Late last week, the House passed H.R. 2647, a piece of forestry legislation that will undermine bedrock environmental protections and the public's ability weigh in on logging projects that affect public lands.
The ironically titled “Resilient Federal Forests Act,” is nothing more than a buffet for the timber industry. From making it nearly impossible for citizens to prevent harmful logging of our public forests, to allowing the possibility of fast tracked logging after a heavy rain storm, to reallocating funds from restoration and land stewardship in favor of timber sale projects, this bill will cripple our country’s forests.
Under this bill,up to 15,000 acres in size could be logged with no consideration of the impacts to water quality, wildlife habitat, or recreational opportunities. Furthermore, Congress barred citizens’ access to the courts by preventing the public from challenging projects that could damage forests, wildlife habitat, drinking water supplies, or local recreation economies.
Incredibly, individuals would be barred from being able to recover their own legal expenses under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) -- a law designed specifically to support citizen’s ability to hold the government accountable by compensating them for their legal expenses if they successfully establish that the government violated the law. As Rep. Nikki Tsongas rightly pointed out on the House floor, this legislation “erode [s] some of the bedrock principles of the American legal system that protect the basic rights of citizens to participate in the Federal decision making process and to hold their government accountable.”
Though a last minute addition to this legislation would allow the President to declare wildfires on federal lands as major disasters and provide supplemental funding for fire suppression, this provision does not solve the problem that fire suppression costs continue to consume an increasingly large share of the Forest Service’s budget. Â
Lastly, H.R. 2647 is unnecessary legislation. The U.S. Forest Service already has full authority to manage for environmental resiliency and provide for multiple uses on our nation’s public lands. Instead of passing damaging legislation such as H.R. 2647 that weakens environmental protections, Congress should focus on passing a clean fire bill to fix fire funding.
House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raul Grijalva said it best, H.R. 2647 “is not about forest health. It is about increasing the numbers of trees removed from the forest.” Congress must focus on passing legislation that fixes fire funding -- not cutting down our forests.