Latest news with #FOFA
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The ‘Fix Our Forests Act' is no fix
The act isn't forest management. It's a corporate giveaway. (Photo: iStock/Getty Images) As a proud Nevadan and Lake Tahoe resident who cherishes our public lands and forests, I feel compelled to speak out against the so-called 'Fix Our Forests Act' (FOFA). Don't let the title fool you! This federal legislation is no fix. In fact, it's a reckless attempt to hand over the keys to our national forests to corporate logging interests under the guise of wildfire prevention. If passed, FOFA would open the floodgates to massive, unchecked logging projects that threaten the very landscapes we hold dear in Nevada and across the country. Let's start with the most alarming piece: FOFA would enable a Trump executive order to ramp up commercial logging across nearly 60% of America's national forests. This is not hyperbole. It's a direct result of language in FOFA that weakens environmental protections and strips the public of its voice in managing these lands. The bill allows agencies to bypass crucial environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Incredibly, it even permits NEPA reviews to happen after logging projects have already been completed, undermining the entire purpose of environmental oversight. It gets worse. FOFA dramatically expands the size of 'Categorical Exclusions' (CEs), administrative loopholes that allow certain forest projects to dodge public review and environmental study. Under FOFA, logging operations up to 10,000 acres (15 square miles) could move forward without any public input. To put that into perspective, that's roughly the size of more than 7,500 football fields, cleared without so much as a town hall meeting. That's not forest management, that's a corporate giveaway. The bill also advances a deeply flawed narrative: that commercial logging and grazing are effective wildfire mitigation strategies. The science says otherwise. Study after study has shown that the most effective ways to protect communities from wildfire involve local measures, like creating defensible space around homes, hardening buildings against fire, and developing emergency response plans. FOFA includes no funding for these proven strategies. Instead, it funnels energy and attention into large-scale commercial logging, which may actually increase fire risk by removing old-growth trees that are naturally more fire-resistant. Here in Nevada, we understand the value of healthy, resilient ecosystems. Our forests aren't just scenic backdrops. They're critical to our water supplies, our recreation, and our identity. The Fix Our Forests Act threatens that balance. It's a Trojan horse for deregulation, designed to sideline science, slash public involvement, and clear the way for extractive industries. Worse yet, it aligns directly with recent moves by the Trump administration to prioritize timber extraction over environmental stewardship. Just days before FOFA was introduced in the Senate, Trump's Secretary of Agriculture released a memo implementing an executive order to massively expand logging across federal lands. This is the same administration that has gutted staff at the U.S. Forest Service and slashed funding for wildfire prevention. If President Trump and the U.S. Congress truly cared about protecting communities, we'd see investments in firefighter support, forest restoration, and climate resilience, not just more clear-cutting. Instead, his executive order and FOFA combine to create a dangerous one-two punch: under-resourced forest agencies forced to chase arbitrary timber targets, at the expense of meaningful wildfire mitigation. Let's be clear: climate change, not tree density, is the root driver of the catastrophic wildfires we've seen across the West. Rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and increasingly erratic weather patterns are drying out our forests and setting the stage for firestorms. Logging our way out of this problem is not just shortsighted, it's counterproductive. More logging won't bring back the rain. What we need is bold, climate-smart leadership that prioritizes long-term forest health and community safety over short-term industry profits. Unfortunately, Congresswoman Susie Lee (NV-03) and Congressman Mark Amodei (NV-02) cosponsored FOFA in the House, and Congressman Steven Horsford (NV-04) voted for the bill. Congresswoman Dina Titus (NV-01) was Nevada's lone 'nay.' The bill will now make its way through the U.S. Senate and Nevada's senators haven't yet revealed how they plan to vote. Whether we're talking about FOFA or Trump's executive orders, the bottom line is the same: this is an attack on our public lands. These are lands that belong to all of us, not just the timber lobby or political donors. Nevada's senators, and senators across the country for that matter, should reject FOFA in its current form. We need our representatives to stop looking at our public lands with dollar signs in their eyes. Instead, they should champion legislation that supports fire-resilient communities through real solutions: funding for home hardening, local emergency planning, defensible space projects, and prescribed fire treatments guided by science and Indigenous knowledge. We need forest policy rooted in stewardship, not exploitation. Nevada deserves better, and so do the forests we all depend on.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fix Our Forests Act would destroy forests without protecting communities
