There are obvious benefits to logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning of California’s forests. When you suppress wildfires for what is now over a century, then overregulate and suppress any other means to thin the forest, you get overcrowded and unhealthy forests. California’s trees now have 5 to 10 times more than a historically normal...

Earlier this summer, an environmentalist group that calls itself the John Muir Project, joined by a few other like-minded state and local organizations, sued the U.S. Forest Service. The transgression: a proposal to thin 13,000 acres of forest near Big Bear Lake, in the heart of California’s San Bernardino Mountains. You would think they’d learn. One...