Idaho Gov. Little aims to ‘complement’ Trump order with this wildfire plan

Gov. Brad Little on Tuesday ordered the Idaho Department of Lands to expand its partnership with the U.S. Forest Service to help manage the approximately 20 million acres of national forest land in Idaho.

The executive order urged the department to help ramp up “active management” of federally managed forests in the state. The Governor’s Office in a news release said the increased state involvement would help reduce wildfire risk. National forest land in Idaho has “remained totally untouched, creating a tinderbox of fuel that threatens communities, air quality and the environment,” Little said in the release.

But what is “active management,” and what will it mean for Idaho forests?

An Idaho Department of Lands official acknowledged that Little’s order refers in part to commercial logging. The order says that active management may take the form of timber harvests, mechanical thinning, forest health projects and controlled, prescribed burns, among other efforts.

The order was intended to “complement” a March executive order from President Donald Trump’s administration, according to the news release. A White House fact sheet about that order briefly mentions wildfire risk but focuses on Trump’s expansion of timber production to reduce foreign dependency and bolster a “reliable domestic wood industry for military and civilian needs.”

Tim Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and the co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, told the Idaho Statesman that an overreliance on commercial logging would in fact exacerbate the risk of wildfires. He supports increasing the use of prescribed burns — along with strategically cutting back smaller trees and clearing out undergrowth — as a more effective form of mitigation.

Little’s news release celebrates the potential for Trump’s order to streamline permitting for such projects. But that streamlining, Ingalsbee said, would allow private companies to log with less public input and scientific analysis of the effects. He called such an approach an “obsolete model” of forestry that views forests as “a reservoir of, basically, timber resources.”

Lia Brewster, a conservation organizer for the Sierra Club, said the focus of Trump’s order on timber production was “one of the clearest indicators” to her that Little’s order, despite its framing, was not about wildfire resilience.

“The original logic had nothing to do with wildfire,” she told the Statesman.

A spokesperson for Little’s office referred questions about the order to Dustin Miller, the director of Idaho’s Department of Lands. Miller said increasing commercial logging was part of the state’s equation, but also highlighted that the proceeds from such logging are reinvested in restoration projects that mitigate wildfires, such as weed abatement and prescribed burns.

Brewster and Ingalsbee acknowledged that cutting down trees has a place in wildfire management: Thinning out young growth and increasing the space between trees can help slow the spread of wildfires by reducing the amount of fuel available for the fire to burn.

But they raised concerns about using commercial logging to do that cutting. Logging companies’ business incentives, they argued, are to cut down the biggest, oldest — and most fire-resistant — trees, leaving behind the smaller trees, fallen branches and pine needles that will be most dangerous in a wildfire. Idaho’s legacy of commercial logging, for that reason, has contributed to its current vulnerability to wildfires, Ingalsbee said.

“Logging alone can actually increase wildfire risk, not decrease it,” Brewster said. “If the actual intent was wildfire prevention, this is absolutely not the correct tool for that.”

Idaho logging mitigates wildfire risk, industry leaders say

Clete Edmunson, the executive director of Idaho’s Association of Logging Contractors, said criticisms about the industry’s role in wildfire risk reflected its former practices, including in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was just starting out in the business. But the industry has since “made a concerted effort to change,” adopting much safer operations, such as clearing out flammable fallen branches and underbrush after logging an area.

Some of that was driven by the industry’s self-interest: “We want a sustainable healthy forest because we want to keep logging,” Edmunson said. And companies now avoid cutting down the largest, oldest trees in an area because so few mills in the state are set up to process those, and it takes too much time and money to get a large tree to a mill that can handle it.

Jennifer Okerlund, the director of Idaho’s Forest Products Commission, told the Statesman that the process of identifying which areas can be commercially logged involves expert and scientific input, she said.

“I think that there’s probably a misconception about that,” Okerlund said. “Loggers don’t just go out into the forest and pre-select everything they want. When the sale takes place, there are very specific objectives that the land manager is trying to adhere to, and it’s a logger’s job to help them do that.”

She added that a respect for forests and focus on sustainability are pervasive in the logging industry. Many people in the industry are themselves experts in cultivating and managing healthy forests.

Edmunson spoke to the Statesman from Orofino, where, he said, he was overlooking a forest.

“I admire a healthy forest,” he said. “When I see a forest that has dead, diseased and dying trees, or I drive by and see where a fire went through last year, I think, ‘dang,’ you know. It just really bothers me.”

Idaho Conservation League ‘optimistic’ about order

Idaho Conservation League officials expressed optimism about Little’s order. Following major cuts to U.S. Forest Service positions, it could allow Idaho workers to partly fill in the gap through its Good Neighbor Authority, they said, which allows state workers to assist the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in planning and implementing forest restoration projects on federal lands.

“Bringing additional resources and capacity to those areas can make a real difference,” Brad Smith, the organization’s conservation director, told the Statesman in an emailed statement.

Jon Robison, the Idaho Conservation League’s public lands and wildlife director, told the Statesman he was “cautiously optimistic” that the order could help logging companies, the public and conservationists find compromises: places where commercial logging could be done in a way that would help to prevent wildfires.

Idaho has thousands of acres of small- or medium-sized trees that have commercial value, are at the intersection of wild and urban areas, and should be thinned to reduce wildfire risk, Robison said. In those places, “you can accomplish the ecological goals and economic goals and community safety goals — and we have not begun to exhaust those areas yet,” he said.

“It’s a tool, and if the tool happens in the right place, it can do good things,” Robison said.

The key, he said, will be for the public to play a role in steering where such logging occurs.

Ingalsbee, though, said he doubted the public would have any such voice. He said Tuesday’s order was “deja vu all over again” and expressed resignation and frustration at leaders’ decadeslong attempt to mitigate wildfires in a way that was proven to be ineffective.

As a wildland firefighter, “I worked hard as a young man to save those trees, to keep them standing,” Ingalsbee said. “If that’s their solution, why bother to fight fires at all?”