The Forest Service Helping Usher in Climate Apocalypse
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In recent years inhaling wildfire smoke for months on end has been primarily an affliction for those living in the drier Western US. However, in the last two years, those living in the East Coast and the Midwest have joined millions of Americans paying dearly for front row seats to the apocalyptic smoke-filled future we have wrought upon ourselves. Wildfire smoke is now routinely dominating the skies across the globe. Even the cold, rainy UK is having wildfires and drought, unheard of in recent history.
The climate crisis is making wildfires five times more likely to spread out of control. (1) Wildfire smoke is becoming the greatest climate related health threat (2 ) in the United States, and is significantly eroding recent improvements in air quality for 2/3 of the United States. (3) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated that the “western United States has passed a critical threshold since about 2000, and human-caused climate change is now the dominant contributor to the increase of wildfire risk.” (4)
In this theatre of the absurd there is a large troupe of bad actors. Headlining the cast of course is the fossil fuel industry, and closely tied to them have been the politicians who do their bidding. Trump’s climate science illiteracy and divorce from reality would be frightening for a junior high student, let alone a President. He has blamed insufficient “raking of the forest floors” for wildfires in California. He said California’s perennial water shortage and wildfire vulnerability could be solved just by turning an imaginary giant water faucet in British Columbia. Trump was joined this year by several of his MAGA suckerfish in Congress demanding punishment for Canada for allowing its smoke to cross American airspace and fill the lungs of the MAGA faithful. Beating their chests they pronounced, “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests,” insinuating that Canada’s wildfires also reflect insufficient “raking.” They ignored of course, that Canada, through no fault of their own, is warming twice as fast as the global average. (5 ) And given that the Republican Party is the only climate denying political party in the entire world, it makes as much sense as an arsonist blaming the owner of a home he’s just torched for the smoke he’s now inhaling.
But another bad actor is the US Forest Service, and their solution is maybe even less helpful than Donald Trump’s “raking.” The agency has peddled the myth that Western forests are morbidly dense and unhealthy because of decades of fire suppression. Solution? 1.“Fuels reduction treatments” and 2. “Prescribed burns.”The euphemisms are deliberately crafted to make you think our forests are sick, and the Forest Service “doctor” will make house calls to do lots of forest surgery;
mainly lots of amputations. But thinning the forest to control wildfires is about as helpful as thinning your brain to prevent Alzheimer’s.
This is wildfire management malpractice.
The Forest Service cites “in-house” research to support the necessity for “fuels reduction.” Notwithstanding thousands of qualified, honest employees, the agency lives, eats, and breathes conflict of interest. It operates under its headmaster, the US Dept. of Agriculture, which treats trees as a commodity. It’s joined at the hip to the logging industry. It promotes lumber and wood products with videos (6 ) that encourage burning wood for heat, the most polluting way to heat a home, and more carbon intensive than using coal. (7) The agency receives funding selling trees to the timber industry, and this obvious conflict of interest is a genetic defect. Dismissing trees as “fire fuel” says just about everything we need to know about the Forest Service.
The agency’s claim that less trees are needed to reduce the chance that wildfires will become explosive and out of control may seem intuitive but it ignores otherimportant factors. It may also be intuitive that the chance of a car exploding in a fireball from an accident is greatest if the fuel tank is full. But that’s also incorrect because it ignores other factors. Specifically, gasoline vapor is more flammable than gasoline liquid.
Similarly, in most cases a thick forest is less likely to burn out of control than a thinned forest. Contrary to agency research, numerous studies from different countries (8) and independent researchers reveal the benefits of trees in reducing wildfire risk. Dr. David Lindenmayer, author of 48 books on forests, says, “logged forests always burn at greater severity than intact forests.” (9 ) In the largest study ever done, (10) the authors concluded forest “thinning,” accelerates and intensifies wildfires, and that, “Dense, mature forests tend to burn less…because they have higher canopy cover and more shade, which creates a cooler, moister microclimate.”
