Raging wildfires across West are once again capturing national attention
Massive fires in Oregon that destroyed an area half the size of Rhode Island even threatened neighboring California. While cooler weather has helped calm the fires, the risk of a flare-up remains, and the loss of property is staggering. Numerous fires further south in California have destroyed buildings, forced evacuations, damaged watersheds, destroyed important animal habitats, and degraded the air quality for thousands of miles. Again, the risk for even more damage remains high if high temperatures and low humidity remains.
The damage caused by the lightning-sparked Bootleg Fire is traumatic but not a new phenomenon. The National Interagency Fire Center, which tracks current active large wildfires, estimates that 1.6 million acres have already burned this year, a number that is expected to increase over the next few months. Last year, more than 10 million acres burned, a record in modern history.
While we can’t prevent lightning strikes, we can certainly proactively manage our forests so they don’t become tinderboxes waiting to go up in flames. Untended forest ecosystems are a disaster waiting to happen and this incident is a stark reminder that we need to be doing more to protect our natural assets.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, there is a backlog of 80 million acres of land in need of restoration and more than 60 million acres are at risk or very high risk of wildfire.
But there are steps we can take. Proactive “housekeeping” strategies and resources for wildfire prevention, mitigation, and management are critical to preventing and mitigating the impact of wildfires on the communities surrounding wildfires and the risk to first responders and wildlife.
Congressman Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas.) recently reintroduced the Resilient Federal Forests Act. This bill would provide categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act to allow the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to get to work on rapidly addressing routine forest maintenance and management activities that reduce the risk of wildfires and the threat of insects, pests, and disease. It would decrease the risk of frivolous litigation that slows the pace of essential forest management projects and would reduce the cost and planning times of projects by simplifying and expediting environmental analysis. Under this bill, collaborative projects would be incentivized to increase the speed and scale of active management.
On the other side of the Hill, Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has introduced the Expediting Forest Restoration and Recovery Act, which would provide the Forest Service with the tools to accelerate treatment to address the risks of infestations and wildfires and publish annual reports on completed treatment. It would also give states the right to form good neighbor agreements for authorized restoration services.
Maintaining healthy forests is essential to reducing catastrophic wildfires and outbreaks of disease and insect infestation. Unfortunately, our national forests have experienced an increase in forest mortality due to poor management.
This situation can be mitigated through active forest management techniques, including tree thinning, the clearing of underbrush, and prescribed burns — techniques that keep forests healthy and remove the underbrush that provides the “fuel” that causes fires to burn out of control.
Active forest management is a key component in preparing ourselves for wildfire season. If we emphasize the importance of wildfire mitigation now, communities located near forests — and the forests themselves — will be better off. The bills introduced by Congressman Westerman and Senator Thune provide pathways to accelerating active forest management and reducing the devastating effects of wildfire.
Every year we wait to address active forest management, more homes, more businesses, more lives, and more habitat are burned. We hope these bills gain traction in Congress so we can begin to reverse this trend.