This bill to reduce wildfires might actually make them worse

Some experts told me that the basic logic behind the bill could actually lead to more severe burns. Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, or FUSEE, told me that scaling up logging in the wilderness, where uncontrolled blazes can stomp through small towns on their way to the exurbs, would leave behind the most flammable materials. “Grasses, shrubs, leaves, small trees, old logging slash: These are the things that the timber industry will never ever remove,” he says. “They have no commodity value. When they wanna do logging, they remove the least flammable portion of a tree and dump all the needles and limbs on the ground where it’s basically tinder.” In fact, the best wildfire mitigators are often the trees themselves. Old-growth forests are able to survive and slow the spread of flames—and their numbers are dwindling due to logging.