The U.S. Forest Service advocates logging and controlled burns to build up woodland resilience to fires and other natural disasters; environmentalists want to leave them alone.
The Alliance’s campaign builds on this movement by pushing to establish the first national preserve explicitly intended to safeguard mature trees to tap into their carbon sequestration potential. First, Congress would have to pass legislation to transfer the forest to the Park Service.
“These fires and the way that they are behaving right now are not going to be as extreme as they are going to be in the next decade. We have yet to see the full fruition of climate change come to light and how it’s going to influence wildfire behavior,” said Kimiko Barrett, lead wildfire researcher and policy analyst at nonprofit research group Headwaters Economics.
The Forest Service uses prescribed burns to reduce flammable vegetation in the Shawnee, but the Alliance say these fires, combined with logging, are actually making the Shawnee drier and more fire-prone. “If we had a serious drought that lasted two to three years and killed a lot of that midstory, we would have communities that would lie in parallel to the same thing that we saw in Maui and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016 around the Great Smoky Mountains,” said Ruffner.the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Further, he and Barrett stressed that communities must not only think about how they manage their forests but also how they prepare their residents. A tree marked to be harvested at a timber sale on the Waterfall Trail on the western end of the Shawnee National Forest near Murphysboro, Aug. 30, 2023. “We have to have a bias toward action in rural America, to try to find ways to make our communities vibrant and multidimensional so that when we go to market them in a regional or national way, people will make a decision to come see us instead of seeing somebody else,” he said.
Restoring the Shawnee to its conditions pre-westward expansion is a priority for the Forest Service, according to its latest Forest Management Plan published in 2006. Oaks need sunlight to grow so, over time, young oaks were replaced by maple and beech trees that thrive in shady conditions. Wildlife that find habitats in oaks suffered alongside the declining oak population.
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