I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a (dead) tree.

In these times of staff reductions and budget cuts, it was disheartening to read that our local Forest Service was devoting its supposedly limited resources to proceed with the deforestation portions of the “Frisco Backyard Project,” starting with slash-and-burn removal of standing dead trees (denuding live trees later). 

Such projects are carried out under the fallacious mantra of “fuels reduction.” Think about it, once their needles have dropped, beetle-killed lodgepole pines offer little to burn. What removing dead trees does do, is take away the dense mix of live and dead trees that allows wind-prone lodgepole to remain standing, provides unique habitat for specialized birds and insects and creates ideal conditions for climax spruce and fir seedlings to propagate.

Other impacts of slash-and-burn projects are painfully obvious. With fewer neighbors to protect them, many of the spared live trees blow over, often across the trails. It is hard to imagine anything ever growing again in the ash and sterilized soil of the huge scars left by the burned teepees. The burn circles are easy to spot, even from a distance, by the dead foliage high in the surrounding trees (Will they survive? How did they manage not to catch fire, or did they all?). In lodgepole-dominant sections, so much of the canopy has been removed that the temperature is probably ten to twenty degrees higher. 

And, of course, the wildfire risk has been greatly increased rather than reduced. The grass, weeds and brush that will fill in the space left by their former dead-tree occupants will be dramatically more likely to catch fire and will spread fire hundreds of times faster.