By Allen Gibbs / For The Herald
The Fix Our Forests Act, currently awaiting action in the U.S. Senate, would do anything but what its title implies. This bill is being touted as a way to reduce wildfires. Instead, it could increase wildfire numbers and intensity, by increasing logging in our national forests.
The law fails to provide dedicated funding for wildfire strategies that are documented to save lives and homes, such as home hardening, creation of defensible space and emergency planning. It undermines the National Environmental Policy Act, allowing destructive logging projects of up to 15 square miles without public input.
Logging operations leave behind debris that becomes tinder dry in open clearcuts. They cause changes in forest composition and microclimate that favor fires, exposing forests to drying winds and sun. Chain saws and other logging equipment generate sparks and start fires.
The Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Report, issued in 1996 by the federal government, found that “timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity.”
This act would not simply reduce flammable brush. The U.S. Forest Service has a sad history of misusing funds appropriated under the National Fire Plan to promote commercial logging — which removed many large, economically valuable and fire-resistant trees — rather than protecting homes and communities from fires by removing more flammable small trees and brush. This was documented in an April 2002 report by the John Muir Project, which revealed that 83 percent of all Forest Service projects in the Sierra Nevada funded by fire plan brush reduction funds were actually commercial timber sales.
The administration seeks to vastly increase logging of national forests, with far less regulatory oversight than is now required.
The act would shorten the judicial review window on logging projects, placing an unfair burden on frontline communities and Tribes that deserve an equal voice in managing their public lands. It would make it very difficult to impossible for a judge to rule against an agency claim that a fire shed management project is not in the public interest and/or that it won’t achieve its stated goal, despite evidence that may be included in the public record to the contrary.
Furthermore, the misnamed Fix Our Forests Act guts the Endangered Species Act consultation process and removes essential protections for vulnerable fish and wildlife.
Do you care about our struggling, beloved orca whales? All of these effects would harm their food supply, chinook salmon. Please urge your elected officials to defeat the Fix Our Forests Act!
Allen Gibbs is conservation chair for the Pilchuck Audubon Society.
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