Fix Our Forests in Name Only

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.

He does think that, in isolation, some of FOFA’s provisions around wildland firefighting are important, but he worries about the impacts of the law’s overall approach on firefighter morale. “There is a legitimate need for proactive fire fuels management,” Ingalsbee said, pointing to prescribed burning, Indigenous cultural burning, and community fire preparation. Fire is inevitable and necessary in fire-prone landscapes, he said, and the century-plus-long practice of total fire suppression needs to change. “The exclusion of fire is now coming back to haunt us.”

“A treacherous bill” 

Critics of the bill are especially alarmed at what they characterize as a power grab, done under the guise of a wildfire emergency, by which stripped-down and unaccountable agencies can undertake whatever sorts of projects they want. 

“In the name of improving conditions in the forests and safety for communities, all of which this bill does not actually accomplish, the bill is going to end up taking out a whole lot of other laws and safeguards that have been in place for decades,” said Zack Porter, executive director of the Vermont-based wildland advocacy organization Standing Trees. “Ecological consequences aside, [FOFA] is a treacherous bill for maintaining the fragile democracy that we have.”

Porter is frustrated that the bill has taken on a bipartisan consensus, with Democrats—including those from eastern states, where wildfire has not traditionally been a major issue—signing on. He is especially incensed that his state’s junior senator, Peter Welch, voted yes in October on moving FOFA out of committee in the Senate, despite a July pledge to vote against the bill.

“Some of the same Democratic lawmakers who have rightly pointed out how the Trump administration is using manufactured emergencies to gain control—how are they not seeing through the ways that this bill does the exact same thing under the guise of the wildfire crisis?” Porter asked.

For Porter, DellaSala, and Ingalsbee, the issue is ultimately bigger than FOFA. It’s the confluence of a range of Trump administration policies that are handing even more control of public lands to industry, limiting public insight, and collectively worsening ecological health through a dramatic intensification of long-standing destructive policies. They point to the Roadless Rule rescission, along with Trump’s Executive Order 14225, titled Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production, as a sort of perfect storm of environmental harm that may lead to vastly more logging in some of the nation’s oldest and wildest forests—all more or less undertaken under the guise of so-called responsible land management. 

DellaSala said he sees the same arguments playing out as when he first testified in Congress in the early 1990s—even as, 30 years later, so many protections have already been rolled back.

“It’s been an accumulation of eroding our nation’s protections and forest regulations to the point where, if FOFA gets through, it’s going to be a house-of-cards thing for forests, where the public has very little say in outcomes,” he said. “You’re going to get very simple environmental assessments that look to bypass regulations and push through these destructive projects that are only going to make the problem worse in the long run.”