A better approach to forest management

Let the forest service do its job

The growing frequency and scale of wildfires represents a remarkable danger to wildlife habitats and to the health of almost everyone across the US. Fires have reversed decades of advancements in air quality, polluted our drinking water, and wreaked havoc on our ecosystems. While the most damaging effects typically occur in the Western states, last year’s severe fire season in Canada darkened skies along the eastern seaboard and reduced air quality in some cities to the worst levels in the world.

Fortunately, a wet winter has kept much of the wildfire kindling damp or buried under snow. So this year, wildfires will likely stay out of the headlines and consequently, out of mind, keeping dangerous pollutants out of our lungs.

Unfortunately, this year is an outlier.

A century of fire suppression policy has led to excess carbon material in forests. Rising temperatures act as the spark that ignites this kindling, increasing the likelihood of severe wildfire seasons over time.

Firefighters aren’t the only ones with the tools to fight fires, though. The US Forest Service has the ability and (as of 2022) the mission to reduce build-up in our forests. Now, it’s up to national, state, and local policymakers across the country to remove redundant legal bureaucracy and let them do their jobs.

Endangered species, millions of acres in natural habitat, and our health are at stake.

Fighting fire with fire

Apocalyptic images of forest fires is often presented as a definitive example of the immediate impacts of climate change. But the causal relationship is complicated, and I think it’s important to level set on a few important truths about the surge in forest fires and the factors driving them.

• Hotter summers, driven by anthropogenic climate change, have led to an increase in the frequency and scope of wildfires.

• However, not every massive forest fire is singularly the result of climate change. In a Heatmap article last year, Robinson Meyer writes that “It is difficult to attribute a single unprecedented event to climate, and the climatology of wildfires in eastern North America is particularly challenging.” He cites atmospheric physicist Kent Moore, who said, “This is probably an unlucky year for Canada, as far as wildfires go.” Meyer also notes that climate change will increase both the chance of rainfall across Canada and the likelihood of extreme heat.

• There’s now a strong consensus in the forestry community that a century of poor public land management, which emphasized the absolute suppression of wildfire, resulted in an unnatural build-up of carbon fuel in forests. This has served as the kindling that allowed for recent forest fires to burn at unprecedented scope and frequency. In short, Smokey the Bear kind of got it wrong: Low intensity forest fires are actually natural and healthy for our forests.

We don’t need to debate whether climate change or poor forest management is more at fault for the increased scope of wildfires. We need actionable solutions to fix the remarkable danger they pose to our human health and our economy. As Patrick Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, told me, the difference between limiting emissions to the business as usual scenario versus the Paris compliant scenario won’t have much of an impact on wildfires by 2050 in the US West.

Conversely, Brown’s research indicates that if California increased its mechanical thinning and controlled burning goal from 1 million acres annually to 3.9 million acres annually, the state would experience significant fire reduction benefits, resulting in an annual economic gain of $22.2 billion. These gains are driven, primarily, by reducing the “cost of health impacts from smoke inhalation, loss of natural capital, effects on property values, and broader economic disruption.”

The US Forest Service has also internalized the lessons of poor forest management, and has now committed to treating 50 million acres of high-risk fire sheds nationally over the coming decade. Additionally, $500 million in funding was allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to support this effort.

The bad news is that, just like many other parts of the climate agenda, there is a gap between what has been pledged and what has been achieved. And the instigating problem is a familiar one. The National Environmental Policy Act, as well as counterproductive legal obstructionism, has clogged up the fire management bureaucracy and tied the well-intentioned hands of the US Forest Service.

The terrible Cottonwood decision

The Canada Lynx is a remarkably cute and vicious cat. It was also, through no fault of its own, the catalyst for a legal assault on proper forest management.

In 2015, the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center sued the US Forest Service over its supposed failure to protect the Canada Lynx under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. The 9th Circuit eventually ruled in Cottonwood’s favor and established the precedent that the Forest Service must halt all of its forest plans (which include prescriptive burning plans) whenever new information arises about animals on the endangered species list in the area.

