Congress is considering legislation known as the Fix Our Forests Act sponsored by Bruce Westerman, the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
The House Committee sponsoring this Act asserts the legislation will restore forest health, increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires, and protect communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration projects.
Using the pretense that our forests are dangerously dense due to “fire suppression” the Act ignores the science that questions such assertions. Indeed, most plant communities in the West tend to have long fire rotations during which fuels naturally accumulate. There is nothing “abnormal” or “unhealthy” about such plant communities.
Any one familiar with the rhetoric of the timber industry and its advocates, will recognize all the “code” words. For instance, the use of “catastrophic wildfires” means high severity blazes which are ecologically critical to functioning forest ecosystems.
“Restoring Forest health” means logging the forest to restore the economic health of the timber industry.
Increasing the scale of “forest restoration” means logging the forest.
“Frivolous lawsuits” are those continuously won by environmental groups because the Forest Service repeatably wins legal challenges to Forest Service logging proposals.
The Fix Our Forests Act is a Trojan horse that will do anything but fix our forests.
Instead, it will open millions of acres of national forest lands to logging with minimal scientific review and public input. The legislation will undoubtably increase roading (a major location for wildfire ignition) and such roads are responsible for greater sedimentation of waterways and soil erosion.
The Act will increase the size of Categorical Exclusions to 10,000 acres. CEs reduces environmental review.
In short, the Act will roll back environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, reduce scientific review and thwart citizen participation in public lands decisions. The final insult is that the Act will bar judicial review making it impossible to hold agencies accountable for their abuses.
The legislation is endorsed by pro logging organizations as the Wild Turkey Foundation, The Forest Landowners Association, The Forest Resources Association and others with a similar timber cutting orientation.
While the legislation hastens logging of our forest in the name of “fuel reductions” it does little to harden communities, so they are less vulnerable to wildfire.
Furthermore, the focus on forests ignores where the majority of wildlife activity is occurring in non-forested vegetation.
For instance, most home loss in California and Nationwide by far occurs in grasslands, shrublands – around 80%.
While dry forest types get a lot of attention, they are less than 1/3 of the forest landscape. But the majority of forest communities have long fire rotations and when they burn are “climate driven”.
However, the real problem is that the majority of acreage charred each year is non-forest plant communities.
This year in Oregon, California, and Washington, as of September 18, 2024 – over 70% of 2 million plus area burned in fire was in grasslands, and shrublands.
Grass and scrubs are “flashy fuels” meaning they burn easily, and flames move quickly through them.
The 2024 Park fire that started in a park in Chico burned primarily through grass and shrublands and it grew 4-5,000 acres per hour. Speed is what kills people, burns homes because it overwhelms fire fighter response, and moves so fast that people do not have any time to evacuate.
Community hardening gives fire fighters a chance to stop the flames. Instead of spending money on logging the forest, we should focus on the home and the immediate area surrounding it. The Fix Our Forest Act will do little to reduce home losses,
The Fix Our Forests Act needs fixing and deserves to be rejected out of hand as nothing more than another attempt to use wildfire as a justification for more logging of public lands. What we need to fix is Congress’s continued attempts to pander to the timber industry and its lackeys.
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