A small pond sits near the Twin Rock Trail in the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. (NPS staff/Peterson/Public domain) Forests are extremely valuable for watersheds, wildlife, carbon storage, recreation and so much more. The deceptively named Fix Our Forests Act, or FOFA, does nothing to conserve forests to retain these values. Instead, it would emphasize logging and otherwise manipulating forests at a scale we haven't seen on public lands for many decades, if ever. The misguided bill has already passed the House, and its Senate version was recently introduced by Colorado's own U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and other Western senators. FOFA encourages the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which manage most of the federal lands in the Western U.S., to avoid a careful examination of impacts from logging and ways to reduce harms under the National Environmental Policy Act. Under FOFA, projects up to 10,000 acres — over 15 square miles — would be excluded from consideration of possible impacts. The effects to watersheds, wildlife habitat, recreation and scenery would be massive. What's more, the public would have only one chance to provide input for logging projects and could only object in court. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX If Fix Our Forests passes, agencies would no longer need to consult about their management plans with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if new threatened or endangered species were listed or critical habitat was designated for them, or even if new information surfaced concerning what action was needed for their recovery to secure populations. This provision could lead to further harm to species already on the edge of continued existence. The use of livestock grazing to reduce the risk of fire would be also encouraged. Grazing can be extremely harmful to fragile ecosystems, especially near streams and lakes. Stock can denude vegetation, leading to invasion by non-native species, such as cheatgrass, which burns easily and readily reestablishes itself after fires. Yet under FOFA, grazing could be used for 'post-fire restoration and recovery,' in spite of adverse impacts. Under recent direction from its Washington office, the U.S. Forest Service would be encouraged to use two methods of approving logging projects that would basically allow loggers to select which trees they want to cut and sell to mills. The largest trees, the ones most valuable for wildlife and storing carbon, would likely be taken. FOFA would even allow logging for the purpose of 'retaining and expanding forest products infrastructure,' i.e., with no other goal than to benefit the logging industry by giving them logs off public lands at taxpayer expense. In the bill, 'high priority hazard trees' would be defined as those likely to fall, which could of course mean almost all trees in the forest. Areas up to 6,000 acres containing such trees within 300 feet of Forest Service roads could be cut with no consideration of impacts. Similarly, trees that could fall within 150 feet of a powerline could be cut with no assessment of possible impacts. Science, much of it researched by the Forest Service, clearly shows the best way to protect houses and other infrastructure is by removing flammable material from the structures and an area no more than 100 feet surrounding them. Cutting our public forests will not protect our communities. We don't need to degrade and destroy forests to save our homes and infrastructure from fire. Our forests need more protection from harmful activities, not less, in order to retain the great benefits they provide for us and other species as well. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This Bill to Reduce Wildfires Might Actually Make Them Worse
The Fix Our Forests Act, which breezed through a House vote last week, represents a 'return to common sense,' according to Speaker Mike Johnson. 'The reason this is so important is because we see what happened in California,' Johnson said. The recent wildfires that have left at least 26 dead and nearly 15,000 structures destroyed, he has also suggested, are partly the fault of 'water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems,' which should be fixed before those suffering receive further federal aid. The Fix Our Forests Act would allow loggers to more easily thin forests by reducing environmental regulations and public input. The thinking is that reducing tree counts means reducing wildfire fuel. Yet environmental groups including Sierra Club and Earthjustice say that the bill would cause more fires, not fewer. FOFA is 'a trojan horse for Republicans to weaken environmental law to serve industry interests,' Earthjustice's Blaine Miller-McFeeley told me. Miller-McFeeley's view of the bill as a gift to logging companies echoes the position of many prominent environmental groups. Last week, more than 130 environmental organizations co-signed a letter observing that FOFA's 'sweeping provisions remove scientific review and accountability to benefit the short-term interests of extractive industries.' The Republican co-author of the bill, Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, received more than $160,000 in campaign contributions from the forestry industry in 2023 and 2024, according to Open Secrets. Some experts told me that the basic logic behind the bill could actually lead to more severe burns. Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethnics, and Ecology (FUSEE) told me that scaling up logging in the wilderness, where uncontrolled blazes can stomp through small towns on their way to the exurbs, would leave behind the most flammable materials. 'Grasses, shrubs, leaves, small trees, old logging slash: these are the things that the timber industry will never ever remove,' he says. 'They have no commodity value. When they wanna do logging, they remove the least flammable portion of a tree and dump all the needles and limbs on the ground where it's basically tinder.' In fact, the best wildfire mitigators are often the trees themselves. Old growth forests are able to survive and slow the spread of flames—and their numbers are dwindling due to logging. Further, the most dangerous fires—the ones that threaten densely populated areas—rarely begin deep in the woods. For example, the LA firestorms 'originated in very brushy areas just outside of town then became an urban configuration issue,' said Ingalsbee. 'No amount of logging would have saved anything—it's this spurious connection.' FOFA's provisions would allow the U.S. Forest Service to skip regulatory steps that are typically required when clearing out federally owned forest land. When a parcel of federal land might need to be altered—say, the installation of utility lines—agencies like the Forest Service can use a designation called 'categorical exclusion' to forego time-consuming steps, like conducting sustainability analyses or soliciting community input, if the alteration is unlikely the impact populated environments. The bill expands the range of certain types of categorical exclusions from 3,000 and 4,500 acres to 10,000 acres—nearly the size of Manhattan. Additional provisions in the bill allow agencies like the Forest Service to conditionally delay environmental review for logging projects until after they're finished and reduces the statute of limitations combating such projects in court to 120 days after they've been announced. Those provisions would make it easier than ever for logging companies to appeal to the Forest Service for permission to chop through federal land—with little public notice or consideration for environmental reproductions, and a window for legal recourse that closes in the blink of an eye. 'The agency, with the timber industry as their puppet master, will be able to do whatever they want and as fast as they want,' Miller-McFeeley says. To the bill's authors, that assertion couldn't be further from the truth. According to Paul Iskajyan, senior advisor to Scott Peters, the bill's Democratic co-author, tree-thinning 'is a tool in the tool belt that will help prevent some fires. It will be up to the experts using the best available science and data, in accordance with the law and strong environmental guardrails, to determine when to use them.' Over email, Iskajyan added that the bill contains a number of other wildfire solutions, such as enhancing inter-agency collaboration to fight fires and investment in research and development. The bill's opponents aren't convinced. 'Coordination is great. So is research and development around advancing tech for wildfire detection and those sorts of things. All of those are fine and standing alone we'd be more than supportive of those,' Miller-McFeeley said. 'They are being used to dress up a problematic, destructive bill.' Jared Huffman, another Democrat from California, has a competing bill under consideration to address wildfires, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, which has endorsements from such groups as Sierra Club and Earthjustice. At the center of Huffman's own bill, co-authored with California Republican Jay Obernolte, is a series of financial incentives to help communities draft their own wildlife resilience plans, which would include identifying 'defensible space' against fires and strengthening communication with state agencies. Huffman denounced FOFA from the House floor on Thursday. 'Wildfire is deadly serious,' he said. 'It's not something politicians should use as a pretext to jam through unrelated industry favors or special interest agendas that undermine our foundational environmental protections.' The good parts of the bill, he argued, 'are totally unfunded.' Instead of addressing 'the key driver of catastrophic wildfires,' i.e. climate change, he said, the bill 'inappropriately co-opts emergency authorities under the National Environmental Policy Act, undercuts the Endangered Species Act, and even makes it more difficult for communities to engage and scrutinize or even know about projects that could directly impact them.' Despite Huffman's broadsides, 64 Democrats joined the Republican majority in passing FOFA through the House. Meanwhile, Huffman's wildfire bill, which he re-introduced last week after it faltered in the previous congressional session, awaits its time on the floor.
