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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…

When abstract reasoning ignores the science: how lofty ideas about wilderness mislead wildfire policy. Last week, the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Haggerty published a Boiling Point newsletter piece titled, “To solve the wildfire crisis, we have to let the myth of ‘the wild’ die.” It argues that John Muir’s belief in protecting wilderness as “untouched”…

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…

Across the globe, people hold countless ways of seeing the natural world. Some draw meaning from scientific understandings of evolution, others from religious or spiritual creation lore, and still others from cultural traditions that see land, water, and all living beings as kin. What unites these varied worldviews is an understanding that the natural world…

The Science, the Stakes, and the Urgent Call to Defend Roadless Wildlands By John Muir Project, Western Watersheds Project, and Eco-Integrity Alliance Our National Forest system contains over 58 million acres of roadless wild lands. These areas, rich in biodiversity, are among the last strongholds of wilderness in the lower 48 states. But today, these…

Each year, the dominant narrative around wildfire focuses on trying to control wildfire “out there” in the backcountry. Logging and vegetation removal are touted as the solution, rooted in the misbelief that if we can just remove “fuels,” aka the trees and shrubs that create forest habitat, with these extractive activities, we can keep fire…

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…