Dear Editor,

Imagine buying a beautiful swath of forest in the name of conservation, and the first thing you do is figure out how many trees you can cut down.

 Sadly, that’s pretty much what Boulder County Open Space is hoping to do to our newly acquired local public land forest, Tucker Ranch (Middle Boulder Creek Fuels Reduction Partnership Project - Boulder County) west of Nederland. While our government appears to be allowing some participatory democracy through the facilitation of the county-funded Boulder Watershed Collective—a hike on May 17, comments due June 10, public meetings on June 12 and July 31—the website reveals that they’ve already decided to log the place in “late 2025.”  

 Once again, without even asking us first, Boulder County is snatching tax dollars out of our pockets to hack apart the forests we all own. Kind of like an older sibling taking your hand and smacking you in the face over and over. “Why are you hitting yourself?”

 How could the most progressive county in Colorado (if not the U.S.) acquire 104 acres of ecologically-rich forest only to immediately destroy wildlife habitat, spew carbon into the atmosphere, and compact and erode soil with heavy machinery? By using the same excuse governments always do when they want to rush something through without meaningful public engagement: “It’s an emergency!”

 In this case, Boulder County wants to chop down countless logging trucks’ worth of trees, opening cooler, moister stands to sunlight and wind, thereby heating up and drying out the forest, ironically in the name of “wildfire risk” and “public safety.”

 This, despite several hundred peer-reviewed studies by hundreds of scientists concluding that cutting forests to supposedly “protect communities” is often ineffective or even counterproductive. Despite abundant evidence from U.S. Forest Service reports showing the same thing. Despite Boulder County’s own 2022 study finding a “lack of clear effectiveness of the treatments at increasing surviving live biomass when exposed to a wildfire,” and surmising “partially that the high ground fuel loads and decreased tree density led to increased fire intensity as a result of easier wind movement...”

 In other words, while Boulder County hasn’t even come close to meeting its burden of proof for such experimental ecosystem tinkering, should simply hyping up the fear of wildfire to shut down rational thinking mean the case is closed?

 While this scheme has fooled many of us for decades, Trump’s executive order to nakedly exploit the natural and essential process of wildfire for the “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” means the cat is out of the bag. What kind of world are we living in where Boulder County has the same public lands policy as the Trump administration?  

 Of course, wildfire is a real concern for those of us who choose to live in a fire plain. That’s why many of us would like to reroute tax dollars currently wasted on tearing apart our climate and biodiversity reserves to instead better fund home hardening and defensible space pruning up to 100 feet around structures along with early-warning systems, the only actions with the weight of consensus science and public support behind them.

 Josh Schlossberg

Nederland

Josh Schlossberg is a Nederland resident living adjacent to the Roosevelt National Forest and Colorado Advocate for Eco-Integrity Alliance. His father is a former Forest Service fire lookout and volunteer firefighter.