The U.S. Forest Service’s “Pine Valley Wildfire Risk Reduction” in the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah, seeks to log, burn, or take other destructive management actions across 127,667 acres—including in old-growth forests—harming ecosystems, biodiversity, watersheds, climate, air quality, and public health.
The project would include clearcutting in some instances, mechanical cutting and mastication (chipping on site), as well as pile burning. USFS intends to sell some trees for “biomass” energy, which emits deadly particulate matter and other air pollutants, along with more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal.
“The Forest Service loves to use the euphemism ‘fuels reduction,’ but this is forest destruction using a false pretense. It’s forest malpractice, climate malpractice, and public health malpractice,” says Dr. Brian Moench of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. “Wood smoke is the most toxic type of pollution the average person ever inhales, including prescribed burns. And prescribed burns have never been shown to reduce the public’s overall exposure to forest fire smoke.”
According to the Forest Service’s Environmental Assessment, cutting in old-growth stands would have no limit on tree size, simply that the average quadratic mean diameter (QMD) of trees in the area must be at least 18 inches DRC [Diameter-Root-Collar]. In other words, the restrictions do “not prevent the removal of individual trees with a diameter greater than 18 inches DRC as long as the threshold for the entire stand is not crossed.”
The purported goal of the “Pine Valley Wildfire Risk Reduction” is to “reduce projected flame lengths and crown fire activity in these areas,” with the agency claiming that the density of trees and other vegetation is “outside the historic range of variability” due to fire suppression. It’s part of a 2021 “emergency action” expanded by the Forest Service in April 2025 to 112 million acres—59% of National Forests—immediately following Trump’s executive order in March for “An Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.”
“The idea that forests are overgrown as a result of a century of successful fire suppression operations is a simplified myth. Climate is the ultimate determinant in fire spread. In fact, creating more open, dry areas in an already dry, climate affected forest will amplify the risk of uncontrollable fire blazing towards towns. If we truly want to protect people and their homes, the real work needs to be done in the home hardening zone- the immediate perimeter around the home,” says Rebecca Diehl, Utah Advocate for Eco-Integrity Alliance. “This renders these projects as little more than profit making endeavors that destroy large swaths of habitat for birds and mammals, and the public should be alarmed at how rapidly these habitats are being destroyed.”
While largely unreported in the media, these massive “fuel reduction” logging projects on public lands do not meet the lowest standard of even U.S. Forest Service studies (an agency whose mission to both protect forests and carry out the federal timber sale program is an insurmountable conflict of interest).
First, higher density of vegetation has not been shown to correlate with fire severity. To the contrary, peer-reviewed science has found that “[U]sing over three decades of fire severity data from relatively frequent-fire pine and mixed-conifer forests throughout the western United States…burn severity tended to be higher in areas with lower levels of protection status (more intense management)…”
Second, logging or “thinning” has rarely been shown to reduce high-severity wildfire, which has little to do with vegetation (aka “fuels”) and more to do with weather, specifically: drought, lack of humidity, temperature, and wind. As this study funded by the Forest Service concludes, “[W]ildfire burning under extreme weather conditions, as is often the case with fires that escape initial attack, can produce large areas of high-severity fire even in fuels-reduced forests with restored fire regimes.”
Third, the Forest Service assertion that forests in the project area are all out of range of historic variability due to fire suppression is false (especially since industrial scale suppression has only been carried out effectively with aircraft since the 1940s). For instance, the same agency estimates the fire return interval for western pinyon pine-juniper forests to range from 100 to 1,000 years.
Even in areas that may have revegetated compared to some arbitrary point in time at the peak of ranching and timber extraction in the state, many ecologists believe that the return of forests across our largely overlogged and overgrazed west is positive for ecology, wildlife, watersheds, and carbon storage.
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