Federal land seizure advocates, you can’t log your way out of wildfire | Opinion
Anytime someone talks about shifting management of federal lands to Idaho, know that they have a bigger goal in mind.
In a recent interview on The Ranch Podcast, Rep. Jordan Redman, R-Coeur d’Alene, was frank about his goals for public lands in Idaho.
He said his father, former Rep. Eric Redman, dreamed of Idaho taking ownership of federal lands, and his goal is the same. The first step is for Idaho to manage public lands for a bit, then the state takes ownership of them.
“How do we get that federal land back in ownership for the state?” Rep. Jordan Redman said.
Back? It should be said that Idaho has never owned federal land. Redman should try reading the Constitution he swore to uphold: “... the people of the state of Idaho do agree and declare that we forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof ... .”
You can’t get back what you never owned; you can only take it. In service of the goal of taking federal land, Redman made a familiar argument.
“We get these big wildfires that rip through, destroy the renewable resource that’s timber,” he said.
“I believe that with the proper management, we have no reliance on the federal government. I mean, we literally generate that much revenue.”
This often-repeated claim is, frankly, absurd.
What people mean when they say this sort of thing is that we have too many forest fires because we aren’t doing enough logging. It should be said clearly: There is absolutely no evidence that this is true. It is wishful thinking at best, deliberate deception at worst.
Here’s the basic narrative: We face terrible wildfires most years. We face those fires because there are too many trees because of too little logging. Increasing logging will mean more revenue and fewer, less severe fires — win-win.
This argument ignores that there is a fundamental difference between the kind of logging that is done for timber production and the kind that is done to reduce fire risk. Economically viable logging often does not reduce wildfire risk, and fuel reduction to combat wildfire risk is often not profitable.
Fuel reduction involves the removal of ground fuel and ladder fuel — burnable material that can help a fire move from the ground into the canopy.
In much of Idaho, what this means is cutting out lots of brushy, short, small-diameter trees and branches — trees that mostly aren’t suitable for lumber. If you want to do fire risk reduction, it’s usually going to be something you have to pay for, not a cash cow.
One 2023 study drawing data from Idaho and Montana estimated that “a nearly fourfold increase in the price of small-diameter material would be required to move the needle on fuel removal in our study area” — in other words, for every $1 the market will pay, the taxpayer would have to kick in $3 just to keep the operation in the black.
Economically viable logging usually involves harvesting large trees. Those trees go to the sawmill for lumber and are much more valuable than small trees. But what’s left behind by big logging operations isn’t a more fire-resistant forest.
If you’ve ever spent time in an area that was clear-cut years or decades before, you find forests where the trees grow densely together. And because everything sprouted at the same time, all the trees are about the same height. It’s a wonderful environment for fire.
This isn’t to say we don’t need profit-focused logging; we do need it because we need lumber. But it isn’t a fire management strategy, and if the goal is to clear-cut the state after transfer, that’s something quite different than what most people understand by “management.”
It’s not impossible that you could improve forest management here and there with targeted use of logging-based strategies, though.
A recent report from Resources for the Future does find that there are instances where taking some larger trees (over 21 inches in diameter) could produce enough lumber-quality timber to make a fuel removal project pencil out. Earlier modeling from the same group estimated that if you packaged in the right to cut about 20% of the big trees in an area where you’re doing fuel reduction, such projects would become economically viable on about 8 million acres of Forest Service land (the Forest Service manages 193 million acres, for context).
But this means these projects would just squeak by without operating at a loss, not be giant money-makers. While this mixed logging method may be a viable model for improving forest management at the margins, it’s not going to result in some big windfall for the state. And it’s not going to come close to covering the cost of fighting massive wildfires, which will of course continue.
As I’ve written previously, if Idaho taxpayers were on the hook for suppression in a bad wildfire year (once-in-a-decade bad, not once-in-a-century), Idaho might have to spend as much on fighting fire as it does on its entire prison system. You never know when that year will come, and Idaho can’t run a deficit. Idaho would face unavoidable and regular fiscal crises.
The simple truth is that Idaho cannot afford to manage federal lands within its boundaries. And no amount of ideology is going to change that.
If Idaho ever took possession of these lands, we know exactly what would happen.
The decision would be to go broke or sell, and Idaho would be forced to find a way to sell off its greatest heritage and legacy, never to get it back.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.