Posts by Jennifer Mamola

Observations from the road, the forest, and the resilience of life. I’ve been struggling lately, with work and with words. Writing takes me hours, even full weekends, as I try to articulate the strife I feel and propose solutions rather than just complain. Yet I always end up tangenting — after all, it’s all connected.…

Preserving the Sanctuaries That Ground and Uplift Us All When I first arrived in Washington D.C., over a decade ago, I noticed how the first question after “What’s your name?” is often “Where do you work?” It reminded me of my time in Uganda, where the question was always “What’s your name?” and “Where do…

Edited Out of Context: A Millennial in the Media Machine I recently participated in my first on-camera interview, for a segment on Stossel TV that had been pitched to me as a conversation about whether public lands should be sold for housing. In the interview, I explained that this is a manufactured crisis, and if…

Tomorrow, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing titled The State of Our Nation’s Federal Forests. The title alone sets the tone: as if our forests are in crisis, waiting for Congress and industry to swoop in with chainsaws and prescriptions. This isn’t the fault of a single administration or party. For decades, political…

Washington’s Climate Plan: A Step Forward on Forest Protection, but a Step Back on Fire and Bioenergy. Washington state is often a leader in climate policy, so it was encouraging to see its new Draft Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP) recognize the crucial role our forests play in fighting climate change. The plan correctly identifies…

Breaking the myth of “wildfire” and facing our roles in the flames. The word wildfire sounds dramatic — raw, “natural,” something beyond our control. But there’s nothing natural about fires sparked by fireworks, power lines, or abandoned campfires. These aren’t wilderness events. They are human-triggered disasters, made worse by failing infrastructure, reckless development, and negligence.…

From Galileo to Groundtruthers, history shows us what happens when evidence threatens empire. For more than a century, U.S. forest policy has treated wildlands as a malfunction to fix: too dense, too flammable, too untidy. Fire was cast as an enemy to be crushed, not a partner in the oldest ecological dance on Earth. This…

“It’s human nature to assume that what we have today is what we’ll have tomorrow.” — Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis “Short-term memory is never a substitute for long-term evidence.” — Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis These two lines capture exactly how we’ve gone wrong with forests. We assume today’s forest is normal and will persist. We assume wildfire,…

A response to SEEC’s climate-and-parks report, and the pantomime of progress around it. Yesterday’s rollout of the new report, America’s Best Idea in Peril, by the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition Institute (SEEC) and the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks (CPANP), is a case study in political branding eclipsing ecological reality. But what it…