Lawmakers fight back against major decision that will impact 45 million acres of land: '[They] will literally pave the way'
The U.S. Forest Service is attempting to repeal a 2001 Virginia law that protects 45 million acres of forest from logging and development. The federal government has framed its argument around bolstering wildfire management, though a seasoned wildfire ecologist who started his career as a wildland firefighter said more roads are likely to cause more fires.
"The historical evidence is clear: roads did not and do not prevent wildfires, they actually facilitate them," Timothy Ingalsbee, PhD, wrote for Columbia Insight in December.
Fix Our Forests Act makes big wildfire response changes. Expert says it also has harmful provisions
Before we can fix our forests, we really need to fix our fires.
Federal judge nixes rule that enabled clearcutting in the name of taming wildfires
“Calling out fire is not enough to get you a get-out-of-jail-free card, you have to back it up with some actual truth.”
Decades-old rule that allowed logging on vast swaths of US land ruled unlawful by Oregon court
“Most of these categorical exclusions used for logging have been framed as wildfire emergency prevention schemes,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, who was not involved in the lawsuit. “The agency screams ‘Fire!’ and thinks they can induce panic in the public and in the courts, and especially in the politicians who are naturally inclined to favor industry, and they can get away with it.”
Forest thinning is most effective when combined with prescribed burning and targeting excessively dense shrubs, saplings and younger trees—the fuel closer to the forest floor, Ingalsbee said. “They burn fast, they burn hot,” he said. But large logging projects target the big crown trees, which are often more resilient to wildfires, and can remove too many trees, leaving sparse forests that can take decades to recover.
Congress has doubts about the Trump administration’s new wildfire management plans
The appropriations bill package approved by the Senate on Thursday doesn’t allocate any funding for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, denying the administration’s request for $6.5 billion for a new agency. The snub is more targeted at the Trump administration’s broader vision to also fold into the agency fire operations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service—a merger that has not yet happened and is unlikely without congressional approval, sources say.
“This consolidation plan has occurred in a black box,” Tim Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter, told me last week. He is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “Everything they’ve done on this has been basically an unfunded mandate [by] Trump.”
The U.S. Wildland Fire Service has officially launched; but Congress has decided not to fund it
Hicks’ organization is concerned that the USWFS will focus too heavily on wildfire suppression, as opposed to mitigation policies like prescribed fire. Many researchers and officials say that there is an extraordinary deficit of low- and moderate-intensity fires on Western landscapes. More than a century of aggressive fire suppression has allowed for the buildup of fuels, which the Forest Service itself has acknowledged as a contributor “to what is now a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.”
“This is going in the opposite direction of getting fire back on the landscape,” Hicks said of the new agency. “And really divorces suppressing fires from natural resource management.”
Interior’s new Fire Service could siphon off thousands of BLM staff
"There are definitely concerns on this change because fire crews are used to help with work in the field like clearing trails or repairing fences when there is down time and no one is sure if that practice will be able to continue."
The ambitious consolidation of fire employees could set up friction with some members of Congress, who recently denied an effort by the Trump administration to create a wildfire agency at Interior to take over fire management from the U.S. Forest Service, which is under the Agriculture Department. Congress instead ordered the Interior Department to study the concept.
Interior launches consolidated U.S. Wildland Fire Service
It appears the new agency is suppression-focused, Steve Ellis, a western Oregon resident who chairs the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, told Capital Press.
“While consolidating agencies might appear to be more efficient for fixing the catastrophic wildfire problem, successful wildland fire management involves much more than suppression,” he said. “The critical linkage between fire suppression and land management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained.”
Trump administration stands up consolidated federal firefighting agency over bipartisan congressional reservations
The Trump administration has taken the first steps in standing up its new, consolidated federal firefighting agency, despite Congress declining to fund it and voicing bipartisan reservations about the plan.
‘Wildland Fire Service’ stalled pending further study
The U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled plans for the formation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in September, with the goal of having the Service operational by the end of January. The formation of the new Service followed an executive order issued by President Donald Trump demanding the Service’s establishment.
Those efforts may never come to fruition after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers blocked that order and opted to maintain the current wildland firefighting structure in their new funding bills. The bill package continues funding allocations for wildland firefighting services to the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior.
Safeguarding fire-prone homes is a collective action problem
“It’s a community issue,” Ms. Berry, the Tahoe Fund chief executive, said. “If one house on the block doesn’t clean up their act, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the community does.”
Which city burns next?
Watching from afar, we still reflexively call these disasters “wildfires,” perhaps imagining that they ignite in some distant forest. But there may be little truly “wild” about such fires beyond the ferocity of the burn. Increasingly, disaster strikes almost entirely within an urban envelope, drawing on homes and landscaping for fuel rather than trees and wild brush. These are not forest fires encroaching on human settlement but rather human settlements burning like only forests used to. And stopping them will require something much harder, and more unpopular, than clearing out distant forests of dead wood.
Wildland firefighters open to respirator use, UCLA study finds
Wildland firefighters are willing to wear respirators and other protective breathing equipment despite concerns the devices could hinder their ability to fight fires safely, according to new research from UCLA.