Physician Warns of Health Risks from Logging & Burning Forests

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]I'm Dr. Brian Mch, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. If you go hiking in national forests throughout the West, you are likely to stumble on slash piles like these in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah by the thousands. Forest thinning and slash pile burning is forest management malpractice, climate malpractice, and public health malpractice. The story the Forest Service tells the public, citing research they sponsor, is that our forests are at increasing wildfire risk because they are overgrown from decades of fire suppression and massive fuels reduction is desperately needed.

[00:00:33]Independent research contradicts this story and finds that wildfire risk is primarily related to the climate crisis with increased temperatures, drought, and overall diminished snowpack.

[00:00:43]Thinning our forest to prevent wildfires makes no more sense than thinning your brain to prevent Alzheimer's. It actually makes things worse because it further dries out the forest, increases forest temperatures, and increases wind speeds, another major risk factor for fires spreading out of control. It's climate malpractice because it aggravates the carbon equation, the cause of the climate crisis. As soon as these trees are cut down, their carbon absorption ends, and when they are set on fire, all that carbon is immediately released into the atmosphere. We all should cringe to see logging and burning in the Amazon, known as the lungs of the planet. But trees are the lungs of the planet, wherever they are, including in Utah. Finally, it is public health malpractice because when these piles are set on fire, they become enormous sources of the most toxic type of pollution the average person ever inhales. This pollution is not saving you from wildfire pollution, is only adding to it. In fact, some studies suggest prescribed burns and slashbio burning produce an even more toxic pollution than smoke from intense wildfires. It's time to stop this costly, misguided mismanagement of our forests. It actually increases wildfire risk, aggravates the climate crisis, and is a completely unnecessary source of highly toxic air pollution. This is a message from Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and our partners at Eco Integrity Alliance.