Dear Senator,
Please oppose the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act” (H.R. 471). This bill is a timber grab masquerading as protecting communities from wildfire. The legislation will likely make fires worse, while imperiling our essential environmental safeguards.
Many bipartisan solutions to address the risks of wildfire exist, including proven community protection measures such as defensible space, emergency planning, and home hardening. Unfortunately, this legislation was rushed to the floor with very little process, and without science-backed solutions. As millions in Southern California suffer from the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, it is disappointing to see that this expedited process is just another effort to take advantage of a scary situation to support the timber and wood pellet industry, rather than those most impacted by the fires.
Instead of rushing this problematic legislation, Congress should be supporting the protection of communities through legislation like the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act (H.R.9760) to harden homes, and it should be ensuring adequate disaster aid is sent to impacted communities and families.
The bill is about stifling citizen voices, removing science from land management decisions, and is a large-scale rollback of the essential protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Historic Preservation Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on millions of acres of federal public lands. Its sweeping provisions remove standards and accountability in service of the short-term interests of extractive industries, which will likely exacerbate wildfires.
The bill means the science-based “hard look” and community input on logging projects that is supposed to be conducted through NEPA will be done after (post hoc) a project, which defeats the purpose entirely. You certainly can not restore a tree or a forest after it has been cut down. This will harm communities and Tribes who live around, use or rely on public forests for everything from subsistence to outdoor recreation jobs. Worse yet, the bill provides massive and unprecedented 10,000 acre categorical exclusions (CEs) from NEPA.
Removing (or punting until after a project is done) environmental review also destroys the process to evaluate impacts and determine whether a project, like commercial logging, is truly helpful or harmful to protecting communities. Without this process, we stand to repeat mistakes of the past and reap unintended consequences of projects that favor logging over genuine restoration and community resilience.
Another section guts key pieces of the ESA by broadly exempting the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management from the regulatory requirement under Section 7 to reinitiate consultation when new species are listed, new critical habitat is designated, or new information indicates that implementation of land management plans may be harming threatened or endangered species in a manner that was not previously accounted for. Such reconsultation is rarely needed but plainly important for the recovery of species, particularly as we learn about new threats posed to species by climate change.
Instead of opening up federal lands to logging interests with false solutions that will make wildfires worse by allowing profit-driven decisions to dictate forest management, leading to even more aggressive logging on public lands, Congress should listen to the science and focus on real solutions that support communities in the face of climate-driven wildfires.
Please oppose H.R. 471,
Thank you.
