Dangerous legislation to make commercial logging of our national forests easier is rapidly making its way through the U.S. Congress. The “Restoring Resilient Federal Forests Act,” sponsored by freshman Congressman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., pushes hard for more logging, while radically reducing public involvement in national forest management, especially in the West.
The bill also distracts Congress from tackling the core problems facing the national forests today, which are lack of adequate funding for the U.S. Forest Service and a solution to the out-of-control wildfire costs that are sapping agency time and dollars. Westerman and his colleagues are trying to make logging easier, when the real goal should be to do it responsibly and sustainably.
The last thing we need is for Congress to remove accountability and inject unnecessary controversy into the way the Forest Service does its job. Knowledgeable scientists and concerned citizens should be involved in forest decision-making to achieve consensus on what needs to happen, where it is appropriate, and how it should be done on the forests we all share.
But Westerman’s bill overturns balanced decision-making by exempting most logging projects on our national forests from transparent public and environmental review. The bill would also make it practically impossible for anyone — even an adjacent landowner — to challenge the legality of certain Forest Service logging activities.
Clearly, national forests are in dire need of sound, science-based restoration work. In parts of the West, the timber industry plays an important role in reducing fire risk by thinning out millions of acres of overly dense, fire-prone forests. Thinning helps reduce the fuel for catastrophic fires.
But restoration forestry is not a mindless task. Unless it’s properly planned, logging can be ineffectual or even make matters worse, such as by removing the largest trees that should be kept to anchor ecosystem resilience. To avoid undesirable results of thinning, the Forest Service needs the time to work with local communities and credible experts to ensure these actions reflect the best available science.
On the Colorado Front Range, for instance, citizens and scientists are working with the Forest Service to craft restoration treatments that yield timber while creating a forest structure that supports diverse wildlife and reduces fire risk. Over the five years of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, approaches to reducing fuel for wildfires have evolved away from producing artificially uniform, orchard-like conditions to creating diverse, natural-appearing forests. This has been accomplished without controversy in a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect, rooted in the most current science.
That’s why it is vitally important that the Forest Service take a reasonable amount of time and effort to consult with forest scientists, local governments, state air quality experts, and concerned citizens. Ramming through hasty projects does not serve the public interest, which is the very reason our national forests were established in the late 19th century. The most efficient way forward is to plan across large landscapes — at the scale of tens of thousands of acres, not small-scale logging projects that do more harm than good.
The most important, urgent actions that Congress needs to take now are budgetary. It must stop the senseless practice of “fire-borrowing,” in which the Forest Service has to pay for unbudgeted fire suppression costs by raiding every other part of its budget, including forest restoration work aimed at reducing fire risk.
Congress also needs to provide adequate funding for all of the Forest Service’s restoration activities. State governments, water and power utilities, adjacent landowners, and other potential partners should be encouraged to contribute to the restoration efforts through matching grants and other incentives.
To its credit, the Forest Service has been building collaborative relationships and using good science to confront the enormous restoration needs of the national forests in many states, such as Arizona, California, and Montana.
However, as climate change inevitably brings hotter, drier conditions, the agency is going to need a lot of help, especially from Congress, in order for the national forests to continue producing their “greatest good” for all Americans– clean water and air, bountiful fish and wildlife habitat, and quality recreational opportunities that we all seek. The Westerman bill does not provide that help and is, in fact, counter-productive. Congress can and should do better.
Jim Furnish is former deputy chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Greg Aplet is senior science director at The Wilderness Society.
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