|
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (SENR) held a hearing on March 12th ostensibly to discuss the Biden Administration's Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. The 50-member Wildfire Commission worked under extreme time pressure to produce a remarkable report representing the most comprehensive, critical assessment of fire policies and problems done in decades. By consensus they crafted 148 smart new policy ideas and handed them off to Congress in the hopes that they would be turned into a number of legislative bills. Members of FUSEE's Advisory Council served on the Wildfire Commission, and the FireGeneration Collaborative organized a special panel of youth organizers discussing workforce development. Several of FireGen's policy ideas were included in the Commission's report! But instead of focusing on the Commission's report, the SENR hearing was sidetracked by members from both parties making speeches about logging, not about fire management. This was not surprising: for the last three decades nearly every federal "wildfire" bill has been focused on logging national forests. Meanwhile, the Smokehouse Creek megafire was burning across cattle ranches and rural communities in Texas--in which logging forests is completely irrelevant--was never even mentioned during the hearing. Sadly, the SENR fire “hearing" was not actually listening to the blue-ribbon panel of fire experts it commissioned for their amazing On Fire report. It's going to require citizens pressuring politicians to actually deal with wildfire problems by focusing on fire management solutions. As an independent voice in the wildland fire community, FUSEE can speak to any policymaker about anything, and we are fired up to educate members of Congress about the tremendous resource they have in their hands: the commission’s On Fire report. As a matter of fact, FireGen's research director recently participated in a wildfire policy summit in Washington D.C., hosted by the Federation of American Scientists discussing how to promote the policy proposals in the On Fire report. Your generous donations enable us to take FUSEE's and FireGen's messages to the nation's capitol: we need a paradigm shift enabling safe, ethical, ecological fire management. That'll happen when Congress gets real about passing fire bills that are about stacking sticks and sprinkling sparks, not spewing sawdust.
|
