NEDERLAND - The Nederland Community Library hosted the Boulder County Forest Protection Sharing Session on Sunday, April 26, 2025, an informational presentation and discussion created and led by local resident, investigative journalist, and environmental advocate Josh Schlossberg. This program was designed to provide his perspective on wildfire preparation techniques employed in our surrounding forests.

Schlossberg began by stating that those in attendance were under no obligation to agree with everything that he had planned to share during the session.

“I set this up for people who do have concerns about forest cutting,” Schlossberg said. “There are a lot of different perspectives, but there are a lot of perspectives that are not really getting out there. There’s really been this one narrative and there’s a lot of other information that I think is important; that’s what I’m going to try and present.”

The session with the public was labeled a “roundtable for ecologically-minded locals to discuss science-based ways for our communities to safely co-exist with wildfire without clearcutting the publicly-owned forests we love.” It was attended by 15 local residents.

There was material available that aimed to discredit the effectiveness of clearcutting as a manner of “fuel reduction.” This information presented the belief that tree cutting is a “destructive industry/agency scheme” that undercuts proven science. 

The material came from Eco-Integrity Alliance (EIA), a “grassroots environmental movement” according to its website, with the vision of  bringing “ecological balance” across the country by adhering to such guiding principles as acknowledging all aspects of the eco-crisis, and critiquing “harmful environmental policies no matter the political source.” 

Those who attended the meeting were made aware of the meeting through Facebook, local posting areas, and emails and newsletters from EIA. Attendees were also given the opportunity to opt to receive communications from EIA, as well as to sign an online Change.org petition. 

The petition, titled “Boulder County, Colorado Commissioners: Stop Logging Our Parks and Open Space!” has so far received 49 signatures.

The petition states that, due to a perceived financially-driven collaboration between Boulder County and private logging corporations, the forest mitigation technique referred to by Schlossberg as “clear cutting” is promoted over others despite peer-reviewed studies that indicate that cutting forests can potentially heat up and dry out the forest microclimate. 

Schlossberg presented photographs and videos of an area of regrowth in the Roosevelt National Forest which was previously damaged by the 2016 Cold Springs Fire. He noted that the damaged area shown had experienced severe forest thinning prior to the fire in 2015. 

The next picture Schlossberg showed was of a private forest, adjacent to the heavily burned area, that had not been thinned. It appeared untouched by the 2016 fire.

A map from a Boulder County study of the Cold Springs Fire shows the severity of burning in the cut areas of forest compared to the uncut areas, though Schlossberg notes that the study does not directly address the disparity. 

“We’re trying to get the other information out there and included in the discussion,” Schlossberg said. “We’re not trying to take away their perspective.” 

Schlossberg is one of six members on EIA’s Steering Committee. He also hosts the organization’s Green Root podcast. In addition to receiving membership fees and donations, EIA is fiscally sponsored by the League of Wilderness Defenders. 

EIA’s petition directly demands that Boulder County immediately cease “fuel reduction” practices on public lands until all scientific and public input is considered in the decision-making process, and that all taxpayer dollars allocated to such “fuel reduction” be redirected to home hardening grants for low-income residents.

“The issue that I have is that any piece of information that doesn’t fit their narrative is left out of the discussion, and I don’t feel that that’s the scientific approach; they’re cherry-picking,” Schlossberg stated as he explained his position to the room.

Schlossberg’s presentation included examples from the “hundreds” of peer-reviewed studies, curated from EIA’s website and at www.coloradosmokescreen.org, that indicate that such treatments as “clear cutting” actually increase the risk of fire due to increased sunlight exposure heating and drying the forest floor and surface fuels. 

Reports from the Colorado Forest Service and from Boulder County were also quoted in order to demonstrate that forest thinning “treatments” and human-created firebreaks were breached during both the 2008 Hayman Fire and the 2010 Four Mile Fire.

Schlossberg indicated that these studies and reports are often missing from major public-facing plans, such as Boulder County’s 2024 Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). 

The Boulder County CWPP offers information on several mitigation strategies, including their prescribed fire program, fireshed focus areas, and recommendations for both resilient landscapes and how to become a fire-adapted community. 

