Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: October 17, 2024
The Fix Our Forests Act has passed the House - now it needs to pass the Senate!
In July 2024, we wrote a Daily Dose post with an action urging legislators to pass the Fix Our Forests Act to empower the U.S. Forest Service to protect woodlands with prescribed burns. Now, the Fix Our Forests Act has passed the U.S. House!
You can help get this much-needed reform across the finish line. Tell the U.S. Senate to pass the Fix Our Forests Act!
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Reasons For Hope
Here’s a reminder on what the Fix Our Forests Act is and why passing it is important!
You’ve probably heard about prescribed burns, the ancient Indigenous landscape management process that the U.S. government is belatedly turning to as a vital tool to protect our woodlands from climate change-supercharged wildfires. Kind of like a “vaccine for wildfires,” they consist of setting a controlled small fire to thin out dead trees and small shrubs, reducing the “fuel load” to make it harder for a big wildfire to spread.
Under the Biden Administration, 2023 saw the Forest Service conduct prescribed burns on nearly two million acres, an all-time high. And it’s set to continue: nearly $500 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding is going to the Forest Service to empower them to take their wildfire prevention work to the next level.
But there’s one big hold-up that’s slowing down this vital climate resilience work. Due to the unintended consequences of the badly decided Cottonwood legal case in 2015, the Forest Service is currently constrained by a lengthy bureaucratic review process, easily hijack-able by any passing lawsuit, that can result in a wait time of up to five to seven years between proposing and starting a prescribed burn (or similar management actions like controlled thinning). There have already been several cases of a real wildfire sweeping in and devastating landscapes while the actions Forest Service wanted to do to protect that landscape were still held up in court! (It’s a long story; here’s a deep dive with the full details from U.S. policy Substack
).
This is widely understood to be a suboptimal situation: Congress passed a temporary fix for this in 2018, but it has since expired. Now, a new bipartisan bill called the Fix Our Forests Act (H.R. 8790) would resolve the situation for good, clearly granting the Forest Service the authority and flexibility it needs to conduct prescribed burns. It also does lots of other helpful stuff, like setting up a “firesheds” program to designate areas for focused federal, state, tribal, and local cooperation on wildfire prevention.
“In California the eight largest wildfires on record have occurred during the last decade, and in just one year, California wildfires contributed more to climate change than the state’s entire power sector.
Our bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act is a comprehensive approach to restore our forests and defend our communities from catastrophic wildfires. Our legislation meets the enormity of this challenge, gives forest managers the tools they need to conduct their work, and promotes scientifically backed land management methods that have been practiced by Native communities for centuries.”
-Congressman Scott Peters (D-Calif)
"America’s forests are in jeopardy. Insufficient management driven by bureaucratic red tape and frivolous litigation have turned vast swaths of our federal forests into overgrown and unhealthy tinderboxes.
The Fix Our Forests Act will revolutionize the way we manage our forests and support active and responsible management of federal lands with the best available technology and science, leaving them more resilient for generations to come."
- House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.)
Since we first reported on this in July, there’s been some BIG progress. On September 24, 2024, the Fix Our Forests Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives! It now goes to the U.S. Senate, where your voice could be critical in determining whether or not it heads to President Biden’s desk.
We need to let the U.S. Forest Service do its job in the way that makes sense for the times: moving quickly and flexibly to protect woodlands with prescribed burns.
Tell your U.S. Senators to support the Fix Our Forests Act!
There's still time to get out the vote before November! Join Climate Action Now and League of Conservation Voters for a special letter-writing event on Thursday, Oct. 17 at 7:30 pm ET. We will learn about the Vote Forward platform and work on crafting messages to add a personal touch to prewritten letters.