Our Forests, Our Future: Rejecting the "Hands-Off" Dogma That Is Burning America

By: Frank Carroll
Date: May 2026
Source: https://www.nwasolution.org

[Editor’s Note: Josh Schlossberg is an investigative journalist, horror fiction writer, and the “Colorado Advocate for Eco-Integrity Analysis" (https://eco-integrityalliance.org/). This editorial is in response to Schlossberg’s August 14, 2025 editorial for the Pagosa Daily Post: June_Schlossberg_20250814.pdf]

"Is this what we want from our forests?" AI-created forester with rhetorical question by Frank Carroll, PFMC.

The environmental lobby, led by activists like Josh Schlossberg, has sold the American public a dangerous and fraudulent bill of goods. Under the guise of “science” and “ecology,” they have waged a fifty-year campaign to remove human ingenuity, human need, and human stewardship from our public lands. Their goal is not protection, but priestly preservation—turning our vibrant, multi-use National Forests into untouchable cathedrals where the only acceptable form of management is catastrophic wildfire. This ideology has failed. It is time to reassert the fundamental truth: these lands are ours, they are for our use and benefit, and through active, scientific management, we will save them from the ash-heap to which these activists have consigned them.

Schlossberg’s core argument is a masterpiece of misdirection. He claims that logging and thinning are ineffective against wildfire, cherry-picking studies about wind-driven infernos to dismiss the proven value of fuel reduction. This is like arguing that seatbelts are useless because they won’t save you in a 150-mph head-on collision. The professional foresters and firefighters I’ve stood with for decades aren’t fighting theoretical fires in papers; they’re fighting real ones on the ground. I’ve seen it with my own eyes: in the Tiger Creek area on the Boise National Forest, it was the previously logged, thinned, and prescribed-burned units that provided the last, best chance for firefighters to make a stand. The fire dropped from the crown to the ground. Mature trees survived. The unlogged and unthinned areas? They were obliterated, including monarch pines, centuries old.

The activists’ alternative is unworkable and dishonest: “harden your home and get out of the way.” They advocate pouring billions into making each house a fortress while surrendering the surrounding forest to a regime of “managed wildfire”—a euphemism for letting it burn. This is a theology of retreat and abandonment. It cedes our collective inheritance to the flames and tells communities huddled in their “hardened” homes to simply inhale the smoke and pray the wind shifts. This is not resilience; it is defeatism dressed up as environmental virtue.

Furthermore, Schlossberg and his ilk deliberately obscure the very purpose of our National Forests. They hide behind the feel-good term “public lands,” hoping you’ll forget the “National Forest” part. These lands were not set aside to be museums. The Organic Act of 1897 states their purpose is to “improve and protect the forest… for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” They are working landscapes, meant to provide renewable resources—water, timber, grazing, recreation—in perpetuity. This is the doctrine of multiple-use, and it is an engine of rural prosperity and national self-reliance.

We do not need an “excuse” to harvest and use our own public timber. It is appropriate, supported by science, and it is our responsibility. This wood builds our homes, fuels our economies, and sequesters carbon in long-lived wood products. Active management—the cycle of harvest, renewal, and care—creates the very forest structures that are resilient to fire, insects, and disease. It is the opposite of destruction; it is the application of human intelligence to cultivate a healthy, sustainable resource.

The irony is diabolical. The “preservationist” would rather see a forest burn to a crisp than see a tree be cut for a family’s home. They call a managed, regenerative harvest “destruction,” but call a million-acre charcoal scar “natural” and “ecologically crucial.” They are content to let burned forests revert to brush fields, sacrificing biodiversity, watershed health, and carbon storage on the altar of their non-interventionist dogma. This is not science; it is a cult of death masquerading as reverence for life.

The “consensus of peer-reviewed science” they trumpet is often a closed loop of activist-academics citing each other, while dismissing the on-the-ground, operational science of the USDA Forest Service’s own silviculturists and fire managers. When a state’s leading research institute, like the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, privately admits that the wildfire strategy “overpromises” and that debating the activists leads to “stalemate,” it reveals a truth: this debate is not about data, but about power. The goal is to paralyze management through litigation, propaganda, and the bullying of anyone who disagrees as a “liar” or a “denier.”

Enough. Americans are fed up with watching our forests burn and our communities choke because a powerful few have decided humans have no place in the natural world. We must reject this poisonous, anti-human environmentalism. We must demand a return to the proactive and scientifically informed management that our laws mandate. We will cut, thin, and prescribe-burn. We will harvest timber and build roads for access and protection. We will manage for resilience and use. We will do this not in spite of our love for the forest, but because of it. We intend to pass on living, working, thriving forests to our children—not photos of blackened stumps and lectures about the beauty of “natural processes.” The era of apologizing for human stewardship is over. It’s time to get back to work.