Fire Doesn’t Care About Fences, But Congress Keeps Building Them
— ‘Fix Our Forests’ or Feed the Industry? A Reality Check on the May 15th, 2025 House Natural Resources Subcommittee Hearing
This week’s House Natural Resources Committee Oversight Hearing — laughably titled Fix Our Forests: How Improved Land Management Can Protect Communities in the Wildland-Urban Interface — was yet another masterclass in business-as-usual greenwashing dressed up in public safety drag. Billed as a conversation about protecting communities, the hearing quickly devolved into a predictable parade of logging boosterism and recycled fire myths.
Where Were the Democrats? Seriously, Where?
Last week, during the “wreck”-onciliation markup, Rep. Joe Neguse gave an impassioned speech about how constituents expect Congress to show up and debate critical issues. And then… most Democrats didn’t. At this week’s hearing, outside of the subcommittee members, their seats remained empty. No pushback, no scrutiny, no leadership. Just crickets — and complicit silence. If you’re not even in the room, you don’t get to claim you’re protecting communities from fire. And Neguse? You don’t get credit for dropping a sound bite one week and ghosting the conversation the next. Fire doesn’t care about your Instagram reel.
With that vacuum, Republicans packed the dais and dominated the narrative, steamrolling nuance in favor of industry talking points. The only “fix” they seem interested in is fixing the market for more timber. It was a strategic win for extractive interests, and a colossal failure for community protection.
Another Hearing, But the Bill Already Passed?
Let’s not forget: the so-called Fix Our Forests Act already passed the House. So why hold another hearing that wasn’t even about the bill — and barely stayed on topic? This wasn’t a policy debate; it was a chance to rehash industry talking points under the banner of “oversight,” while avoiding real scrutiny of the bill’s failures. It’s political theater, not governance — and certainly not community protection. But this bizarre post-passage hearing also suggests that the bill’s backers realize that more and more people are wondering why the response of Congress to the chaparral fires that devastated two cities in Los Angeles–miles and miles from the nearest forest habitat–is to promote yet another backcountry logging bill on public lands, far from communities. This was their clumsy and unconvincing attempt to spin this logging bill as a community safety measure, which it’s not.
This Was Supposed to Be About Communities, Remember?
Instead of focusing on homes, neighborhoods, and human safety zones where fire actually threatens lives, the hearing dragged us back to tired tropes about overgrown forests, roadless areas, and the false idol of “active management.”
And let’s be honest: much of the so-called ‘original’ forestland settlers encountered has already been logged, grazed, developed, or fragmented since colonization began in the late 1400s. What remains is a patchwork of altered landscapes, many of which are still recovering–and yet we’re told these forests are ‘too dense’ or ‘unhealthy’ simply because they don’t look like commercial plantations.
Chief Munsey of San Bernardino leaned into this narrative, pointing to increasing tree density and beetle kill as justification for repeated interventions. But that argument collapses under scrutiny. Forests aren’t unhealthy just because they’re dense–they’re adapting to changing conditions. Treating every increase in biomass as a problem to be ‘fixed’ through logging is both ahistorical and ecologically reckless. Most current scientific studies find that the most carbon-rich forests have the highest biodiversity, and tend to burn at lower intensities when wildfires occur.
Choose a Lane: Let Fire Burn or Kill Every Spark?
Captain Chapman of Flagstaff said it best: fire doesn’t care if a fence is there, it’s going to keep moving. Exactly. So why are we still pretending we can box it in with fuel breaks and road-building?
Chapman also acknowledged that “doing the work on the public land didn’t move the needle the way we had hoped.” So why do we keep treating the backcountry as the epicenter of risk? Why is the insurance industry still propping up this illusion — offering coverage based on backcountry fuel reduction projects, instead of focusing policies and incentives on what actually works: home hardening, ember-resistant design, and neighborhood-scale preparedness?
If you’re going to follow the science, follow all of it — not just the parts that make logging contracts pencil out.
The Logging Lie, Again
The (sub)committee trotted out the old Greatest Hits: thinning, fuel breaks, and the magical belief that logging reduces fire risk, despite the fact that dozens of studies by the Forest Service’s own scientists contradict this claim, finding that thinning and other logging tend to intensify wildfire behavior and rate of spread. Boebert made the cherry-picked claim that wildfire emissions are worse than cars — a grossly misleading comment that distracted from the real issue: logging and road-building release carbon and degrade ecosystem resilience. Over 200 climate scientists and ecologists sent a letter to Congress in 2021 noting that current annual carbon emissions from logging in the US are comparable to carbon emissions from burning coal.
Hageman laid it bare with unusual honesty: “They’re to be managed as a commodity.” There it is. Community protection isn’t the point — it’s just the PR spin.
The Contradictions Keep Coming
Chapman made a strong case for smoke-resilient infrastructure during prescribed burns — great. But why is public health protection only prioritized when fire is planned by people in uniforms?
We’re told that natural fire is essential — but only the kinds we light on our terms. Meanwhile, uncontrolled fires are met with suppression at all costs, even when those costs include ecological collapse, public safety delays, and firefighter fatalities. If fire is natural and necessary, then why are we throwing everything we’ve got at killing it, while neglecting the very places and people that actually need protection?
Start with Homes, Not Harvests
Weiner of Megafire Action asked the one question that actually mattered: How do we get homeowners to do the work on their property? Everything else should have flowed from that. Instead, we detoured back into a familiar loop of commercial forest policy, Good Neighbor Authority expansions, and the forest biomass energy fantasy — all cloaked in hollow rhetoric about protecting communities from wildfires.
We don’t need more roads into national forests. We need policies that scale what works: risk maps that are accurate and transparent, public education campaigns that go beyond fear-mongering, and real investments in fire-safe home retrofits and local response capacity to save homes and help people and their animals safely evacuate during wildfires.
You want fire resilience? Start with the first five feet around your home, not 10 miles into a national forest.
Stop Using Us as Cover
Congress continues to use “community protection” as a talking point to justify forest extraction. But what communities actually need — and keep asking for — are upgraded building codes, support for home hardening and defensible space, emergency alert systems, smoke centers, and neighborhood-scale support. Until lawmakers center people instead of using them as cover for giveaways to timber, mining, and biomass energy interests, nothing meaningful will change.
The Fix Our Forests Act is not a fix. It’s a cynical diversion. And until members of Congress stop congratulating themselves for showing up — or worse, not showing up at all — communities will continue to burn while remote public forests are felled and the spin machine keeps cranking.