Why The Fix Our Forests Act Won’t Fix Our Forests

A bipartisan group of lawmakers realize they need something to show voters in the mid-terms. The resulting bill achieves nothing beyond careless harm to our national forests.

Last month, the ambitiously titled Fix Our Forests Act passed out of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry with broad bi-partisan support. It’s already passed the House, so once this shutdown nonsense is resolved, it will receive a floor vote and likely be sent to the President’s desk where it will be signed into law. A rare case of otherwise polarized politicians coming together to solve a crisis (this time wildfires)? Of course it isn’t, here’s why.

“There is a wildfire crisis across much of the country — our communities need action now,” states Senator John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), one of the bill’s sponsors. “Wildfires won’t wait.”

And while that statement is true, Fix Our Forests won’t do diddly squat about wildfires. I’m battling a flu-like illness and my head feels like it’s full of cotton balls, so I’m going to try and keep all this as simple and quick as possible.

Are Our Forests Really In Crisis?

Back in the halcyon days of 2017 I wrote a piece for my column in Outside titled, “Why The West Will Burn.” Its takeaway was basically that over 44 million homes have been built in something called the Wildland Urban Interface—areas prone to wildfire—and that since climate change is making fires start easier and grow faster, the only logical solution is managed retreat.

Approaching fire risk as an inevitable outcome in the same way we do sea level rise would allow us to protect both lives and capital by simply acknowledging and planning for the inevitable.

A good synonym for the WUI would be to simply call them areas of natural beauty. And if there’s one place that rich people like to build houses, it’s in pretty places. See: Pacific Palisades.

And while the only real solution to eliminating exposure to wildfires is to retreat from places that will experience them, the fact that we’re talking about expensive homes built by rich people means that we, as a nation, are involved in the process of twisting ourselves into knots to try and act like the problem is anything other than homes being built in wildfire-prone places during an era of exponentially accelerating wildfire risk.

So while it’s true that our century-old policy of prioritizing the suppression of wildfires has allowed fuels to grow to unsafe levels, it’s also true that the need to defend rich people’s homes demands that fires must be fought. While it’s true that more controlled burns are needed to reduce both the risk of fire ignition and the speed at which they spread, it’s also true that rich people don’t want to breathe smoke, and fight fuel reduction measures being conducted close to their homes (see: Pacific Palisades). While its true that logging can be shown to reduce both incidences of fire and its intensity, that’s only true when that logging is conducted immediately adjacent to homes, which would spoil the natural beauty rich people are paying for when they build expensive homes. And it’s also true that many fires occur in places that don’t have big trees, and therefore aren’t suitable for logging (see: Pacific Palisades).

What’s In The Fix Our Forests Act?

Let’s ask Senator Alex Padilla (D-California), who co-chairs the Senate Wildfire Caucus and is sponsoring the bill for an explanation of what’s in it. According to his website, FOFA will:

• Establish new and updated programs to reduce wildfire risks across large, high-priority “firesheds,” with an emphasis on cross-jurisdictional collaboration.

• Streamline and expand tools for forest health projects (e.g., stewardship contracting, Good Neighbor Agreements) and provide faster processes for certain hazardous fuels treatments.

• Create a single interagency program to help communities in the wildland-urban interface build and retrofit with wildfire-resistant measures, while simplifying and consolidating grant applications.

• Expand research and demonstration initiatives — including biochar projects and the Community Wildfire Defense Research Program — to test and deploy cutting-edge wildfire prevention, detection, and mitigation technologies.

• Strengthen coordination efforts across agencies through a new Wildfire Intelligence Center which would streamline the federal response and create a whole-of-government approach to combating wildfires.

• Improve reforestation, seedling supply, and nursery capacity; establish new programs for white oak restoration; and clarify policies to reduce wildfire-related litigation and expedite forest health treatments.

That all sounds pretty vague, but also pretty important, right? Well that’s a problem, because one thing FOFA does not do is appropriate any new money. And as should be obvious, no money equals no results.

What Does FOFA Really Do?

Well that’s not quite true. While you do need money to build new things, you don’t necessarily need money to break existing things.

FOFA’s big achievement appears to be changing the maximum size of the area projects managed by the U.S. Forest Service can scale to before they need to seek approval through the processes dictated by the National Environmental Policy Act, which can take years to complete.

And while it’s common to focus on the extended timeline dictated by NEPA, that makes possible a process that takes into account input from a broad swath of stakeholders ranging from local community members, to environmental non-profits, scientists, lawyers, and private companies hoping to perform construction or extraction. The end result of NEPA isn’t delays, its fully-considered permitting that fosters the co-existence of increased profits, reduced wildfire risk, and minimized environmental impacts. In short, NEPA is there to ensure everyone wins, including the economy.

Right now, USFS can skip past the NEPA process by declaring an emergency exemption across projects spanning 2,000 to 3,000 acres. FOFA’s big provision is that it expands that area to 10,000 acres.

It then goes further, and allows the agency to designate its own “fireshed management areas,” which can be up to 250,000 acres in size, and in which NEPA’s typical public comment period will skipped once an environmental impact statement is created.

One check-and-balance on agency action has always been judicial review. If a stakeholder is concerned a given project may have been permitted illegally, or has impacts greater than originally considered that person or organization can file a lawsuit. Currently, the statute of limitations there is six years. FOFA would shrink that to just 150 days.

FOFA would also eliminate the requirement that USFS work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure protections for endangered or threatened species are included in its management planning.

Much of this has been written in favor of expanded logging efforts. One provision in FOFA provides a categorical exclusion from the NEPA process for any projects designed to remove “hazard trees,” which it defines as ones that the Secretary of Agriculture (USFS is a department within USDA) feels may pose a risk to firefighters. 250 such areas of “hazard trees” already exist across the west, FOFA would allow more to be created, and for all those areas to be logged without further process.

Putting FOFA Into Context

USFS manages 193 million acres of public land nationwide. USFS is currently managed by Tom Shultz, a former lobbyist for the logging industry with no experience at the agency.

USFS is an agency within USDA, which is managed by Brooke Rollins, who used to be Rick Perry’s lawyer.

Back in April, Rollins announced plans to log 112 million acres of national forest, using the excuse that, “We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our National Forests.”

But even while the Trump administration is trying to open up pretty much every area of forest to logging, it’s also attempting to slash budgets at both USDA and USFS. Since January, USFS has lost thousands of staff. The White House wants to further reduce that agency’s budget by $1.4 billion.

So, even while Schultz and Rollins are mandated to massively increase logging, they’re being asked to do so with ever shrinking budgets. For example, Rollins is only devoting $50 million over 5 years to building the roads necessary for expanded logging, a mere fraction of a percent of the construction necessary to support all this logging (by law, roads in national forests must be funded by taxpayers).

At the same time as they’re trying to pass this legislation to permit more logging, Senators have also voted to irrevocably break the permitting process for extraction projects on all public lands. So, any permitting for many existing, and any new logging projects has already been made legally questionable. Regardless of any changes to statutes in limitations around agency rulemaking, it will remain an open question whether or not the Congressional Review Act applies to these projects.

All that’s to say that while Hickenlooper’s claims this country is in a wildfire crisis, that our communities need action now, and that “wildfires won’t wait” are completely true, any assertion that the Fix Our Forests Act will fix anything other than giving Republicans the cover they need to claim they’re expanding logging even though they aren’t is a complete lie. Do better guys, we’re not paying you to keep screwing around.

Top photo: USFS

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