The higher density of trees of all sizes act as a windbreak, buffering gust-driven flames and limiting flying embers. “Thinning and other activities that remove trees, especially mature trees, reverse those effects, creating hotter, drier,and windier conditions.” Furthermore, creating more canopy open space allows more oxygen to feed a fire, something easily observed when building a campfire. Forests left alone do their own thinning, (11) and most of the tree mortality in those undisturbed forests is of trees less than 18 inches in diameter. (12)
I know Forest Service employees that have been fired for challenging the agency’s fuels reduction orthodoxy. Communication with whistle blowers (including PhDsin ecology) in federal agencies and other institutions characterize the differences in conclusions drawn by independent research compared to Forest Service-connected research and policy this way:
1. The burning and thinning mindset has been institutionalized, and it is difficult to change. It takes a long time to convince people that the strategy is not working. Employees are reluctant to consider what they have been doing is failing or making it worse.
2. There is a long-term budget commitment to “active forest management” so land managers want to take advantage of those available funds. Follow the money.
3. Land management agencies (primarily Forest Service and BLM) want to be perceived as being proactive because the public expects them to do something to put out or prevent fire, to keep their homes safe. Land managers don't want to be blamed if there is a poor outcome especially when houses, cabins or other structures burn) which feeds the public's expectation that something can and should be done. It’s easy to persuade the public that logging is that “something.”
4. Counterproductive policy is often the result of political pressure. Policy makers look for "science” that backs up their preconceived ideas of what “should” be done. The current administration takes this to an extreme on every issue, not just forest management.
This is also climate malpractice.
The agency is pouring gasoline on the climate fire, literally and figuratively. For years the most important message from climate scientists has been that we must avoid crossing the threshold of global warming where feed-back loops kick in and ignite an irreversible and uncontrollable climate apocalypse. The most recent warnings are that we have at most 2-3 years of dramatically scaling back atmospheric carbon emissions before we permanently cross that threshold, widelybelieved to be a global average increase of 1.5-2.0 o C above pre-industrial levels. The Earth’s average temperature has already exceeded that for the last three years. This means the health and well-being of much of human civilization is dependent on whether we do everything we can immediately to reduce carbon emissions. The forest impacts of “fuels reduction” enhance some of the signature impacts of the climate crisis, i.e. hotter, drier forests. The climate crisis even threatens our forests by increasing the incidence of lightning strikes: 12% for every one degree C rise in global atmosphere. (13)
In the environmental assessments for their thinning projects, the Forest Service admits cutting down trees and burning them is an obvious net carbon emitter for at least the next 15 years. (In reality it’s likely to be much longer than that.) But that’s game, set and match for mitigating the climate crisis, which means game, set, and match for salvaging our forests and humanity’s future.
The misguided, ironically named Fix Our Forests Act, eagerly sponsored by Republicans and unfortunately a few gullible Democrats is a glaring example of not seeing the forest for the trees. There is indeed a forest emergency because of the climate emergency, but the Forest Service is selling it as a forest density emergency. It’s as dishonest as Trump blaming the Washington reflecting pool debacle on vandals.
This is public health malpractice.
On April 9 of this year, the agency conducted a prescribed burn on 330 acres near Helena, MT. By 9:00 pm, the nearest PM2.5 monitors at about 2.5 miles away read a shocking and highly dangerous 732 ug/m 3 . This air pollution remained significantly elevated until noon the next day.
PM2.5 levels that high (and they would have been even higher closer to the burnplot) indicate a severe, immediate, and deadly concentration of air pollution, capable of causing heart attacks, strokes, and sudden death from a variety of causes. Miscarriages, still births, and a myriad of other poor pregnancy outcomes could have been caused. Bear in mind also that PM2.5 levels often underestimate toxicity because the monitors are poor at capturing the most toxic components ofPM2.5, the even smaller “ultrafine” particulate matter (.1microns in size and smaller). (14, 15) And high concentrations of ultrafines is a major reason why smoke from wood burning, whether from a fireplace, wildfire, pizza oven, or prescribed burn, is the most toxic type of pollution (16) the average person commonly inhales.