In theory, the Cottonwood requirement seems like a common sense way to protect endangered species. But in practice, it added a layer of bureaucracy that has needlessly delayed critical forest burning and mechanical trimming projects, which ultimately harms the very species they intended to protect.

Before Cottonwood, it was already Forest Service policy to ensure forest plans’ compliance with NEPA and to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service. To say that the Forest Service wasn’t factoring endangered species into its forestry plans is simply not true. While Congress passed a temporary fix, suspending the Cottonwood requirement for five years until a more permanent solution for permitting reform could be established, that solution expired last year. As a result, the Forest Service Deputy Chief estimated in a Congressional testimony that its work reducing wildfire risk would now be challenged in 87 forests. New forest plans will take up to 10 years to complete, and the financial cost will total in the tens of millions.

Looking at legal challenges that began before the suspension of the Cottonwood requirement in 2018, we can see the kind of impact the rule has had delaying necessary forest restoration projects.

The 2022 Hermit Peak Fire, which resulted from a prescribed burn, spread over 341,000 acres, destroying habitats for Mexican spotted owls, elk, and other wildlife. According to the Forest Service’s Wildfire Review Report, a thinning project in the area, which might have mitigated the fire’s impact, was delayed by a 2017 injunction. Delayed prescribed burning and thinning projects were also a culprit in the 2017 Park Creek and Arrastra Wildfires, which burned over 18,000 acres and destroyed extensive animal habitats. In an especially tragic turn of irony, Kat Dwyer, a spokesperson at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me about a forest management project that was delayed in the Klamath National Forest by a legal battle to protect the habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl. Sadly, during the delay, a wildfire ripped through the area and decimated the habitat. A report after the 2021 fire showed that areas that were subject to controlled thinning fared far better than the parts that were not.

These are far from the only instances in which delay was costly, and if the Forest Service continues to be forced to needlessly postpone scientifically sound forest plans, more acres will burn. And the endangered species these legal challenges are seeking to protect could suffer.

We need action

The good news is that there is a longstanding bipartisan push against Cottonwood in Washington. It started right after the 9th Circuit Court gave its decision, when the Obama administration warned that the ruling had the “potential to cripple the Forest Service and BLM’s land management functions.” The Trump administration echoed this call, which led to the temporary fix in 2018 that has since expired.

The bad news is that Congress isn’t looking like it will act to establish a permanent Cottonwood fix this year. Several pieces of legislation have been proposed. And Montana Senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines are leading the way with a bill that would “amend the Forest Planning and Land Management Acts to clarify that land management plans do not need to be revised when a new species is listed or new critical habitat is designated.”

But even if the Cottonwood decision is reversed, the simple truth is that under the current environmental review process, the Forest Service isn’t going to be able to accomplish their goal of treating 50 million acres of forest by the coming decade. According to PERC, it takes nearly five years to begin a prescribed burn through the environmental review process. For projects that require environmental impact statements, that process can jump up to over seven years.

Dwyer told me that the organization is “not against the environmental review process. It’s well intentioned.” However, as the report notes, these dramatic delays must be reformed if we’re going to have a chance at removing the excess forest build up that is driving a lot of these forest fires.

In my conversation with Patrick Brown at the Breakthrough Institute, he spoke somewhat optimistically about forest fire permitting reform in California, citing the California Vegetation Treatment Program, which allows wildfire fuel reduction projects to circumvent the burdensome regulatory requirements in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

In this unique case, it looks like California could serve as a model for reducing bureaucratic redundancy. However, while its admirable to see the state take the lead on expediting responsible forest management projects, action from the Congress would leave a much bigger footprint on fire safety.

It might be an election year, and such policy could spark challenging conversations with certain environmental groups, but fire safety is an issue that has bipartisan support in Congress. Prioritizing this policy will benefit our forests, the wildlife they sustain, and the health of people living across the country.