The Schultz Interview: What We’re Hearing

As of this morning — our February 3 interview with Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz has generated more than 600 responses from Evergreen readers. More than 50 readers have emailed it to a friend or colleague.

We received this note from Chief Schultz last night:

“Thanks for your work on the interview. I’ve received lots of positive feedback.”

We received a second note this morning:

“Thanks for all you’ve done for the profession for years. You’re fine to use the photo.”

The photo he references is the one above. He took it on his cell phone in our kitchen last night. He was in the Coeur d’Alene area for an evening with his family before flying east to Nashville and Knoxville. He lives out of a suitcase.

We monitor Evergreen’s website traffic daily. If the upward trendline holds, at least 1,000 people will have read the interview by February 10 — and roughly 100 will have shared it with someone else.

Our Interview Process: 40 Years and Counting

We’ve been doing question-and-answer interviews with the men and women guiding public and private forestry for 40 years. Our two-step routine has never changed:

• We share our questions with interviewees in advance so they are fully prepared.
• Before publication, we insist they read the interview for accuracy and completeness. We want to be certain we have not misquoted or misinterpreted anything.

That standard protects them — and it protects our readers.

The Eight Groups Behind Our Questions

We framed our questions around concerns shared with us by eight groups we know well:

• Forest Service employees and retirees
• Federal timber purchasers
• County, state, and federal elected officials
• Public and private natural resource managers
• Wildland firefighters
• Forest scientists and academics
• Conservationists
• People living in rural timber communities whose lives have been turned upside down by seemingly unstoppable wildfires

Their concerns fall into six broad categories:

• Catastrophic wildfire
• Wildfire response time
• Managed fire for ecosystem benefit
• Thinning
• Prescribed burning
• Salvage logging

Given the depth and breadth of our audience, each of these topics is a lightning rod.

Where Our Readers Stand

Not everyone agrees that today’s wildfires are catastrophic.
Most — but not all — favor rapid response.

A few support managed fire for ecosystem benefit — and they are generally not in the rapid-response camp.

Most support thinning in overstocked forests to reduce disease and wildfire risk.
Some prefer to let Nature do the thinning.

Prescribed burning after thinning is preferred by many readers.
Others are comfortable with burning but worry about excessive thinning.

Most support salvage logging.
Some argue it causes too much environmental damage.

That’s the landscape of opinion we operate in.

Where We Stand

We support:

• Salvage logging when used in combination with prescribed burning.
• Prescribed fire that reduces the risk that logging debris and downed woody material will fuel a reburn.
• Precommercial and commercial thinning to reduce wildfire risk associated with disease and tree mortality.
• Rapid response, because we do not see ecosystem benefit in:
  • Wildfires that burn so hot they destroy the organic soil layer needed for rapid regeneration.
  • Wildfires that eliminate wildlife habitat for decades.
  • Wildfires that erase biological, structural, and age-class diversity.
  • Wildfires that annually destroy millions of acres of forestland — our nation’s four-season outdoor playgrounds.

Why Schultz’s Answers Didn’t Surprise Us

Frankly, we were not surprised by Chief Schultz’s answers.

We have followed his career since his work in state trust lands management in Montana and Idaho. Trust lands are managed to generate income for public institutions — schools, prisons, hospitals, and other state-owned entities.

Our expectation is that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and her staff will give Chief Schultz the administrative latitude he needs to move Forest Service land management practices toward the more adaptive, less cookie-cutter approach common on state lands.

President Trump signaled a similar direction during his first term. His “rake the forest” comment while touring the aftermath of the Camp Fire drew laughter from some observers — and knowing smiles from private forest landowners.

What he was referring to was the need to remove ground-based forest debris — ladder fuels that carry fire into tree crowns in unthinned forests. Finland’s former President, Sauli Niinistö, described that ground-fuel management approach to Trump during a July 2018 meeting in Helsinki.

The Science Question

Skeptics often ask where we find the scientific reports supporting the positions we take. It’s a fair question.

Our board includes two forestry-related PhDs and four Forest Service retirees. After 40 years in this business, we also maintain deep relationships in scientific and academic communities.

We have no shortage of peer-reviewed literature at our fingertips.

Here are three examples among thousands available online:

• The impact of salvage logging on soil erosion following California’s 2013 Rim Fire
• Wildfire burn severity impacts on soil in the Cascade Range
• Deaths in California related to wildfire smoke

You can also find a wealth of data in the monthly U.S. Drought Monitor reports and from the Boise Interagency Fire Center.

A Look West — and a Look Ahead

If you want to know what kind of wildfire season we may be heading into, you start with maps.

At the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, predictive services teams track snowpack, fuel moisture, drought indices, and long-range weather patterns. These aren’t political documents. They are operational tools — the same maps used to position crews, aircraft, and incident management teams before fire activity accelerates.

Those maps are not comforting.

Across much of the drought-stressed West, snowpack is below average. In some basins it is significantly below average. When mountain snow is thin, runoff comes early. When runoff comes early, soils dry sooner. And when soils dry sooner, grasses, brush, and timber fuels become receptive to ignition weeks ahead of schedule.

The U.S. Drought Monitor tells a similar story. Moderate to severe drought persists across large portions of the Interior West and Southwest. Drought does not guarantee catastrophic fire. But drought stacked on low snowpack stacked on prolonged heat is a formula we have seen before.

Weather maps reinforce the concern. Extended forecasts show intermittent moisture, but not the kind of sustained, soaking systems that recharge deep soil profiles or meaningfully reduce fuel stress across broad landscapes. Fine fuels dry quickly. Heavy fuels follow.

We have been here before.

No one at the Interagency center in Boise will tell you in February exactly how July will behave. Fire seasons are shaped by wind, lightning, human behavior, and plain unpredictability. But starting a season with depleted snowpack and expanding drought is like beginning a marathon already short of breath.

It would be irresponsible not to notice.

Whether this becomes another record-setting year depends on weather patterns we cannot yet see. What we can see — in black and white on drought maps and predictive outlooks — is that the West is entering spring without the cushion it once relied on.

The conditions are aligning.

What we choose to do with that knowledge is the stewardship question.

Why We Do This

Evergreen was founded on a simple premise: forests deserve serious conversation grounded in science, experience, and accountability.

We do not chase headlines.
And we do not pretend these issues are simple.

Wildfire, thinning, prescribed fire, salvage logging — none of it is tidy. But neither is watching entire landscapes burn while we argue about ideology.

For four decades we have asked hard questions of the people responsible for managing America’s forests. We have published their answers — unedited except for accuracy — and we have let our readers weigh the evidence.

That won’t change.

Our commitment is to informed stewardship.
Our responsibility is to facts.
And our readers — whether they agree with us or not — deserve nothing less.

Support Evergreen

Evergreen is supported by readers who value independent, science-based forestry reporting.
(Donate or Subscribe)