FANNING THE FLAMES
Bill guts environmental protections — and won’t prevent wildfires
The 2017 wildfire season burned nearly 9 million acres across the United States, killing dozens of people, consuming $2.9 billion in federal firefighting funds and costing billions more in property damage.
But members of Congress are making things even worse by trying to exploit the public’s fears and misunderstandings of wildfire.
Under the guise of protecting us, some lawmakers are pushing bills that would harm public forests and wildlife, increase wildfire suppression costs, endanger firefighters, suppress public oversight and do nothing to make our communities safer.
It’s especially disheartening to see U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema align herself with the most extreme factions of the Republican Party and vote for the worst of these bills, H.R. 2936. Sinema was one of 10 Democrats joining Republicans to pass the bill last week.
Doesn’t Sinema know that this bill is nothing more than a gift to the timber industry?
Its supporters willfully misrepresent it as a road to forest “health,” when in fact it charts a dangerous path toward more wildfires and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of forest ecosystems.
It would gut endangered species protections and rubber-stamp huge logging projects. It would open up millions of acres of treasured roadless areas to harmful logging and roadbuilding.
In what the bill’s proponents slyly describe as innocuous forest housekeeping, timber companies could clear up to 15 square miles of forest after a fire. But scientists have found so-called “salvage” logging actually makes forests more prone to wildfires. It also harms wildlife and decimates a richly biodiverse, regenerating landscape.
Fires have always been a natural process in the life of a forest. The habitat left behind, scientists have found, is fully capable of healing itself. The snags, seedlings and downed wood that timber companies want to haul out are the building blocks of the forest’s new life.
Under the bill, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management could unilaterally decide that logging is harmless to an endangered animal or its habitat, without ever consulting experts as the law now requires.
The bill would silence the voice of citizens. It