-by Josh Schlossberg

How much credible science backs up the draft Nederland and Timberline Fire Protection District “Community Wildfire Protection Plan” (CWPP), with its priority of logging thousands of acres of publicly owned, biodiverse, carbon-storing forests?

To my knowledge, not a single member of the core team drawing up the plan is an independent (meaning no conflict of interest) wildfire scientist. And of the 21 references in the 263-page document, zero independent peer-reviewed studies on “fuel reduction” are cited (only U.S. Forest Service findings, the federal agency that gets billions in taxpayer funding to do this logging).

Meanwhile, a large and growing body of peer-reviewed science demonstrates that not only won’t “fuel reduction” logging protect communities from wildfire—only home hardening is proven to do that—tree-cutting can make flames burn hotter and spread faster by opening forests to sunlight and wind.

What’s more, the narrative of “overgrown” forests coupled with “unusual” high-severity wildfire upon which the CWPP is built is refuted by studies finding that, even prior to fire suppression, western dry forests— including in Boulder County and across the Front Range—did grow densely and did routinely experience high-severity wildfire, especially in Nederland’s montane zone.

In 2014, when I was working as a journalist, I wrote an article for Boulder Weekly in the aftermath of “fuel reduction” in West Magnolia in the Arapaho National Forest. This June I revisited the area and found that many of the clearcut lodgepole pine stands have grown back even more densely than what’s left of the unlogged forest, defeating the project’s (unscientific) premise in the first place.

Not only is this local, on-the-ground, easily verified case study ignored by the CWPP, but the document sneaks in a proposal to log units already dropped by the Forest Service after public outcry. Ongoing community concerns within the proposed 581-acre “West Boulder Canyon Phase 1” outside Big Springs include logging opening the forest to the drying and heating effects of sunlight and wind—thereby more rapidly spreading any potential wildfire to homes—as well as exacerbating flooding issues for residences. Yet the CWPP seems intent on spitting in the face of such participatory democracy by local citizens in its attempt to reverse the previous decision and rush through cutting of this area as a “first priority.” This cannot stand.

Thankfully, the CWPP also contains excellent sections backed by unanimous science. Most crucial, the desperate need for universal home hardening and preparedness, making structures and their immediate surroundings (studies suggest 15-60 feet and no more than 100) fire-resistant, on which the County’s Wildfire Partners has made some small but promising headway.

The problem is, the CWPP still wants to route the vast majority of time, effort, and taxpayer funding to its main goal of unproven “fuels” logging— increasing rather than reducing the risk to communities and firefighters—instead of exclusively towards proven home hardening for lower-income residents, retirees, and those with disabilities, along with more effective prevention of human-caused wildfires.

(Originally published in The Mountain Ear, 8.3.24)