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.”
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.
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“The community building I’ve seen and experienced because of FUSEE will send waves of positive change that will affect generations of public land managers. In attending these mindfulness retreats I’ve seen how profoundly it can touch someone, and give them tools to heal invisible scars many wildland firefighters carry.”
Hope—and Many Fears—Follow in the Wake of Trump’s Plan to Transform Wildland Firefighting
“The wildland fire community is freaked out beyond alarm … by all the defunding and downsizing and disruption caused by the DOGE dudes,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE). Over his career, he has worked in fire operations under both the USDA and the Interior Department.
One of FUSEE’s primary concerns about consolidation is the mission impact. Each agency under the Interior Department brings different approaches to wildfire—for good reasons. The National Park Service, for example, seeks to protect communities by maintaining ecological health, while the BLM’s top priority is securing public safety; its website lists fire suppression first among the ways it does so.
“If you’re going to consolidate all these different programs with their different missions … whose fire philosophy is going to prevail?” Ingalsbee asked. His worry is that suppression will win out.
Fix Our Forests in name only. A new piece of bipartisan legislation would erode safeguards meant to protect trees
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and now wildland fire ecologist, is executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. He also emphasizes the harms of road building—often falsely characterized as necessary for effective wildland firefighting—agreeing that FOFA on the whole is a dangerous bill.
He does think that, in isolation, some of FOFA’s provisions around wildland firefighting are important, but he worries about the impacts of the law’s overall approach on firefighter morale. “There is a legitimate need for proactive fire fuels management,” Ingalsbee said, pointing to prescribed burning, Indigenous cultural burning, and community fire preparation. Fire is inevitable and necessary in fire-prone landscapes, he said, and the century-plus-long practice of total fire suppression needs to change. “The exclusion of fire is now coming back to haunt us.”
Building more roads in national forests won’t prevent wildfires
Revoking the Roadless Rule will do no favors for wildland firefighters, only increase their risks and burdens to keep bolstering the failing and ultimately futile fire exclusion policies of the past century.
Firefighters motivated by conservation values and dedicated to protecting America’s wildlands are not willing to trade away ecological integrity for dubious claims of improved firefighter efficiency—not in our name, you don’t!
Sabotage of public lands continues
By now it’s clear the Trump administration is far outside public opinion in its views of Western public lands.
Yet Trump’s staff continue to dismantle our system of federal lands in direct conflict with the wishes of most Americas according to numerous polls.
Forest Service restarts effort to change decades-old Pacific Northwest forest policy
Initial efforts to amend the Northwest Forest Plan focused on getting input from tribes on how the federal government should manage their ancestral lands. Forest Service officials created an advisory committee made up of multiple tribal representatives, as well as people representing environmental and timber interests, to guide its policies. They also held forums with tribes to gather input ahead of drafting proposed changes.
“It was a tribal-centric effort,” said Ryan Reed, a former advisory committee representative and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. “That was the headliner of our work. It’s disheartening that they felt that wasn’t enough.”
Bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act would bring big changes to national wildfire policy
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) said that part of the bill “expands categorical exclusions and emergency authorities that weaken analysis, public engagement, and environmental safeguards” and “encourages logging-centric approaches that are not ecologically sound or fire-resilient.”
FUSEE supports other parts of FOFA, like those aiming to facilitate prescribed fire and make communities more resilient to blazes. The group encourages Congress to improve the bill through amendments, but does not endorse it in “its current form.”
“The Act, as drafted, prioritizes expedited logging over ecological fire management and lacks funding for the reforms wildland firefighters need,” the group wrote in a recent message to legislators.
Washington state’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets
As the number of fire ignitions continues to rise, each new fire represents a roll of the dice, said Michael Medler, a former wildland firefighter and pyrogeography researcher at Western Washington University. Chances of a major fire in Western Washington might be low in a given year but they’re growing.
The paradigm brings to mind Hurricane Katrina, Medler said. In the aftermath, then-President George W. Bush claimed that nobody anticipated New Orleans’ levees breaching in the storm surge.
Sure they did, Medler said. Anybody who thought about it for an hour anticipated the breach.
“That’s where we’re at. Who could anticipate a $5 billion west-side Cascades fire? Everyone who’s thought about it,” said Medler, referencing the potential cost of damages from such a blaze.
WA’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets
Put together, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland fire ecologist based in Eugene, Ore., the Trump administration is dismantling the country’s resources to guard against, fight and recover from wildfires at a time when the risk is increasing. And it’s putting much more pressure on states that aren’t financially capable of making up the difference.
“We are running fast in the wrong direction,” Ingalsbee said.
The gap between science and contemporary fire management is huge and growing, said Ingalsbee, who also heads the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
Fighting fire with fire. FUSEE hosts its second Fall Fire Festival
“We need more than just a new policy, we need a new culture that welcomes all the gifts that fire brings,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a local wildland firefighting nonprofit. Ingalsbee says that FUSEE’s mission is to promote ecological fire management by working with fire instead of fighting against it.
Federal fire agencies take first steps toward consolidation, other reforms
“It seemed from the outset that consolidation was just a means of further downsizing the wildland fire workforce and shrinking the budget for federal fire management,” said Tim Ingalsbee, head of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
But beyond any specific policy, Ingalsbee wants to see a more fundamental change.
“We need to shift from this reactive mode of emergency wildfire suppression to a proactive mode of intentional ecological fire management,” he argued. “We have to increase and facilitate the use of beneficial fire.”
New wildfire agency launched to streamline federal response
Despite the administration’s optimistic outlook, critics have raised concerns that the new agency may overlook the ecological role of fire in land management. Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, cautioned that the discourse surrounding fire management appears to focus solely on its threats, rather than recognizing its role within ecosystems.
Ingalsbee, however, remains skeptical about whether this unification will enhance interagency coordination. He highlighted the distinct differences in fire management strategies between agencies such as the Forest Service and the National Park Service, raising concerns that the initiative could either push the Forest Service towards a more ecological management approach or vice versa.
Interior and Agriculture heads lay out plan for more efficient wildfire collaboration
“It offers a hope for some fundamental change in federal fire management, particularly within the U.S. Forest Service,” Tim Ingalsbee, head of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, said of the memos.
But a big part of the change he’d like to see is a reorientation toward putting more beneficial fire on the ground.
“We have to increase and facilitate the use of beneficial fire on the landscape,” he said, referring to practices like prescribed fire. “And there's nothing even hinting of that necessary change in either.”
Instead, he worries that the plans could lead to “further downsizing the wildland fire workforce and shrinking the budget for federal fire management.”
More than 2 million acres of roadless, wilderness area in Oregon could soon lose protections
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, and one of the environmental advocates on the flight, said he anticipates building roads will increase the chance that Oregon’s remote, hard to reach areas will burn.
"The vast majority, 90% or more of wildfires, happen alongside roads,” Ingalsbee said. “What they might gain from the possibility of ferrying in large convoys of firefighters and dozers and all that stuff, they're going to lose in terms of vastly more wildfire ignitions from careless motorists, campers, or arsonists."