Born and raised in Truckee, the smell of fresh pine always calls me home. This year it won out, and I’ve moved back full time. But lately, Northern California’s iconic forests have come under attack.
Industrial-scale wood pellet plants have been proposed in Lassen and Tuolumne counties under the guise of responsible forest management and wildfire prevention. Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a government-linked nonprofit, proposed these plants with the intention of exporting one million tons of wood pellets to overseas markets annually. The project is backed by a notorious biomass company, U.K.-based Drax, whose chart-topping carbon emissions and colorful history of environmental law violations — including a recent fine of $2.5 million for serious air quality breaches — speak for themselves.
Initially, Drax and GSNR touted the project as a means of using leftover forest matter generated from slash piles or sawmills, a solution for forest “waste.” However, their recently released draft environmental impact report paints a much different picture. GSNR intends to log whole trees (up to 40 inches in diameter) for pellets over a massive area that includes 18 of California’s national forests, extending operations into Nevada and Oregon.
I’m afraid of a future where California’s forests are at the mercy of the highest bidder and appalled by the extensive harm that follows in Drax’s wake. But my deepest fear surrounding this project is the implications it has for my own hometown.
With their sights set on Northern California, Drax and GSNR will siphon resources — namely money, time, and attention — away from true wildfire resilience. The indiscriminate, broadscale thinning that GSNR proposes won’t prevent wildfire, despite the companies’ unfounded claims to the contrary, and may even exacerbate its effects. Even if any given area of thinned forest experiences a high-intensity fire — the likelihood of which studies have deemed negligible — abundant scientific evidence contradicts thinning alone as an effective strategy to curb wildfires.
In fact, U.S. Forest Service scientists have found that thinned areas create more open conditions for wildfire to flourish, and are associated with “higher temperatures, lower relative humidity, higher wind speeds, and increasing fire intensity,” according to a 2019 article in Ecosphere. A 2019 study from Forest Service scientists cites thinned forests as creating drier areas that make fire ignition and high heat more likely. As someone whose lifelong home sits squarely within wildfire territory, these conditions sound terrifying to me.
Trying to fireproof California is like trying to use a bucket to empty the ocean: an impossible task with disastrous implications.
Fire suppression’s role, then, should be strategically deployed in the spaces immediately surrounding our homes and emergency routes, a tactic proven to be the most effective means of wildfire protection for homes and lives. The best available science encourages home hardening and defensible space, in addition to the development and improvement of warning systems and evacuation routes, and the availability of proper air filters and escape shelters for every community in fire-prone areas. Science, not profit-driven logging schemes, will help keep our community safe.
To create wildfire-resilient communities, we must steward our land in a way that keeps carbon sequestered and ecosystems thriving. By decimating California forests, which act as important carbon sequesters, and shipping wood pellets around the world to be burned like coal, GSNR is coopting our legitimate fears of climate-driven wildfire for their own economic gain. Their proposal goes beyond forest resiliency to develop an industrial monster that will produce the very carbon emissions making California’s already outsized wildfires bigger, hotter, and more frequent.
Our neighboring forests being sold and burned overseas does not make my community’s wish list this holiday season. What does? A stable climate, legitimate wildfire defense, and safety for my home and neighbors.
~ Addison Wingate was born and raised in Truckee, where she grew up skiing, hiking, horseback riding, and enjoying the forest she so lovingly calls home. After graduating from UCLA in 2022, Addison joined the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she now helps to protect the planet, combat the climate crisis, and advance public health.
