Forest Management Facts and Logic

President Trump's tweet on November 10th, two days after the Camp Fire destroyed most of Paradise, CA, sparked controversy:

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

Reaction on Twitter was negative, of course. A plurality of responses were of the Trump-is-an-idiot genre, with a subcategory pointing out that, because the Federal Government owns most of the forestland, the President should point the finger at his own Executive Branch. That argument might have some validity if environmentalist lawsuits had not stymied government efforts to clean up the forests.

Sacramento Bee, 2015: Anti-logging lawsuits hurt fight against forest fires, officials say [bold added]

The largest fire ever recorded in the Sierra Nevada, the Rim Fire that began in August 2013, ultimately burned 402 square miles, spanning parts of Yosemite National Park, private lands and the Stanislaus National Forest. In September 2014, the Forest Service proposed a plan to allow logging on 52 square miles of the affected wildlands.

The Center for Biological Diversity and several other environmental groups subsequently sued to stop the Rim Fire plan [snip].

More than 40 percent of the [1,125 environmental lawsuits between 1989 and 2008] challenged the Forest Service’s “vegetative management” decisions, meaning logging and salvage programs, and these were also the lawsuits the agency was “most likely to settle,” the analysts found.

(WSJ graphic)

The destruction of Paradise may be the decisive event that will force environmentalists to withdraw their opposition to government forest management practices. Even before this year's wildfires the sentiment was moving in the direction of thinning trees.

In 2017, California joined with the U.S. Forest Service and other groups in creating the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative, which aims to thin millions of trees from about 2.4 million acres of forest—believed to be the largest such state-federal project in the country....The thinning coalition represents a new front. The Nature Conservancy’s Mr. Edelson used to sue to block logging plans in national forests as an attorney for another green group. Now he said he sees the need for limited logging because of the dramatic rise in wildfires.

President Trump's tweets are often crude and disrespectful, but they also give rise to learning. Thoughtful opponents who wish to respond with more than name-calling are forced to counter with facts and logic. Often to their surprise, sometimes the President has facts and logic on his side as well.