If you are at all in touch with U.S. politics today, you’re probably being relentlessly bombarded by Instagram posts, protest marches and dire warnings about human rights in modern society left, right and center.
And while it remains incredibly important to heed most of these warnings, it’s also vital to avoid getting tunnel vision.
One of the most important things to monitor is everything that is being snuck under the table with regard to the environment.
Many policymakers are relying on the public’s attention being diverted due to the endless struggle over the government shutdown, and meanwhile, are using that cover to pass bill after bill, undermining all the recent progress that advocates have made in countless fields.
One of the biggest areas suffering from this is the environment, which is becoming even more severely degraded due to the many environmental policy changes that have been enacted in recent years.
One such piece of legislation that is currently in front of the Senate, the Fix Our Forests Act, is particularly guilty of this. It’s disguised as an initiative to “provide agencies with critical tools to implement the most vital forest management projects immediately,” and to “return resilience to overgrown, fire-prone forested lands,” according to the House of Representatives website.
However, ironically, it actually does the exact opposite.
It fundamentally undermines wildfire detection and prevention measures, putting vulnerable communities at even more risk for loss of life, limb and home – especially Indigenous and rural ones, which are already underrepresented and at higher risk to begin with.
Many Indigenous communities live in and around forests that would be especially affected by this, and the lack of proper evaluations and repealing of regulations proposed by this act could put them even further in harm’s way.
“Indigenous communities in California,” for example, “[are] exposed to about 1.7 times as much wildfire smoke, on average, as would be expected based on their statewide populations,” according to a research article from the University of California at Berkeley.
The bill also undermines vital environmental protection measures that are already in place, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. NEPA provides much of the framework for making informed, careful decisions about granting land development permits, among other things.
The Fix Our Forests Act aims to “expedite” such processes, which could make these evaluations into a rush job with dangerously little to no regulation, reports Environment America.
“NEPA’s function is to promote informed decision-making by requiring that the federal government look before it leaps,” says The Hill. “It…requires that a project’s likely effects be assessed before it is approved.”
The undermining of NEPA would also open the door to increased logging activity within national forests, especially due to the weakening of permit protections and the political leanings of the current administration, which would render yet more communities vulnerable to destruction and devastation from the increasingly relentless blazes that continue to plague our forests.
Environmental organizations such as Earth Justice, Environment America, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and others have sent a joint letter of opposition to the bill to a U.S. Senate Committee, stating that “this legislation will open millions of acres of federal land to logging without scientific review and community input.
This bill also paves the way for magnifying the already-expansive system of logging roads and removing large, old trees that naturally confer fire resilience. Road density has been linked with an increase in human-caused wildfires—as the density of roads increases, so do wildfire ignitions.”
As highlighted in their letter, they also hold deep concerns regarding the direct impacts of the Fix Our Forests Act on older forest habitats in the United States, due to the habitats being seen as a wildfire risk.
The solution proposed by the Act incorporates extractive logging practices to completely remove timber in many areas, which would purportedly reduce the chance of wildfire spread.
However, this goes directly against many studies conducted by ecologists over time about older forest habitats, since these more established forest habitats with less unsustainable logging practices (if any) have been proven to be more wildfire resilient.
It has also been proven that “clear-cutting” practices, as they are called, actually weaken forest health & undermine wildfire resilience. The act would not just fail to prevent wildfires in that vein, but it could even possibly inflame and worsen them further.
“It’s a natural solution for addressing the climate crisis just as it is,” says Montana forest guide Rick Bass to Scientific American about old-growth forests protected from logging. “It is fire-resilient just as it is. Instead of worrying about the world burning, we can help cool it—by leaving this forest, and others like it, just as it is.”
The United States forests are crucial, as they relate to climate resilience and impact on public health.
Our national forests, as well as forests in general — especially older ones — have incredibly important utility in fighting climate change, such as preventing carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere and keeping local communities safe from wildfires.
Some, like the Drew Forest right here on campus, also help our communities by simply providing an incredibly valuable natural space for people and classes to learn and grow. With extractive practices in place, the United States risks crucial resources like these being completely destroyed, never to be recovered.
The lead editorial is the collective opinion of the editorial board.
