The “Fix Our Forests Act” is a Wasteful, Destructive Con: Part 1

Fire is natural and ecologically essential in U.S. forests. There is no scientific disagreement about this. But a political narrative has been circulating in recent years, asserting that it is infeasible to simply manage public forests with fire because many are too dense, or have not burned in many decades. They would have us spend billions of taxpayer dollars “thinning” public forests, claiming this must be done before we can safely allow fire to occur, and we must weaken or override environmental laws to expedite this increase in taxpayer-subsidized logging on public lands.

Notably, proponents of this narrative include those who advocate for passage of the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act” (S. 1462)—a logging bill that would severely undermine environmental laws and restrict the ability of courts to hold the Forest Service accountable for illegal logging projects on public lands.

In reality, there is a serious problem with the narrative being used to promote the Fix Our Forests Act and similar logging bills: it’s a fiction. Dozens of scientific studies by the government’s own scientists, conducted over the course of nearly half a century, have clearly established that there is no need to remove any trees before managing with fire, even in extremely dense forests or forests that have not burned in over a century. The burning—including managed wildfire, prescribed fire, and Indigenous cultural burning—is simply conducted in the natural fire season during mild fire weather, avoiding hot, dry, windy conditions, if low-intensity fire is desired.

But the false narrative persists because so many people are making so much money at taxpayer expense. Case in point, the Central and West Slope “thinning” project on the Plumas National Forest in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The U.S. Forest Service admitted in its responses to public comments that “it is known that tree removal is not required before prescribed fire can be used”, and further admitted in its environmental assessment that thinning plus prescribed fire is about six times more expensive per acre for taxpayers than prescribed fire alone, without thinning.

Heedless of these facts, the Forest Service chose to conduct 218,000 acres of logging, under the guise of “thinning”, on public lands in the Central and West Slope project. Millions of mature and old-growth trees would be sold to logging companies, cut down and killed, and hauled to lumber mills in the deceptive name of wildfire management through this project, with a shocking price tag of $673 million, according to the environmental assessment. There are many other such thinning projects being planned and implemented currently on national forests across the country.

Notably, it’s not just logging companies that get a financial windfall from logging on public lands; the U.S. Forest Service also has a financial interest. Many people may not realize that the Forest Service uses public funds to plan and implement projects that sell vast swaths of trees on our national forests to logging companies. The Forest Service keeps most of the revenue from these federal timber sales for its own budget. This creates a perverse financial incentive to prioritize logging over all else. As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has observed, the Forest Service “has a substantial financial interest in the harvesting of timber” from national forests, and is often “more interested in harvesting timber than in complying with our environmental laws.”

For their part, logging interests shower many members of Congress, of both political parties, with campaign contributions to prop up the federal lands logging program and keep it going.

The candid truth is that the political narrative currently being used to promote the Fix Our Forests Act does not square with the science. In addition to numerous well-documented adverse impacts of mechanical thinning to wildlife and our climate, forest thinning is wildly expensive and is simply not necessary. Managing forests with fire alone effectively modifies the behavior and intensity of subsequent wildfires, where that may be a goal, while mechanical thinning often increases wildfire intensity.

And here’s the kicker. Under existing laws, the Forest Service already has the legal authority to allow an unlimited number of managed wildfires (natural lightning ignitions allowed to burn in mild to moderate fire weather for ecological benefit). The agency also has the existing authority to expedite and carry out prescribed fire projects up to 3,000 acres in size each through “categorical exclusions”, without conducting environmental analyses. There are no existing legal impediments to returning fire to our forests.

At one of the House Natural Resources Committee’s recent hearings promoting the Fix Our Forests Act logging bill, one of the Committee’s witnesses, recently retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire scientist, Dr. David Calkin, conveyed an inconvenient truth to the Committee’s leadership, stating: “The only solution to wildfire is more fire. We need more fire on the ground. There is no substitute for fire.”

In fact, there is no need for any of Fix Our Forests Act’s provisions that would weaken or override environmental laws…except, of course, that the true goal is simply to increase taxpayer-subsidized logging on public lands, regardless of the costs.

Take Action:

Call your U.S. Senators (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121) and strongly urge them to oppose the “Fix Our Forests Act”, S. 1462. Tell them the deceptively-named “Fix Our Forests Act” is a destructive and dishonest Trojan horse logging bill cynically masquerading as a forest health and community wildfire protection measure.

Chad Hanson, based in the Sierra Nevada, is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project and the author of the book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.