At first glance, the logic behind the Fix Our Forests Act makes a twisted sort of sense and the scientific backdrop behind the act is real. A century of logging and intensive fire suppression have disrupted the natural ecological processes of our fire-adapted forests in the West and in the Rocky Mountains, which has led to an increased risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Unfortunately, the connections with legitimate fire ecology end there, and the rest of the reasoning behind this legislation that is making its way through Congress, obscures an industry-led effort to leverage the wildfire emergency to line their pockets and wreck our public lands in the process.
This bill proposes to exempt “vegetation management” activities on our national forests from environmental review. This isn’t just raking pine needles. These activities include industrial-scale commercial logging and heavy livestock grazing. By removing the environmental checks and balances to federal land management projects, the Fix our Forests Act (FOFA) bypasses the critical oversight and public scrutiny that protects our ecosystems and restricts scientific input and public involvement. Plus, there’s scant evidence that these commercial treatments are doing anything helpful on the firefront.
An example can be found in the Camp Fire, a 2018 tragic fire that killed 85 people and largely destroyed four California communities, including a community called Paradise that was surrounded by heavy-handed logging “fuels treatments.” The fire burned through private lands and the public National Forest where there had been extensive logging and tree thinning. These logging treatments did not slow down the fire or protect the community, because, as the old adage used by firefighters goes, “wind wins”.
Like many catastrophic wildfires, including the recent fires in Los Angeles, the primary vector of the Camp Fire’s spread was embers carried by the wind, rather than fire consuming and traveling across vegetation alone. Logging the forest around Paradise didn’t protect the community, and it may have even allowed the wind to carry embers farther and faster.
These industrial treatments also create more receptive fuel beds for embers to land and spread fire. Based on the largest analysis of its kind conducted in 2016 and published in the journal Ecosphere, commercial thinning increases fire intensity. Logging reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy, creating hotter and drier conditions. It also removes valuable trunks of trees, which don’t burn, but leave behind fine fuels, or kindling. The soil and vegetation disturbance caused by logging and livestock facilitates invasions of quick-burning invasive grasses like cheatgrass.
Livestock grazing also disturbs old-growth, fire-resilient native grasslands, shrublands, and open forests, allowing cheatgrass and other disturbance-adapted flashy fuel species to replace them. Cattle will not eat most woody shrubs and trees, nor do they eat woody downed fuel, so grazing does not remove wood that will cause fires. The types of vegetation that livestock do remove tend to grow back within one year, so the benefit of them eating plants to prevent fires is short-lived and not worth the environmental cost.
Also essential is the consideration of large-scale climate impacts. Research has demonstrated that logging and grazing under the guise of wildfire prevention emit about three times more carbon into the atmosphere, per acre, than wildfire alone.
FOFA would gut the current environmental review requirements and no longer account for these factors. Without them, extractive industries have more freedom to place private profit over the public good.
Toward the end of my time working as a federal wildland firefighter, these large-scale, industrial fuel treatment projects were gaining momentum, even without FOFA. If we want to create a sustainable wildland-urban interface, we must focus on home hardening, defensible space, and appropriate prescribed fire treatments near homes and communities, not making loopholes for industrial logging and livestock grazing in the backcountry.
Coloradans should be fully informed and both Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet have an opportunity to make decisive differences regarding this legislation.
Delaney Rudy is the Colorado Director for Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group working to protect and restore wildlife and watersheds throughout the American West. She formerly worked as a wildland firefighter on the Gunnison National Forest in western Colorado.
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