Despite all the planning and approvals from relevant state agencies, the ForestService put the entire town of Helena in a life-threatening situation from a prescribed burn. Whatever the goals of the intentional burn, they could not have justified the outcome. When I communicated with the director that ordered the burn, Emily Platt, she responded that “the forecasted winds were expected to be stronger overnight” as the only explanation or excuse for the outcome. But she went on to downplay the extreme pollution as “an unavoidable reality of any prescribed fire,” a shocking dismissal of the gravity of what her agency had done. That is like my telling a family that during an appendectomy we somehow managed to saw off a leg and then excused it as an “unavoidable reality of having sharp objects in the operating room.”
New research gives another black eye to the presumptive therapeutics of "prescribed burns.” On a national scale, at least 10,000 people die annually from wildfire smoke, but slightly more (17) die from prescribed burn smoke. Further contradicting claims that human health is being protected by prescribed burns, perhectare burned modeling suggests the health burden and daily health care costs are nearly five times higher (18) for prescribed burns compared to wildfires. There are multiple physio-chemical reasons why lower temperature prescribed burns can produce emissions with more toxicity than high temperature wildfires. (19, 20)
Informed Americans are contemptuous at deforestation of the Amazon knowingthe “lungs of the earth” are being mutilated and their climate buffering is being lost. But when we do the same to American forests, many cheer it on because it’s rebranded “fuels reduction.” What’s turning North America’s forests into bonfires and smothering us in toxic smoke is not too many trees and a lack of rakes, it’s too many climate deniers controlling public policy and a lack of courage in everyone else. Dealing with that honestly is our only chance of saving our forests and ourselves.
Dr. Moench had a 40 year career in clinical medicine as an anesthesiologist. He was a former faculty instructor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, a former adjunct faculty member of the Honors College of the University of Utah teaching the public health consequences of the environmental degradation. He is the founder of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the largest civic organizations of medical professionals in the Western US, and the Board Chair of the international coalition, Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution. He was nominated by the Obama Administration for the award Champion of Change for his work on public health and the climate crisis. He is the recipient of the U. of Utah School of Medicine Alumni Association Distinguished Humanitarian Award, 2025
He is the author of two non-fiction books, Death by Corporation: Killing Humankind in the Age of Monster Corporations, and The Great Brain Robbery/Why women have become smarter than men/Science with an attitude. Both books deal with environmental issues and the public health consequences of environmental degradation; air pollution, in particular.
References1. Masters, J. Dangerous and historic wildfire smoke pollution event engulfsthe U.S. and Canada. Yale Climate Connections. July 17, 2026.
2. Briscoe, T. Could wildfire smoke become America’s leading climate healththreat by 2050? LA Times, Sept. 21, 2025
3. Liang, M, et al. Wildfire contributions to prenatal PM 2.5 exposure in thecontiguous United States, 2003–2019. Front. Environ. Health, 06 August2026 Sec. Air Quality and Health Volume 5 - 2026| https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvh.2026.1838836
4. Study Shows That Climate Change is the Main Driver of Increasing FireWeather in the Western U.S. November 9, 2021.
5. Bush, E. and Lemmen, D.S., editors (2019): Canada’s Changing ClimateReport; Government of Canada, Ottawa, ON. 444 p.
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https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-state-government-is-increasing-our-bushfire-risk-right-now-20220715-p5b1zu.html fbclid=IwAR2pwl3n4znjfSnWombXcc2EHu_JJm87SJ6lok9iEhtkBjjpva7Mck3af8Q
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13. Romps, D. et al. Projected increase in lightning strikes in the United Statesdue to global warming. 14 November 2014, Science 346, 851
14. de Jesus AL, Rahman MM, Mazaheri M, et al. Ultrafine particles and PM2.5in the air of cities around the world: Are they representative of each other?Environ Int. 2019;129:118-135. doi:10.5194/acp-11-6663-2011
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17. Dennin, L.R., Nock, D., Muller, N.Z. et al. Socially vulnerable communitiesface disproportionate exposure and susceptibility to U.S. wildfire andprescribed burn smoke. Commun Earth Environ 6, 190 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02100-y
18. Borchers-Arriagada, N. et al. Smoke health costs and the calculus forwildfires fuel management: a modelling study. The Lancet/Planetary Health.Volume 5, Issue 9e608-e619September 2021
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