We can't forget where we've been, or what our forests are becoming

As we near the end of summer and begin fall in our national forests, we cannot forget where we have been. 

We have lived through another season of smoke‑choked valleys, closed highways, evacuation notices, and communities holding their breath as lightning strikes and dry winds turn small ignitions into runaway events. We have watched forests we once walked, hunted, and worked in become tinderboxes. And we have seen, yet again, that the conditions on the ground are changing faster than our laws, policies, and institutions are willing to admit.

The truth is simple: Earth’s climate has never been static. It has always shifted — warming, cooling, drying, flooding, recalibrating. Climate change is not a modern invention; it is a permanent, natural feature of the planet’s history. But while the climate continues to evolve, our forest‑management framework remains frozen in time, built on assumptions from the 1970s that no longer match reality.

Today’s forests are not the forests of 1970. Summers are hotter and drier. Snowpack melts earlier. Runoff arrives weeks ahead of historic norms. Beetle‑kill spreads through overstocked stands like a contagion. Fire seasons stretch longer each year, and the fires themselves burn with an intensity that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Regardless of the cause, the conditions have changed — and pretending otherwise has consequences measured in acres lost, homes destroyed, and lives disrupted.

Yet our policies still treat active management as a threat rather than a tool. Decades of litigation, procedural gridlock, and ideological absolutism have created a system where doing nothing is considered virtuous. But doing nothing is not neutral. Doing nothing is a choice — and it is the most destructive choice available.

A century of fire suppression has left many forests dangerously out of sync with natural fire cycles. In places where 60 to 80 trees per acre once stood, we now see 300 to 600. Ladder fuels turn every ignition into a crown fire. Deadfall piles up until late summer winds can turn a spark into a catastrophe. When lightning hits that, it is not “nature healing itself.” It is a stand‑replacing event that sterilizes soil, destroys habitat, and sends smoke across half the continent.

Calling this “natural” is a dangerous fiction.

Modern forestry is not the clearcut‑and‑walk‑away era of the past. It is selective thinning, targeted salvage, prescribed fire, watershed protection, and road maintenance that allows firefighters and foresters to reach landscapes that need attention. These practices reduce megafire intensity, protect communities, restore ecological resilience, and support rural economies. Stewardship is not exploitation — it is responsibility.

But stewardship requires access. And access is disappearing. Road decommissioning, blanket restrictions, and litigation‑driven paralysis have steadily removed the public from public forests. The result is predictable: larger fires, more smoke, more habitat loss, and higher taxpayer costs. When agencies cannot thin, cannot burn, cannot salvage, and cannot reach the land, the land suffers.

We are entering a new season — not just on the calendar, but in the life of our forests. The climate will continue to change, as it always has. The question is whether our management will change with it.

A modern forest policy must acknowledge that climate change is continuous and unavoidable. It must empower agencies to act at landscape scale. It must treat rural communities as partners, not obstacles. And it must replace outdated laws that assume static conditions with a framework built for the world we actually live in.

As summer ends and fall begins, we cannot forget where we have been. But more importantly, we must decide where we are going. Because the path we are on — the path of paralysis — leads only to more megafires, more smoke, and more loss.

The forests are telling us what they need.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

DARRELL KERBY

Bonners Ferry