During an interview with Cathy Wurzer from Minnesota Public Radio last week, Eighth District Congressman Pete Stauber once again repeated his preposterous talking point regarding the ongoing issue of intense wildfire smoke from Canada.
“And the fact of the matter is, if we can manage our forests, if we can harvest those trees and reduce the burden on the ground that is actually the fuel for the fires, we can do very, very well,” Stauber stated.
Stauber’s suggestion that better “forest management” can help reduce wildfire smoke from Canada is uninformed. Yet, it’s become the only talking point that President Trump’s loyalists feel they can use given that they are required by the president and his hardcore supporters to ignore the primary factor that’s driving the increasing levels of smoke emanating from the boreal forests of Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia— and that’s climate change.
We all know, and I think even Rep. Stauber would admit, that as recently as 10-15 years ago, we didn’t regularly experience days-long incursions of dense wildfire smoke into our state from Canada.
But here’s another fact that Mr. Stauber can’t deny, and that’s that there were just as many trees, if not more, in the boreal forests of Canada 10-15 years ago than there are today. And there were fewer areas experiencing “forest management” in Canada back then, since the road networks didn’t extend as far north as they do today. Yet, somehow, those trees didn’t burn as frequently or as intensely as they do now.
We don’t need to guess why that is. According to Environment Canada, the climate in central and northern Canada is changing at about twice the pace of most other parts of the world, which is consistent with the modeling of climate scientists. Warmer temperatures are combining with more frequent droughts to increase forest mortality, speed the drying of forest duff and soils, and heighten the risk of catastrophic wildfires in the boreal forests.
As we’ve noted here before, the location of the major land biomes that exist on Earth are determined largely by climate. The climate regime consistent with the boreal forest is shifting northward and that is both pushing the tree line further north (which is well documented) and is putting other parts of the boreal forest under increasing stress and risk of wildfire as the climate becomes increasingly incompatible with this forest type. While wildfire has been a fact of life in boreal forests for eons, the frequency and intensity of those fires has increased dramatically over the past decade due to climate change. It appears that large portions of the boreal forest, both in Canada and Russia, have reached a tipping point in the last several years, where the conditions have changed sufficiently that wildfire has become inevitable. That trend is likely to intensify in the years to come as humans fail to meet the challenge posed by climate change.
Logging is not a solution
Stauber’s suggestion that simply cutting more trees in Canada is the answer to our smoke problem reflects his lack of understanding of, well… everything related to this issue. As University of Minnesota forest ecologist Lee Frelich pointed out to me recently, it actually isn’t burning trees that are sending all that smoke into Minnesota. What burns in a boreal forest fire are the fine fuels— the (mostly coniferous) tree branches along with the duff layer, which is the accumulation of years’ worth of needles and leaves that don’t decompose quickly in the normally cool to frigid conditions of the boreal forest.
This is a fact that we all should recognize. If you look at the photos from the aftermath of forest fires in our region, we see that the vast majority of the trees, while dead, remain standing and largely intact, they’re just blackened and devoid of any green growth. The trunks and larger branches of most trees don’t burn in even the most intense forest fires.
Logging the boreal forest removes the least flammable parts of the trees (the trunks) and leaves the most flammable material behind, while simultaneously exposing all that material to direct sunlight and wind. The only way to practically eliminate all that flammable material would be to burn it after logging, yet doing this on a scale that would be meaningful would put every bit as much smoke in the air as the fires currently burning in Canada.
And there are other practical considerations as well. Canada’s boreal forest is vast, at about 1.36 billion acres, and a large majority of it has no road access. How does Stauber propose to get logging equipment into these vast stretches of wilderness and get the timber out again? Helicopters?
Even if logging could help, Canada’s forests are so vast that logging can’t really scratch the surface. Canada currently harvests about 1.65 million acres annually. Even if it could double its current timber production to 3.3 million acres, that would still only amount to “managing” about 0.2 percent of Canada’s forests annually. At that rate, it would take 500 years to log it all once. At the current rate of logging, it would take a millennium.
And even if Canada had the ability to increase its timber harvest, where would it sell the wood products? It already meets all of its own demand and the Trump administration has imposed hefty lumber tariffs on Canadian softwoods and other wood products, which limits Canada’s ability to expand its markets, which is the only way it could expand production. Is Stauber going to make the case to Trump to ease the lumber tariffs so Canada can “manage” more of its forests? Not a chance.
The boreal forest is our best hedge against climate change
If anything, the U.S. should be working with Canada to protect the boreal forest, which is the largest land-based carbon sink on the planet. Unfortunately, recent studies are confirming that deforestation in the tropical rain forests is reducing the ability of those forests to sequester carbon. The boreal forests are so vast, at about 4.2 billion acres worldwide, and hold their carbon so much longer than tropical forests, that it makes them the most important carbon sink on land. Of course, the best way to protect the boreal forests is to address climate change, but that seems increasingly unlikely given the Trump administration’s concerted efforts to intensify, rather than address, the problem.
And there’s the rub. We have a congressman whose constituents are unhappy with a situation that his party’s own policies are making worse. And because Stauber has no choice but to dance to Trump’s tune, he’s forced to use nonsensical talking points and simply hope that his constituents aren’t interested or smart enough to see them for what they are.
It’s up to journalists and the public to hold his feet to the fire on issues like this. If we allow politicians like Stauber to pass off nonsense as common sense, the smoke will only get thicker.