The Rocky Mountain West has some of the most
beautiful forests
in the world. Whether you enjoy hiking, fishing, or simply admiring the views from afar, we’re lucky to have these majestic natural resources in our backyard.
But living in close connection with these forests also takes real work.
Public forests
, for example, are managed by dedicated state and federal agencies staffed with wildlife biologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, and other professionals.
WHILE PUBLIC SCHOOLS CLOSED ON FEAR AND POLITICS, CATHOLIC SCHOOLS OPENED ON LOVE AND SCIENCE
Too often, their work is made much more difficult — if not impossible — by far-left environmental groups who use strategic lawsuits to prevent forest management activities from taking place. It’s time that elected officials in the nation’s capital put an end to these abusive lawsuits or, at a minimum, roll back some of the worst impacts.
It isn’t just about helping people, who radical environmentalists view as irredeemably bad. It’s also about helping the wildlife species that these groups claim they are trying to protect.
Here’s why: For forest managers, a big part of their job is keeping the ecosystem healthy while also making sure it’s safe for people to live near and visit. That job is harder than it sounds, especially in the West, because people have understandably chosen to limit the natural role that fire plays in maintaining balanced forest ecosystems.
Without natural fires, large amounts of undergrowth can build up. Over time, the stockpile of fuel grows to dangerous levels, and when there is a fire, it’s much larger and more damaging than it should be.
That isn’t just bad for the people living in nearby communities; it’s also bad for wildlife. Ecologists have found that when forests grow too tall and too thick due to decades of fire suppression, there aren’t enough smaller, younger plants to provide the kind of habitat that many species need.
“In today’s situation, if you look at these big panoramic landscapes, what you see is an incredibly lower level of diversity, where the forest has all grown up and blended,” Paul Hessburg, a research landscape ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service,
told Oregon Public Broadcasting
back in 2018. “There are some critters still making a living in that landscape, but it has nowhere near the variety of the former landscape before it was homogenized.”
Small-scale, controlled burns are one tool that forest managers can use to mimic the role of natural fires. But mechanical thinning of the undergrowth, using everything from hand tools to rakes to chainsaws to wood chippers, is also a must, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Piling up brush, thinning dense stands of trees, and pruning lower branches are some of the ways forest managers reduce the risk of catastrophic fires and encourage the kind of new growth and restoration that benefits wildlife.
But a faction of the environmental movement finds this kind of human activity in forests to be unacceptable, and for decades, these activists have been waging war against forest managers in the courts.
Perhaps the worst example is the 2015 victory of the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center in front of the ultraliberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The decision allowed environmental groups to use the Endangered Species Act to derail existing forest management plans by forcing the federal government to go back and repeat years of consultation and desk work on those plans.
The Obama and Trump administrations worked with Congress to freeze the effect of the so-called Cottonwood decision, but that freeze recently expired. Today, there are 87 different forest management plans that could be brought to a halt by Cottonwood-style lawsuits,
the U.S. Forest Service has warned
.
On federal land alone, there is already an 80 million-acre backlog of forest ecosystems that need restoration work. The wildfire threat posed by this backlog has been called a “
crisis
” by the Biden administration, which is attempting to fast-track forest-thinning projects over the next decade.
But the Biden forest plan and other forest management proposals to reduce the backlog are now clouded in uncertainty because of the renewed threat of legal action.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is leading a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to fix this problem. “An immediate resolution to this decision is vital to allow land managers and wildlife biologists to follow the best available science to improve the health of our forests, reduce the risk of severe wildfires, advance wildlife habitat projects, and support good paying timber jobs,” Daines and his fellow lawmakers
told the Biden administration
earlier this year.
It’s hard to fathom how an idea with this much bipartisan support still struggles to get traction inside the Beltway. Regardless, it’s time for real leaders in both parties to come up with a permanent legislative fix to this problem.
For communities facing the growing threat of catastrophic wildfires, it truly is a matter of life and death.
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John Karakoulakis is director of the Western Way, a nonprofit organization focused on free market solutions to Western U.S. conservation issues.
