives)
