Image by Ales Krivec.

A new bill moving through Congress promises a major overhaul in the way federal officials manage public lands in the United States. Lawmakers have framed the Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA), passed by the House of Representatives, as a necessary response to the spate of disastrous wildfires that have burned in the West over the last several years. The bipartisan bill would remove impediments to logging, allowing the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management vastly more latitude to remove what they say is the fuel that drives wildfires.

But critics contend that the bill’s purported solutions are a mirage. Instead of addressing the crisis, this bill would allow federal agencies to push through large management projects indiscriminately, while limiting avenues for public oversight. Though there is broad support for reducing wildfire destruction, some lawmakers and conservationists say FOFA’s effects on public lands would be disastrous. Rather than reducing wildfire and protecting forests, they say the bill is a giveaway to the timber industry that will worsen wildfires and other threats American forests are facing.

“Forests are broken because of the extent of logging that’s happened over the last five or six decades,” said Dominick DellaSala, a biodiversity and climate change scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute who is a critic of the bill. “You can’t fix a problem with forests with the same methods that have caused the degradation to begin with.”

Why now?

The enormity of fire disasters in recent years—including those in Maui, Los Angeles, and Texas—has been impossible to ignore. This is why the bill has garnered broad, bipartisan support, including in the Senate, where the bill passed out of committee but has yet to receive a floor vote. Its cosponsors are Democrats Alex Padilla of California and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, along with Republicans John Curtis of Utah and Tim Sheehy of Montana. FOFA offers provisions that supposedly would help land managers address the fire threat, seemingly oriented around the theory that more actively managing forests—through increased logging—can reduce the potential for large wildfires.

Specific provisions in FOFA allow for this in several ways. These include allowing certain projects to be exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act. Projects under 3,000 acres are typically able to get these exceptions, called “categorical exclusions,” if projects are claimed to pose little environmental risk. But the new law would enable exclusions for projects up to 10,000 acres, which would allow federal authorities to avoid currently required environmental analyses for far more management projects.

If FOFA becomes law, land managers would also be able to log and thin in designated fireshed management areas—fire-prone landscapes up to 250,000 acres—without current levels of environmental review. At the same time, it would give officials leeway to skip Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act review requirements.

For the public, the bill aims to limit input and reduce transparency by narrowing the timeframe that stakeholders have to challenge newly announced rules. The current allowance of time is six years, but under FOFA, the public would have 150 days, following the announcement of the decision, to mount a challenge.

Failed solutions

Many of the bill’s supporters, such as members of the Congressional Western Caucus, contend that cutting “red tape” is what will make FOFA effective. Giving the Feds more freedom to undertake intensive projects will reduce the amount of biomass available to burn and more readily allow for emergency management projects, they say.

But opponents say that the regulatory burden—already significantly weakened in recent years—is not the cause of worsening wildfires. Rather, they point to abundant data that long-standing patterns of active management are themselves worsening fire risk. This cohort includes DellaSala, who has authored numerous papers on wildfire and testified regularly in Congress on forest health.

He sees at least four components as essential to addressing the wildfire crisis: immediately cutting emissions (including from logging), which exacerbate climate change and make the scale of fires worse; protecting existing natural areas, which he describes as “our best natural climate solution”; focusing on preventing home ignitions by improving home hardening and defensible space in fire-prone areas; and by stopping road construction through wildlands. “Something like 90 percent of all fires nationwide have a human ignition factor built in,” he said. “We can’t stop lightning, but we can reduce the incidence of human-caused fires by having a better transportation management plan, which means closing and obliterating many roads.”

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and now wildland fire ecologist, is executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. He also emphasizes the harms of road building—often falsely characterized as necessary for effective wildland firefighting—agreeing that FOFA on the whole is a dangerous bill.

This piece first appeared in Sierra.

The post Fix Our Forests in Name Only appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed