EVERSON, Wash. (RFD News) — Wildfires have been a major concern across farm country this year, with some agriculture groups pointing to forest management as a contributing factor.
Dillon Honcoop with Save Family Farming said he believes poor forest management is playing a larger role than climate change.
“The land is not being managed the way it used to be. There’s a reason why we’re seeing more wild, more devastating wildfires than we’ve seen in the past. A lot of people wanted to talk about climate change. Is that a contributor? It’s somewhere on the list, but we didn’t suddenly, magically pass some kind of threshold. Even if we’ve gone up a couple of degrees, and people will go back and forth on what warming really is or not. That’s not sparking these fires. It’s not causing them to spread so huge. It’s just not that big of a contributor, nearly as much as how this land is being managed, or as we’re pointing out, not being managed.”
His comments come as the U.S. Forest Service considers rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which currently restricts certain forest management activities across more than 44 million acres of national forests.
