A helicopter carries water to fire behind a ranch near Ukiah as part of the effort against the Battle Mountain Complex of blazes in Umatilla County. About 75% of the acres scorched in this year’s wildfire season were in grass and shrub lands, mostly in southern and eastern Oregon. (Courtesy of Northwest Interagency Coordination Center)
For the last 30 years, shrub and grass fires have burned far more acres and destroyed more property in the West than forest fires, and the same was true this season.
Still, Republicans in the U.S. House – including Oregon’s two Republican representatives – are hoping Congress will pass a bill before year’s end that would tackle increasingly large wildfires in the West by scaling back environmental regulations to make it easier to log and cut vegetation in federal forests, which account for more than 60% of the forests in Oregon.
Proposed by Arkansas Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman and California Democrat Rep. Scott Peters, the “Fix Our Forests Act” passed the U.S. House on Sept. 24 with 268 representatives in favor and 151 opposed, including Oregon’s four Democratic representatives. It is expected to get a vote in the U.S. Senate after the November general election, according to Hank Stern, a spokesperson for Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat.
Proponents say the bill would restore forest health, increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires and protect communities by expediting environmental analyses while reducing frivolous lawsuits and step up restoration projects. But opponents, including environmentalists and Democrats, say it would open millions of acres of federal land to logging without scientific review or community input, potentially increasing the risk of wildfires while rolling back regulations to protect endangered and threatened species.
To counteract the bill, Oregon’s Democratic House and Senate members are introducing legislation that would direct federal investments in community preparedness and home hardening.
The Biden administration is also opposed to the bill and published a statement a day before the House vote, saying it contains “a number of provisions that would undermine basic protections for communities, lands, waters and wildlife.” More than 85 environmental groups also submitted a letter to the House Committee on Natural Resources opposing the bill.
The bill comes on top of calls in Oregon from state House Republicans to roll back restrictions on logging in state and private forests. Three prominent state lawmakers recently called on their peers in the state Legislature to reform forest management and logging policies they say would prevent large fires from starting and spreading.
More than 2,000 wildfires in Oregon this season have burned a record of about 2 million acres – and not largely in forests. About 75% of the acres scorched were in grass and shrubland, mostly in eastern Oregon, according to the Wildland Mapping Institute.
Forest plan
The bill would promote more collaboration on wildfire preparedness and response among local, state, federal and tribal agencies, and allow for greater investment in new technology meant to improve information-sharing about fire risks, including at the individual property level. But a cornerstone of the bill is expediting and circumventing some environmental reviews that now must be done before federal agencies approve areas for post-fire logging, pre-fire logging, or “thinning” – which involves hiring timber companies to cut trees that could be dry fuel for a fire but also requires typically that they get some marketable timber out of the deal – or burning, on federal lands.
It would allow 10,000-acre swaths of forest to forgo federally required environmental reviews, including a site-specific review of potential impacts to threatened or endangered species, before logging takes place. Currently, only up to 3,000-acre swaths can be exempted from reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
Proponents of the Fix Our Forests Act say it would speed up cumbersome environmental reviews that have kept the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior from initiating projects that would reduce fire-fueling vegetation on the landscape.
In a release explaining her support of the bill, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican representing Oregon’s 5th Congressional District that includes Linn county, parts of Multnomah and Marion counties and most of Clackamas and Deschutes counties, said the act would help prevent another record wildfire season like the one this summer.
“It’s a comprehensive proposal that would improve forest management in areas at the highest risk for wildfires by using advanced science and technology. Providing needed resources to those affected, and working to prevent wildfires from starting in the first place, will continue to be top priorities,” she said in the release.
A summary of the bill shared by Chavez-DeRemer describes millions of acres of federal forests as “overgrown” and in need of large-scale intervention.
Democratic alternatives
But opponents of the bill say that in many landscapes at high risk of fire, logging can contribute to the drying out of forests that further perpetuates fires. Researchers have found that unless thinning is targeted around communities at high risk so as to prevent homes and buildings from burning, thinning forest tracts far from people and infrastructure is costly and has little beneficial return.
A multi-year study of forest treatments such as commercial thinning and prescribed fire across Western states found wildfire only occurs on about 1% of treated forests, and that it’s largely ineffective because those treatments last only about 10 to 20 years before the vegetation grows back. Studies have shown thinning and prescribed burning around homes and cities can be effective at keeping wildfires from moving quickly into communities.
U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 6th District in the heart of the Willamette Valley, is co-sponsoring a bill called the “Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act” that would invest in community and home hardening, landscape resiliency to wildfire and community preparedness plans. And in the U.S. Senate, Wyden of Oregon is drafting a similar bill called the Wildfire Safe Communities Act of 2024.
Wyden said in an email that the Fix Our Forests Act would make federal forest management more controversial and less successful.
“The bill undermines bedrock environmental laws, and would allow poorly designed, large commercial projects that threaten community drinking water, wildlife and recreation opportunities to proceed with inadequate environmental review,” Wyden said.
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