Posts by Jennifer Mamola

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…

The John Muir Project just returned from our annual retreat, a time to reconnect with each other—and with the landscapes we are fighting to protect. This year, our time in Sequoia country aligned with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year when light stretches across the landscape and the rhythms of the natural world feel most alive.

An ounce of prevention? Try a pound of industry greenwash. On June 26, the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Lands hosted a hearing titled “Advancing Innovative Technologies to Improve Forest Management and Prevent Wildfires.” But in reality, it was a blaze of slick marketing and false panaceas dressed up as innovation. Rep. Tom…

The Same Old Logging Giveaway Threatens Public Lands—Now Riding the Budget Reconciliation Wave Once again, Congress is playing with fire—this time through a dangerous misuse of budget reconciliation. Designed to advance budget-related legislation with a simple majority, this process is being twisted to push through anti-environmental provisions that would shred safeguards, greenlight logging across public…