The 464-page plan includes mapping data, fire behavior modeling, regional expertise from community members and firefighting professionals, estimates of fire mitigation efforts from 2011 to 2023, reports on the combustibility of regional vegetation, regional causes of forest fires, monitoring of wind speeds, monthly climate averages, and many wildfire risk assessments.  

The most recent project that Schlossberg mentioned as being targeted by Boulder County’s supposed agenda for timber collection is the mitigation planned for the County-owned parcel known as the Tucker property.

“The first thing the County does is say, ‘so we have this land, what trees are we going to cut?’ Why is that always the first thing?” Schlossberg said. 

The Tucker property is the open forest between the Dyers neighborhood and the former Caribou township that the Boulder Watershed Collective plans to focus on for their next mitigation project in conjunction with the Town of Nederland.

The Nederland Fire Protection District (NFPD) has also previously suggested to Town officials that the Tucker property should be prioritized in terms of mitigation for wildfire protection. 

“One of our biggest concerns for Town is this swath of trees,” NFPD Fire Chief Charlie Schmidtmann said about the property in question. “Access is almost impossible, so if there were a wall of fire coming in we couldn’t get behind it.” 

Schmidtmann noted that a big concern was that if a fire were to roll through the Tucker property, it could travel unimpeded into Old Town, which has its own challenges when it comes to home hardening.

“There are a lot of older houses that don’t have that, and there are some people who want to leave their house the way that it was built, so it is also a challenge,” Schmidtmann said, adding that as a homeowner in the area he understands the expense involved with many home hardening measures.

Though Schmidtmann and Fire Marshal Andrew Joslin adhere to the responsibilities of their respective posts, which is to protect life first and protect property second, they typically enact mitigation services for public property at the request of the Town or County. 

Both Schmidtmann and Joslin reiterated that, as they are not the ones who conduct the studies and provide the data which leads to the decisions that inevitably dictate what forest treatments are employed, they cannot speak on the effectiveness of one treatment over another.

However, they stated that, in the case of wildfire protection, all treatments are necessary and should be considered, including clear cutting, firebreaks, prescribed burns, and home hardening.

“We take the best advice that’s in common practice that’s used by agencies that do these studies, and we use those recommendations to reduce risk in our jurisdiction,” Joslin said.

Joslin mentioned how the Town of Nederland and Boulder County have already made strides in adopting code to mandate home hardening measures, and that the State will also be pursuing such legislation when it attempts to pass the proposed resiliency code in July, 2025. 

Despite hoping that, if such wildfire preparation were to become a national issue, home hardening will become more available and less expensive for homeowners, Joslin was sure to note that that was only one piece of the wildfire protection puzzle. 

“We need to focus not just on the homes but on the properties and the properties in between,” Joslin added. “From a tactical standpoint there are things that we need to consider about how we’re going to make access to these fires and what we can do to reduce the fuels that are present.”

“It takes all of the pieces,” Schmidtmann said. “It takes fire mitigation work, fuels management, creating your safety zones, buffering around the house, home hardening, the egress routes—it takes all of these pieces; it’s not just one thing that fixes it.”

Schmidtmann’s and Joslin’s statements were similar to those made by attendees at Schlossberg’s presentation during the open discussion portion, as many called for a focus on home hardening efforts, though only as a replacement for clear cutting and not as an additional protective measure. 

While there were some members in the crowd from a local advocacy organization, the Magnolia Forest Group, who were against the cutting of Nederland-area forests, others were eager to point out that studies on the impact of forest thinning on the spread of wildfire show mixed results due to the countless variables in every wildfire scenario. 

One attendee who had previously worked for the Forest Service stated that the service’s use of forest thinning as a treatment is partly due to the organization having to pivot away from using fire as a natural mitigation tool because of the influx of homes built in these areas.

“In very remote places in the country they’ll let these fires burn for a considerable amount of time in hopes that they’re mitigating fuels and creating a healthy ecosystem in the forest,” Joslin mentioned. “But we can’t do that here; we couldn’t just let the fire burn all the way down to Boulder.”

“If we can’t allow these forests to naturally burn the way they have for thousands of years because our homes are in the way, if we’re not going in there and maintaining that forest health, then those forests are most likely to burn hotter, faster, and more devastatingly.”