"Fix Our Forests Act" Draws Mixed Reactions

A U.S. Senate committee hearing Tuesday revealed the dramatically differing views regarding the potential benefits of the Fix Our Forests Act, a bipartisan proposal that critics say would lead to logging of old-growth trees and weaken the country's environmental laws.

At the same time, proponents believe the act will lead to healthier forests and wildlife. A similar measure passed the House of Representatives early this year.

Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), John Curtis (R-Utah), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) say their measure would help combat catastrophic wildfires, restore forest ecosystems, and make federal forest management more efficient. 

“The status quo around wildfires isn’t working and far too many Americans have paid the price,” said Padilla. “The families I’ve met who have lost everything to the devastation in Los Angeles and in wildfire disasters across the country deserve action. That’s why we’re coming together to confront this crisis and rethink how we prevent and respond."

But Anna Medema, the Sierra Club’s associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands, maintained that the legislation is a "handout to the timber industry."

"Critical public services are running out of funding, federal workers are missing paychecks, but the Trump administration and its allies can find the time to advance a bill giving logging CEOs free rein in our national forests," added Medema, referring to the ongoing government shutdown. "If they were interested in doing what’s best for our national forests, Congressional Republicans would re-open the government and fund the Forest Service."

From the Sierra Club's viewpoint, the legislation considered by the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry contains "provisions that would vastly increase the cutting of old-growth and mature trees, weaken environmental protection laws, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and limit public input and judicial oversight of logging projects in national forests."

Defenders of Wildlife also opposed the legislation.

"Providing more authority to the administration by weakening our conservation laws will allow for unfettered logging by minimizing transparency, oversight and accountability,” said Chris Westfall, senior government relations legislative counsel at Defenders. “Ignoring science and community input for logging projects without adding considerations for fire-resilient old-growth trees will not prevent wildfires but will allow the logging industry to destroy wildlife habitat, including vital habitat for imperiled species.”

But officials at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership counter that the measure would reverse the declining health of the nation's forests.

“The declining health of our National Forests and the fish and wildlife habitat that they provide is a concern for America’s hunters and anglers,” said Joel Webster, chief conservation officer for Partnership. “TRCP applauds the leadership of Senate Agriculture Committee members for advancing the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act. We urge Congress to pass these important forest management provisions and to accompany them with adequate resources and capacity to carry out on-the-ground work.” 

TRCP said the legislation would hasten "important planning and implementation of restoration projects, expand collaborative tools, and improve coordination between local, state, federal, and tribal partners. The legislation bolsters the use of prescribed fire, promotes replanting after wildfires or other extreme events, and supports ecosystem and habitat restoration across Western forests, as well as the priceless white oak forests of the Eastern U.S."

“While the ongoing government shutdown highlights the challenges facing our public land agencies, today’s bipartisan action by the Senate Agriculture Committee shows that progress on forest health and wildfire resilience can and should continue,” said Webster. “The Fix Our Forests Act lays the groundwork to advance the pace and scale of forest management, and the TRCP will continue to work with Congress to secure the resources agencies need to put these tools to work.”

In an article earlier this year that took a close look at Senate and House legislation aimed at ramping up logging in the nation's forests the National Parks Traveler reported that global warming and drought have intensified wildfires and that some scientists believe that ramping up timber production on federal land as President Donald Trump has ordered would fuel the climate crisis. And as Congress members shepherd legislation to reduce vegetation that feeds infernos, critics foresee a gateway to unnecessary logging beyond wildfire resilience efforts.

Controlled burns and mechanical forest thinning are standard tools for public and private forests. But Trump’s drive to exploit federal land resources in the name of fire protection and economic development — his order ties wildfire destruction to “our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply” — has created a stew of concerns and suspicion along with urgency. In Congress, a push for more and faster wildfire protection has produced bipartisan legislation in both houses that would expand use of “categorical exclusions,” which are used under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to reduce environmental review when a project is deemed to have no significant environmental impact. 

At the time Padilla told the Traveler that, "Our communities can’t afford to wait for the political winds to change to find solutions to address the ever-increasing threat of wildfires.”

The legislation reviewed Tuesday by the Senate committee would:

• 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.

Defenders maintains the legislation would:

• Overturn Cottonwood, the ESA legal precedent that affirmed that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management must reinitiate consultation on a forest or land management plan when a new species is listed, critical habitat is designated, or new information that may affect a species or habitat is revealed. 
• Undermine judicial review by shortening the statute of limitations and change the standard for injunctive relief, "putting a thumb on the scale of allowing illegal actions to continue. The bill dramatically shortens the time to challenge projects in court from six years in most instances to 150 days. The start date for this extremely abbreviated period is also unclear and runs from notice of intent to carry out the project, not final agency action. This shortened timeline will bar many from exercising their right to be heard in court and block communities’ attempts to protect wildlife. The changes to injunctive standards also favor logging projects and makes it harder to grant injunctions protecting species under the ESA."
• Potentially create confusion by codifying ESA and NEPA emergency regulations that already exist. 
• Expand the size of multiple NEPA categorical exclusions for environmental reviews to 10,000 acres, weakening the process of reviewing logging projects which include massive swaths of forest. This will incentivize the logging of large, old growth trees, which are not only the most fire-resilient, but also key habitat for wildlife, the organization said.