- Contributed by Sam Krop

Our reaction to forest fire needs to be more nuanced than just: ”cut and replant.” Burns, it turns out, are actually an opportunity to regenerate a missing component of the spotted owl’s ancestral habitat. 

Fire is elemental, fire is powerful, fire can and does destroy homes. But does fire destroy our forests? What happens when forests are allowed to regrow naturally?

Late last month we alerted you to post-fire logging projects moving forward across western Oregon, and in particular Bureau of Land Management forests in the McKenzie and North Umpqua River watersheds. As the new year advances, so too will these and other logging proposals in sensitive burned landscapes.

The carbon emissions from fire are less worrisome than you might think.

Adapted from Oregon’s Ancient Forests: A hiking guide

A a discussion with fire experts about these contributing factors and how we might prepare for a more fire-prone future.

You may have recently seen a statistic floating around in the news or on social media lately that 80% of the forest acres burned in Oregon were on federal public lands. This line has most recently been aggressively trotted out by logging corporations and their PR firm, Portland-based Gallatin Public Affairs, to attack efforts to protect clean drinking water. Gallatin even managed to tell an especially pants-on-fire whopper through several rural newspapers and OPB's Think Out Loud claiming that federal public forests are completely “unmanaged.”  

This week, Governor Kate Brown’s Council on Wildfire Response unveiled their final proposed management plan for the state. An earlier draft of the plan attracted headlines for its eye-popping cost - $4 billion - but little attention has been paid to the substance of the report and whether the recommendations will work.

The short answer is: probably not.