As the recent wildfire season lingers in the minds of many, research scientists, including UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences’ Susan Prichard, are calling for more thinning of forests.

Prichard and many other scientists escalated the fight to save forests after Chad Hanson, an environmentalist, said the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe shows forest thinning doesn’t work.

Prichard is one of at least 111 scientists that have co-authored at least 41 scientific papers that rebut Hanson’s arguments against forest thinning, according to a Sacramento Bee story:

“Susan Prichard, a University of Washington fire ecologist and lead author of one of the recent articles that rebut Hansen’s positions, compares Hanson and his allies to early climate change deniers. The deniers, she said, received outsized media attention, and made it seem as if there was a scientific debate when in reality an overwhelming majority of scientists insisted climate change was a pressing threat.

“‘It’s jaw-dropping,’ Prichard said. ‘Because for those of us that are in the field, we have this sense of everyone’s in pretty close agreement, and that the science is settled.'”

Read the full story here.