Opinion: Cal Fire’s forest management undermining California’s climate goals

In these times of climate denialism in Washington, some look for signs of reason in California. 

Sadly, one particular agency can’t see the forest for the trees. 

Cal Fire, the state’s chief fire agency, has a little-known side hustle managing 14 state-owned forests, totaling 85,000 acres.

To pay those bills, Cal Fire logs the public’s trees in its largest holding – Jackson Demonstration State Forest – which spans 50,000 acres in Mendocino County. The agency also wields absolute approval power for logging on California’s vast private lands.

Trees are about half carbon by dry weight. Coastal redwood forests contain more of the stuff than any other, storing it for more than two millennia if undisturbed. Highly resistant to rot, insects, and fire, old redwoods provide an extremely durable carbon piggy bank storing up to 1,300 tons per acre. At odds with California’s climate goal of achieving zero-net carbon pollution, logging and milling wastes promptly release half a tree’s carbon into the atmosphere. The rest resides for a time in lumber, which in the case of redwood is mostly used for picnic tables, fences and decks that all too soon decay and release the remaining carbon.

Conveniently flawed

Yes, the carbon may be recaptured if trees regrow. However, that’s hardly guaranteed and takes far too long given the current climate emergency. Troublingly, Cal Fire’s flawed models systematically underestimate logging emissions and overestimate regrowth, conveniently ignoring how climate change hamstrings regrowth and fuels wildfires that release yet more emissions. 

Thanks to such voodoo carbon accounting, sellers of forest carbon offsets elsewhere are having to refund buyers due to unmet growth projections. 

In fact, forest growth has been slowing around the world, including in Mendocino’s Jackson forest, which could devolve into a “zombie forest” like that in the Sierra foothills where growth of established trees has fully stalled and new ones cannot sprout.

Unhappy marriage

Cal Fire’s management of Jackson demonstrates a happy marriage of industrial logging with conservation and recreation – or at least, that’s what they want us to think. Truth be told, this is a rocky marriage, to say the least.

After acquiring the land in 1947, Cal Fire liquidated nearly all remaining old-growth trees (20,000 acres worth), continuing into the 1980s. The only period in modern times that carbon storage increased there was during a decade-long moratorium following protests and litigation. Logging later resumed under an archaic mandate and approval processes that a past Cal Fire director and others say still violates key laws such as CEQA and works at cross purposes to the missions of other agencies.

Only 7% of old-growth forests remain, most of which are now protected. Because most second-growth trees – which can be up to 175 years old – are still fair game, only 2% have avoided the axe.

Cal Fire claims to manage half of Jackson to promote such old-forest conditions. In reality, it’s closer to a third. For the rest, happy talk about “sustainable management” is code for perpetually growing and then cutting young trees. As a result, tree sizes and growth in state-managed forests embarrassingly lag others in the coastal range, achieving a meager 10% of their carbon-storage potential.

Putting the cart before the horse and reneging on public commitments to the contrary, Cal Fire is forging ahead with more logging before completing a long-overdue update of its overarching Forest Management Plan to ensure environmental protections and resolve ambiguities as to whether they areCal Fire in compliance with legislation calling for tribal co-management. These antics are supercharging a decades-long controversy.

Cal Fire’s newest proposal for Jackson, dubbed AMEX, targets nearly 500 acres with a patchwork of small clearcuts and is silent on tree sizes to be felled. Cal Fire’s use of a “black-box” carbon calculator hampers external review. Observers say claimed carbon benefits from regrowth ignore future carbon capture if the removed trees were allowed to keep growing and undercount above- and below-ground carbon emissions.

Another similarly sized proposal in Jackson – Camp 8 South – focuses on a rare second-growth forest in the name of “restoration.” Measuring up to six-feet in diameter and exceeding 200 feet, money indeed grows on these trees. But thanks to logging abstinence since the late 1800s, the grand trees are already widely spaced and flammable deadwood is sparse, a textbook example of healthy and resilient forestland on-track to produce tomorrow’s giants. In a nearby plot, natural self-thinning over 80 years reduced crowding from 275 to 70 trees per acre.

Projects like these also increase vulnerability to the ravages of climate change. 

Cal Fire is greenwashing

Wildfire risk escalates as logging litters the forest floor with discarded fuels and admits sunlight that dries soils and woody debris while promoting brushy native undergrowth and flammable invasives. Unlike natural thinning, large fire-resilient trees are typically high-graded for felling in Jackson, creating tinderboxes of 300 to 500 mostly juvenile trees per acre.

Endangered salmon decimated by early logging are slowly returning to the already at-risk Noyo River, downslope from the Camp 8 forest. They are now challenged by climate-driven drought, warming waters, carbon-laden mudflows from proposed timber operations, and water withdrawals to control dust from logging trucks.

While greenwashing is usually seen as the domain of private companies, Cal Fire is a public agency also deeply engaged in the practice. 

Citizens, environmental groups and tribal stakeholders are demoralized by this and the prioritization of industrial logging, embrace of pseudoscience, non-transparency, poor responsiveness to public and expert comments, and meetings held while stakeholders are at work. Bad-faith actions elsewhere further undermine public trust. 

State Senate Leader Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Assembly member Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa) recently wrote to the Board of Forestry and Cal Fire asking that Jackson’s decade-old Forest Management Plan be completed and its nearly two-decade-old Environmental Impact Report be updated prior to further logging.

Looking forward, wiser practices include low-intensity prescribed fire, urgently needed after decades of overzealous suppression – often by none other than Cal Fire. The agency could likely generate comparable revenue from thinning smaller trees in truly overgrown areas.

It’s time to rethink Jackson’s mission, Cal Fire’s broader role and forest management itself. 

The stewardship of public forests – holding a third of all timber nationally – must evolve to demonstrate genuine science-based climate solutions to be emulated by private industry. 

Let’s start here in California.

Evan Mills is an environmental scientist specializing in energy and climate change. He is a retired senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. John P. O’Brien is a climate scientist specializing in atmospheric dynamics, forest health and climate change. He has worked as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and he’s a board member of the Environmental Protection Information Center.