The House Subcommittee on Environment held a hearing to examine strategies the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) employs to prevent wildfires, including prescribed burns, thinning and commercial logging, as well as identify climate change and drought management measures.
Members of the hearing, led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA-17), chairman of the committee, heard from USFS Chief Randy Moore, scientists and environmental activists, including singer-songwriter Carole King.
In his opening statement, Khanna said, “The climate crisis and misguided forestry policies of the past have given rise to catastrophic burning across our Western forests.” Khanna said drought, diseased and dying trees and USFS’ “10 a.m. policy” of suppressing fires have all contributed to record wildfire seasons in the last couple of decades. Khanna said USFS has a “hard job in addressing this crisis” but stated the logging industry influences forest management policy. Citing a study by ProPublica, Khanna stated the industry dramatically thins the forests, including cutting larger trees, increasing the fire risk.
“Congress must conduct careful oversight to make sure that (USFS) has the tools they need to reduce large fires,” Khanna said.
Moore talked about the number of people who depend on forests for economic opportunities, jobs and drinking water.
“Caring for the land and serving people—that’s what we are really all about,” Moore said in his opening statement. “We cannot fulfill this mission without successfully combating the wildfire crisis that is occurring. Our job is to sustain a healthy, resilient landscape for all the benefit of the people, both now and for generations to come.”
Moore cited that drought has contributed to the outbreak of disease and insect infestations, affecting millions of acres of forests across the West. Moore said there is a wildfire crisis due to not only drought, but overgrown forests and the encroachment of the wildland-urban interface, resulting in the fire season growing into “fire years.”
Based on decades of science and experience, Moore said USFS needs to restore resilient forests through thinning and prescribed burning.
“It’ll take a paradigm shift to confront the wildfire crisis facing the nation,” Moore said. “The old paradigm is to use limited funds and capacity to scatter treatments randomly across landscapes to the best of our limited ability. The new paradigm is to step up the pace and scale of our treatments to match the actual scale of wildfires across the landscapes. We need to put that paradigm into action.”
Moore cited the initiative to treat more than 50 million acres of land using $3 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as a “significant down payment” on forest management.
During questioning from Khanna, Moore said there needs to be a new market created for the low-value small woods instead of, in some cases, paying to remove the wood because it creates a hazard. Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM-2) told Moore a solution to the problem of low-value woods could be the BIOCHAR Act, her introduced bill. The bill would fund research projects to study viable markets for cost-effective biochar-based products, including in agriculture.
Herrell mentioned grazing on federal lands as a management tool and an economic necessity to rural communities and questioned if USFS has plans to improve ranchers’ access and reopen vacant allotments.
Moore replied that with money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, he is hoping to rehire resource professionals “so that we can start addressing some of the really significant issues we have, particularly in the West, when it comes to grazing.”
According to the Public Lands Council, the organization submitted testimony for the record supporting the role of grazing in wildfire management.
Scientists who testified stressed the need for home hardening and building a defensible space to prevent wildfires in the wildland-urban interface, but they had differing opinions on how to go about achieving the goal. Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D., chief scientist at Wild Heritage, which is a project of Earth Island Institute, said USFS is making the situation worse by using active forest management to thin trees. DellaSala said loggers are also taking bigger trees, clear-cutting the forest, releasing carbon stored in the trees and contributing to climate change.
“Out in forest wildlands, reintroducing fire safely should be a priority when it is not a threat to communities,” DellaSala said. “If and where thinning occurs, it should be noncommercial, with large fire-resistant and mature trees protected from logging.”
DellaSala noted that efforts should focus on densely populated roaded areas, not roadless ones, as USFS cannot fire-proof vast forests or grasslands as climate change becomes “the main driver of altered fire behavior.”
Whereas Michael J. Gollner, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical engineering and Deb Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, suggested despite climate change contributing to drought, wildfire disasters could be prevented by using forest management. Gollner recommended using prescribed fire, reducing hazardous fuels near communities and allowing some fires to burn under mild conditions, lowering the intensity of fires in communities.
“Our understanding of wildfires and how they ignite and spread within our communities is improving, but there are still many unanswered questions,” Gollner said.
Gollner stated research is needed on how embers spread wildfires into communities and how houses can be hardened against the embers. Gollner said federal grants could play a significant role in increasing the capacity of local programs to implement changes that will prevent disaster.
King concurred with DellaSala, stating clear-cutting is not the answer to forest management, puts forests at risk and emits carbon, which contributes to climate change.
“Clear-cuts are tinderboxes,” King said. “Coal, oil and gas get a lot of attention, but logging is also a huge emitter of carbon, and taxpayers have been subsidizing clear-cutting in our national forests under multiple presidents from both parties for decades. It’s institutional.”
King stated USFS and other government agencies continue to use “Orwellian euphemisms: thinning, fuel reduction, salvage, management and the ever-popular restoration” under the guise of clear-cutting.
King is advocating for the passage of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA). Introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY-12), who serves on the subcommittee, NREPA would designate inventoried roadless areas (approximately 23 million acres) in the Northern Rockies as wilderness and prohibit construction, motorized vehicles and use of mechanized tools on wilderness lands. King also urged lawmakers to pass a law requiring USFS to incentivize preservation and repeal logging provisions in the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Maloney voiced support for the NREPA bill, stating it supports the Biden administration’s goal of protecting 30 percent of federal lands by 2030. Without action, “all seasons will be fire seasons” amid climate change and more frequent and intense fires raging, Maloney said. — Charles Wallace, WLJ editor
