More or less, except that in some areas the problem isn’t just fire suppression but that the forests are adapted to prehistoric peoples intentionally starting fires.
The problem with logging as a solution is that the fuels that are building up aren’t the trees themselves*, its the stuff in the undergrowth and dead fall that is of fairly minimal economic value. The Forest Service calls the process of going in and clearing the stuff “mechanical fuels reduction” and while there’s certainly a role the timber industry can play in it, it’s generally not economically self-sustaining.
*The frequent low intensity fires that the forests are adapted to would generally just burn out the undergrowth and leave the trees alive. The prehistoric burn intervals I mentioned in my earlier post are largely based on analysis of tree rings, which show the effects of earlier fires the trees survived. Without the periodic small fires though, you get more intense fires that DO kill the trees. This is also incidentally why the “blame the tree huggers” argument is bullshit, since traditional logging practices had nothing to do with reducing fuel in the understory.
It will be interesting to see how things go the next few years. Within these massive burned areas, there is not likely to be another blaze for a generation or so. But there is still the areas yet to burn, who have yet to benefit from current fire management theory of letting it burn at a low level. It seems like every valley in the Sierra is awaiting it’s 200-year fire, and they are all occurring within a 25 year window. The drought sure is helping to accelerate things.
Think less about individual trees and more about species composition. In order for a stand replacing fire event to occur you need an abundance of ladder fuels to bring the fire up from the ground to the tree canopy. You also need tightly packed trees with interlocking canopies to propagate the spread of fire from tree to tree.
A reduction in the amount of disturbance in our forests has helped shade tolerant Douglas fir and true firs move into traditional ponderosa pine habitat. In some areas as much as 80% of the traditional ponderosa pine habitat has been superseded by fir. Though both potentially healthy forests, ponderosa pine habitat is characterized by open grown trees with little canopy closure. Firs, being shade tolerant, can and do grow much closer together contributing to the effects of wild fires.
At this time, the most economical way of regaining our traditional ponderosa pine habitat would be to selectively log much of the fir and some of the pines out of the stands, leaving widely spaced mature pines representative of the traditional habitat.
The trees themselves and our continued mismanagement of them are the problem.