Boulder County, Colorado—where 79% of the electorate voted for Kamala Harris in 2024—continues to almost completely ignore the overwhelming body of science and warnings from the conservation community as to the lack of efficacy, the ecological harm, and the increased danger of spreading fire to communities from its rampant and indiscriminate “fuel reduction” logging across Open Space Parks.
(Yes, pretty much all so-called “fuel reduction” meets the dictionary definition of logging, i.e. “to cut trees into logs”; contractors hired to do the jobs are “logging contractors”; even U.S. Forest Service project maps clearly label this as “logging.”)
In a beautiful subalpine forest at 9,400 feet off the Peak to Peak Highway in western Boulder County, you’ll find a massive scar in the otherwise intact forest canopy. That’s because Boulder County Open Space has clearcut this hillside of lodgepole pine, along with hundreds of mature trees up to 115 years old. This government agency entrusted with the stewardship of our public lands stole a forest and left behind a stumpfield strewn with flammable logging debris and grasses, including invasive cheatgrass.
What reason could Boulder County have to hack apart this high-elevation forest adjacent to the Niwot Ridge Biospheric Reserve in the Roosevelt National Forest, designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under the highest levels of environmental protection?
READ THE FULL PIECE AT ECO-INTEGRITY ALLIANCE’S SUBSTACK
Eco-Integrity Alliance 
Not only did Boulder County clearcut this 15 (or 18) acre (depending on which County forester you ask) maturing lodgepole forest – in recovery from past abuses, they made no pretense about CLOSING access roads as even the US Forest Service does. Therefore it is wide open to intensive, frequently irresponsible, Front Range wreckreation. There goes the habitat! And people cause fires. This is so even though Boulder County has a proclamation against “forest fragmentation”
https://assets.bouldercounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/habitat-fragmentation-analysis.pdf
as does CO and the feds.
Since Boulder County Open Space is buying land to log, including land in subdivisions which I was told they NEVER do when I was trying to protect a wildlife corridor, maybe it shouldn’t be funded. Logging like this in remote areas, protecting no one, is a classic waste. I call it make-work for foresters.
Besides letting in people, heat, dryness, weeds and wind, a casual look at these Front Range cuts shows that they make as much woody debris as they relieve. We can only imagine what the recent huge CO wind events did to create blowdown in all of the fragmented areas that the cutters are creating.
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We concur wholeheartedly!
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